A SINGLE NOON
for cello and piano
3 minutes
The opening of movement of my NYC-inspired piano suite, A Single Noon, is the sort of thing you might hum to yourself while taking a walk. The sighing theme - sweet, faintly nostalgic - feels just right for the rich timbre of the cello.
Opera has always enraptured me, but it wasn’t until I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that I felt the strong impulse to write one.
Published 200 years ago, essentially inventing the science-fiction genre, the novel tells the heartbreaking story of a living, feeling creature, brought into the world only to be forsaken by its creator and left to fend for itself. Far from the grunting Hollywood brutishness of Boris Karloff, Frankenstein vividly conveys the agony of a being whose desire for emotional nourishment is repeatedly and violently rejected, and who is driven to respond in kind.
I have begun composing this opera because I believe that this story, in this time, told in this way, has the potential for us to connect - viscerally, emotionally - with the characters and with each other in an elemental and urgently needed way; to make us feel and make us listen to one another, especially in an era of intensifying xenophobia and virulent tribalism. I want to lift Shelley’s staggeringly beautiful work off the page with music that makes us feel for the monster, its creator, and every victim in this tragic story.
I chose to begin with three scenes because their deep humanity and fraught love are, for me, the heart and essence of Shelley’s work. These Frankenstein sketches are a work in progress; they are the seeds from which I hope the opera will grow into a fully staged and orchestrated production.
“Most compelling was the Frankenstein monster’s monologue about making his way through a hostile world not knowing what or who he was but with an intelligence that allowed him to pick up language and earmarks of civilization...
The observations in the words, and the depth of feeling in the music were extremely powerful.
...How the rest of the opera unfolds remains to be seen. But for the time being, the monster’s anguished monologue that encompasses so much of the story’s larger themes could easily be a ‘scena’ to perform in recitals – especially as sung by the plush voice of Joshua Jeremiah. Singers are augmenting their standard romantic-era Schubert/Schumann/Wolf repertoire in any number of ways, and the penetrating dramatic truths of Frankenstein might co-exist with 19th-century lieder more easily than one might think.”
–David Patrick Stearns, Condemned To Music
“Rising up from a groan of pain out of the cello, Kallor’s dynamically-charged score is intricate yet approachable with long, singable lines and plenty of moody atmosphere... What it does do extremely well is support the emotional journeys of its protagonists.
…As Frankenstein recounts his creation’s chilling promise that “I will be with you on your wedding night”, a hollow voice drifts in from an adjoining burial chamber to merge in haunting harmonies – a seriously chilling moment.”
–Clive Paget, Limelight
“The score of these sketches was modern, edgy, well-matched to the subject matter, while not being chaotically 12-tone. The cello, played with a warm beauty by Joshua Roman, echoed the sung pleas of both the creature and the cornered Frankenstein. You can imagine what that wonderful instrument sounded like in the stone chambers.
And the composer played the piano part, his technique itself dazzling as he kept the propulsive, fierce music racing to match the emotional intensity of the dramatic scenes being played, both on the stage area, and even amidst the audience itself.
Quite something. The singers also reveled in the drama and the sheer sonority of the piece.
...It’s my guess that everyone in attendance came away from this night feeling that this had been an extraordinary experience.”
–Matt Costello, Opera Wire
Leonard Bernstein would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year. I composed a short piano piece in honor of the man whose sublime music-making and extraordinary ability to communicate passion to audiences around the world continue to inspire me.
Bernstein gave a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1973 in which he explored the musical and philosophical implications of Charles Ives' metaphysical "Unanswered Question," which Bernstein rephrased as : "... another question, a purely musical one - ‘whither music?’"
To me, his wide-ranging discussion in answering this question, encompassing everything from music analysis and history to linguistics, aesthetic philosophy, phonology, and physics, encapsulates Bernstein: passionate, thoughtful, inclusive, communicative, joyful. Six lectures culminate in what might be considered his artistic credo - a celebratory, organic synthesis of many styles and ideas, shared with sincerity and exuberance. Bernstein concludes his 11+ hour-long exploration with an open heart and open arms: “I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know the answer, and the answer is: Yes.”
“As a soloist, Kallor played a Bernstein tribute titled The Answer Is: Yes, and if you braced yourself for West Side Story cliches, you were happily surprised with an extravagant fantasy... that showed just how fine of a pianist Kallor is.”
–David Patrick Stearns, Condemned To Music
“an attractive, jazz-inflected solo”
–Clive Paget, Limelight
“There were no Bernstein musical quotes, but his spirit was present in Kallor’s own melodies, rhythms and dynamism. The seamless interplay between classical and jazz were Kallor’s alone.”
–Rick Perdian, Seen and Heard International
“a short, breezy piece that while, very much in Kallor’s style, also cleverly weaved in moments that recalled bits of Lenny’s best.”
–Matt Costello, Opera Wire
Composer-pianist Gregg Kallor unveiled his setting of Edgar Allan Poe's terrifying short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, in a 100-year old vaulted crypt beneath the Church of the Intercession in New York City in October 2016 - just before Halloween.
Kallor premiered the creepy tale with mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Pojanowski and cellist Joshua Roman in a semi-staging by Sarah Meyers (Metropolitan Opera), with a lighting design by Shawn Kaufman. The two sold-out performances were presented by The Crypt Sessions in collaboration with On Site Opera.
Following on the heels of the acclaimed premiere, Kallor reprised the piece with soprano Melody Moore and Joshua Roman in a late-night performance at SubCulture NY in January 2017 (video excerpt shown above).
"I can't think of a better opera to become a new Halloween tradition."
-James Jorden, The New York Observer
“The Tell-Tale Heart is a terrific piece of music… gripping and even more crepuscular than the Catacombs themselves.”
–George Grella, New York Classical Review
"Just in time for Halloween, The Crypt Sessions, in collaboration with On Site Opera, came through with the hair-raising world premiere of Gregg Kallor's musical monodrama The Tell-Tale Heart, based on Edgar Allan Poe's classic chiller.
Kallor's vocal writing was refreshingly gracious and intelligible... allowing moments of lyricism, as well as providing hints for dramatic emphasis."
-Joanne Sydney Lessner, Opera News
“Kallor’s efficient, multi-faceted score runs the gamut, from intimate confession through mounting paranoia to ultimate terror… a tour de force of contemporary music drama.”
–Clive Paget, Limelight
“Kallor transformed Poe’s 1843 tale of Gothic fiction into an operatic experience of epic emotional and musical proportions. As operatic heroines’ crash-burns go, the Narrator’s only real rivals are Strauss’s Elektra and Salome. Those mythical figures’ demises are terrible to behold but kept safely at a distance. There was no such detachment here, and in the dark confines of an underground crypt, the unhinged woman under the harsh glare of light was all too contemporary and real.
Kallor’s music is equally Straussian in scale and emotional impact. The vocal line was as carefully etched as in Sketches from Frankenstein, but soared to ever increasing crescendos of sound and emotion. Piano and cello again combined to create the complex sonorities of a much larger ensemble. Undoubtedly the acoustics played their part, but Kallor and Roman conjured up a ferocious, whirlwind of sound.”
–Rick Perdian, Seen and Heard International
“As directed by Sarah Meyers, Jennifer Johnson Cano’s crazed killer had a subtlety, a reality as she progresses from obsession to plans, and finally to murder. It was a demanding tour-de-force… I found the retelling — and Cano’s amazing shifts in tone, as click-by-click she descended into madness, absolutely riveting. Opera can often struggle to be drama, but that was certainly not the case here, but quite the opposite.
...It’s my guess that everyone in attendance came away from this night feeling that this had been an extraordinary experience.”
–Matt Costello, Opera Wire
"The Crypt Sessions celebrates Halloween with the world premiere of Gregg Kallor's dramatic cantata based on Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart."
"Kallor mesmerizes until he terrifies."
-Susan Hall, Berkshire Fine Arts
"The program, consisting of the short monodrama and two additional instrumental pieces (also by Kallor), moved nimbly from a sincere, emotional urgency, toward an effective climax of macabre hysteria."
-Patrick James, Parterre Box
"Go if you dare."
"The Tell-Tale Heart is a familiar tale to a lot of people - we want to give it to them in new clothes."
3-movement suite for string orchestra
Commissioned by Town Hall Seattle
Premiere: June 21, 2017 by the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Joshua Roman at Town Hall Seattle
"Mouthful of Forevers" is an exquisite/heartbreaking/perfect poem by Clementine Von Radics that slays me every time I read it. I wanted - needed, really - to respond musically to those words that make me feel so much.
The poem is a paean to a love that "came when we'd given up on asking love to come." Von Radics beautifully captures the vulnerability that comes from opening up to someone, and what it is that binds two people together: "I will kiss you like forgiveness. You will hold me like I'm hope... And I will not be afraid of your scars." To me, there is no more perfect expression of love.
I was thrilled and honored when Joshua Roman asked me to compose this piece for the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra to premiere at Town Hall Seattle, and I hope the music evokes the exuberance, fragility, and the deep, beautiful sigh of contentment embedded in Clementine's extraordinary poem.
5-movement suite for piano and string quartet
Commissioned by the Classical Recording Foundation and funded by a gift from Linda and Stuart Nelson
Premiered June 5th, 2017 by Gregg Kallor and the Attacca Quartet at The Sheen Center in NYC
Every year on Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday, I spend some time with his speeches. Dr. King's birthday is a few days before mine, and this year I turned 39 - the same age that Dr. King was when he was assassinated. It made me wonder what further words of conscience he might have offered had he lived longer - and what I would leave for the world if I were to die so young.
I've never felt more fear or uncertainty about the way we communicate with each other and what that means for our future than I have these past few months, and I find myself increasingly drawn to Dr. King's message of compassion, and inclusiveness, and social and economic equality for everyone. His words have been a great comfort to me during this unsettling period, and my new composition for piano and string quartet is inspired by Dr. King's singular faith in our capacity to love, and to do better.
The title of the suite, Some Not Too Distant Tomorrow, comes from a passage in Dr. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, which he wrote during a period of solitary confinement in the Alabama prison. The letter is an exquisite statement about the dire urgency of achieving social and economic justice, and about the moral and practical implications of nonviolence as the means of getting there. It's also a searing indictment of those who advocated for the status quo in the face of horrible injustice. And it's a moving plea for understanding, and mutual respect.
I hope the music conveys the profound impact his words have had on me.
"We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children."
-from MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech
delivered August 28, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
"And I must confess, my friends, that the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future."
-from Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
published in 1967
"And here was a man of nonviolence [Gandhi], falling at the hand of a man of violence. Here was a man of love falling at the hands of a man of hate. This seems the way of history... And the man who shot Gandhi only shot him into the hearts of humanity. And just as when Abraham Lincoln was shot - mark you, for the same reason that Mahatma Gandhi was shot, that is, the attempt to heal the wounds of a divided nation - when the great leader Abraham Lincoln was shot, Secretary Stanton stood by the body of this leader and said, "Now he belongs to the ages." And that same thing can be said about Mahatma Gandhi now. He belongs to the ages, and he belongs especially to this age, an age drifting once more to its doom. And he has revealed to us that we must learn to go another way."
-from MLK's Palm Sunday sermon on Mohandas K. Gandhi
delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama on March 22, 1959
"The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around... But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars."
-from MLK's "I've Been To The Mountaintop" speech
delivered April 3, 1968 at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple Church in Memphis, TN
"Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty."
-from Letter From Birmingham Jail
published in Why We Can't Wait in 1963
delivered August 28, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
delivered April 3, 1968 in Memphis, TN
delivered December 10, 1964 in Oslo, Norway
"Amid Kallor's jazz-inflected sound world, a lyrical grace threaded through the five cohesive movements. The music seemed to distill complex ruminations into a clear vision...
Floating, sunkissed passages swam with underlying tension...
The final movement left the audience with a peaceful atmosphere, weaving an elegant veil of serene tones - a satisfying nexus between social conflict and art."
-Cristina Schreil
"The main event was the world premiere of Some Not Too Distant Tomorrow, a piano quintet conceived as a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. With the composer at the piano, the [Attacca] quartet dug into the first movement, 'The Fierce Urgency of Now', its angularity and syncopations reflecting the strength in King's 'I Have a Dream' speech. Later came blues-infused melodies floating over alluring pizzicato ostinatos alternating with bristling, rapid energy. The fifth movement, which gives the work its title, comes from King's 1963 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail', and in its granitic, complex chords, left a mood of optimism in its wake."
-Bruce Hodges
"Some Not Too Distant Tomorrow... incorporates modern melodic and jazz ideas in a flawless fusion of sounds, reflecting the tension, unease and tragedy of Dr. King's too-brief life.
The work uses piano and string quartet in effective tandem, generating fresh voicings as the instruments are sounded, combined and recombined. The five movements are pure music, with some room for Mr. Kallor's piano to improvise against the ensemble. There is a stunning fast movement where fast pizzicato work dives and leaps over a keening violin and Mr. Kallor's steady pianism.
The slow final movement was the best of all. Here, slow, hypnotic chords and gentle string melodies forged a gentle, hopeful cloak of sound, a light and transparent comfort in these dark times."
-Paul J. Pelkonen
"[Kallor] is preternaturally comfortable in both the jazz and classical idioms. This gives his music a wonderful, off-kilter beat and also provides the satisfaction of the demands of classical rigor. That this convergence works is a tribute to this highly gifted contemporary composer...
We heard Kallor's Halloween classic, The Tell-Tale Heart, at a Crypt event around All Hollow's Eve as it unfolded into an instant classic. It is easy to see a piece like Some Not Too Distant Tomorrow being performed in the Oprah Winfrey Theatre at the Museum of African American History on the Washington Mall. It is both an unusual and a monumental tribute to a leader who died as he was beginning to push for economic justice in America.
Cutting edge music is carving out all kinds of new edges with composers like Gregg Kallor. Despite dire predictions about the death of classical, its liveliness is erupting all around us."
-Susan Hall
FANTASY OVERTURE (2008)
for orchestra
(3, 3, 3, 2 - 4, 2, 3, 1 - timp., 3 perc. - strings)
8 minutes
Commissioned by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra
Edward Cumming, Musical Director
premiere: February 14th, 2009 by The Hartford Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marc Kaplan
The Hartford Symphony Orchestra commissioned me to compose a piece for their family concert series and my good friend, Marc Kaplan, conducted the premiere. Very special homecoming.
FOUND (2011)
for orchestra
(3, 3, 3, 2 - 4, 3, 3, 1 - timp., 3 perc. - solo string quartet + full string section)
10 minutes
Found is the fifth movement of my piano suite, A SINGLE NOON. It's the Central Park of the suite - an oasis amidst the dizzying pace of the city, where time almost stands still. There's a feeling of contentment; of fulfillment. Of belonging.
Even as I composed Found for the piano, I wrote it with the orchestra in mind - the slow sustained chords and floating melodies seemed to call for the resonance of strings and winds and brass - and I've been itching to hear this orchestral version of the piece (it's never been performed).
Here's a performance of the original version.
5-movement suite for violin, cello, and piano
Commissioned by SubCulture Arts Underground, New York
Premiered June 11th, 2015 by Miranda Cuckson (violin), Joshua Roman (cello), and Gregg Kallor (piano) at SubCulture NYC
The title of this piece comes from Edgar Lee Masters' breathless poem, "Love is a madness," and the five movements weave through the intoxication of falling in love and the searing pain of love crumbling. Masters tells us, "The beginning and the end are devoid of speech." But not of music.
SHORT STORIES (2012)
for violin and piano
3 movements, approx. 13 minutes
1. Faces and Names
2. A Kept Promise
3. Sticks and Stones
My maternal grandmother was a talented violinist, but she stopped playing after her mother died. By the time I was alive, her arthritis prevented her from holding the violin. Her parents bought her a baby grand piano for her sixteenth birthday so that she and her sister, a cellist, could invite friends over to play chamber music. That was the instrument on which I learned to play.
I grew up six blocks from my grandparents and saw them most days of the week. We were very close. They came to every concert I gave and always sat right in front (arriving super early to ensure snagging that prime real estate). They never got to hear this music, but I feel their presence very strongly when I play it.
I wrote Short Stories imagining my grandmother playing it, and my grandfather listening to it. She was a gentle, quiet soul he was the strongest man I've ever known. Both had a touch of mischief. They were deeply in love for nearly 63 years.
UNDERCURRENT (2013)
for cello and piano
3 movements, approx. 15 minutes
Sometimes there's a disconnect between the things we feel and the things we say; Undercurrent explores where the two meet. The simmering line that the cello and piano pass back and forth is always churning away just under the surface, like the fraught subtext that sometimes attends our most intimate conversations - until it bubbles up and explodes. (Some relationships are, um... dynamic.) The middle movement evokes that fragile place of unspoken intimacy - where a glance, a gesture, a touch can mean everything.
A PRAYER (2016)
for voice and piano
poem by Clementine Von Radics
premiere: May 25th, 2016 at Carnegie Hall, NYC by Melody Moore (soprano) and Robert Mollicone (piano)
I am so honored that Melody Moore asked me to compose a setting of Clementine Von Radics' gorgeous poem, "A Prayer," for her Carnegie Hall debut in 2016. The poem gave me chills the first time I read it, and every time since. I wanted to write something that would let the fragile tenderness of the poem speak, and give Melody room to do what she does so, so beautifully.
BUT NOT TO ME (2015)
for voice and piano
poem by Sara Teasdale
premiere: April 28th, 2015 at SubCulture New York by Adriana Zabala (mezzo-soprano) and Gregg Kallor
poem:
The April night is still and sweet
With flowers on every tree;
Peace comes to them on quiet feet,
But not to me.
My peace is hidden in his breast
Where I shall never be;
Love comes to-night to all the rest,
But not to me.
CRANE SONGS (2015)
four songs for voice and piano
poems by Stephen Crane
premiere: April 28th, 2015 at SubCulture New York by Matthew Worth (baritone), Adriana Zabala (mezzo-soprano), and Gregg Kallor
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
4 movements
Commissioned by SubCulture Arts Underground, New York
premiere: September 16th, 2014 at SubCulture NYC by Gregg Kallor
This suite was commissioned by SubCulture, the gorgeous underground NYC venue where I've had the honor of being Composer-In-Residence. This is the first of three pieces that I composed for my residency, and I premiered it on the night of the first anniversary of SubCulture's opening. (I added a movement - "The Waiting" - later, and premiered it at SubCulture on January 7th, 2016.)
You know that great feeling of being invited into someone's living room where your super gracious hosts make everything warm and comfortable and welcoming? That's how I feel every time I walk into SubCulture. I love that place, and the fantastic people who work there.
A SINGLE NOON (2010)
suite for solo piano
approx. 45 minutes
premiere: April 20th, 2011 at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York City by Gregg Kallor
A SINGLE NOON is a tableau of life in New York City told through a combination of composed music and improvisation. The nine movements are meant to be evocative snapshots - moments of caffeinated bliss, embarrassing subway mishaps, the buzzing energy of a city driven by dynamic, thoughtful, talented, and slightly crazy people.
A DRUNKEN MAN'S PRAISE OF SOBRIETY (2012)
for violin and piano
5 minutes
William Butler Yeats' raucous poem, A Drunken Man's Praise of Sobriety, ends a set of songs I wrote several years ago (always best to close with a drinking song), and I thought it would make a fun romp for violin and piano.
EXHILARATION - Emily Dickinson songs (2006)
nine songs for voice and piano
poems by Emily Dickinson
20 minutes
premiere: March 20th, 2007 at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York City by
Adriana Zabala (mezzo-soprano) and Gregg Kallor
“MY BUSINESS IS TO SING!” Emily Dickinson once wrote; what she sings of is the exhilaration of being alive.
In It bloomed and dropt, Dickinson mourns the loss of a single "noon," a metaphor for "the instantaneous, arrested present... when all accident, or 'grossness,' is discarded and there is nothing but essence." It isn't the passage of time that she regrets, but the lost opportunity to inhale more deeply the intoxicating ether of experience. For the poet who "would eat evanescence slowly," the moment is everything.
And it is the moment to which she so compellingly calls our attention - the rapture of those first precious moments of spring, the frenzied urge of sexual yearning, the anguish of watching a beloved die. She illuminates these fleeting sensations with exquisite nuance, urging us to savor them before they vanish forever.
"Let Emily sing for you because she cannot pray," she wrote to her grieving cousins after their father died. A poem, for her, was no mere abstraction, but a vital force - a prayer, a comfort, an inspiration. She felt impelled to let others hear the "noiseless noise in the Orchard" and her poems incite us to seek that noise - that essence - ourselves. "Exhilaration," she tells us, "is within."
I AM (2015)
for voice and piano
poem by John Clare
premiere: April 28th, 2015 at SubCulture New York by Matthew Worth (baritone) and Gregg Kallor
poem:
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes -
They rise and vanish in oblivion's host,
Like shadows in love, frenzied, stifled throes: -
And yet I am, and live - like vapours tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes, where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below, above, the vaulted sky.
LITTLE ELEGY (2015)
for voice and piano
poem by Elinor Wylie
premiere: April 28th, 2015 at SubCulture New York by Adriana Zabala (mezzo-soprano) and Gregg Kallor
poem:
Without you
No rose can grow;
No leaf be green
If never seen
Your sweetest face;
No bird have grace
Or power to sing;
Or anything
Be kind, or fair,
And you nowhere.
