All This the World Well Knows: a symphonic cantata in Sonnets and Proverbs for mixed chorus, four solo voices, and orchestra

All This the World Well Knows is a 30-minute symphonic cantata for mixed chorus, four solo voices (soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and baritone), and orchestra. The libretto, adapted by the composer, weaves together texts from Shakespeare's Dark Lady sonnets and from the King James Bible's book of Proverbs in a loose narrative of love, betrayal, and reconciliation. The composition's pitch material includes microtonality that arises from the just intonation of sonorities derived from the harmonic series. In passages in which the solo voices express this microtonality, they are amplified in order to allow precise, non vibrato intonation. The modest size of the orchestra, which includes pairs of winds and only two percussionists, makes the composition practical for a wide range of performing groups.

The Way We Mourned

The five short stories in this collection illustrate the insistence of the imagination in a foreign country. The protagonists deal with loss and exile of the human spirit, as well as language. In “View of the Taft Bridge”, a Chinese painter befriends a panda in the National Zoo in America’s capital. In “Early June before the Millennium”, an illicit student and teacher relationship unveils a painful history of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. An adopted teenager finds her life unraveled at the presence of a new tenant who shares her ethnicity in “Girl in the Basement”. And the inertia of a housewife drives her desire to become a house cat, in “Catwoman”, until dream and reality become interchangeable. In “The Way We Mourned”, betrayal and memorial are closely knit in the wake of a close friend’s death. These stories search for connections to bridge “self” and “other”, as well as one’s present with a haunting past.