From Soma (gr. Body) and Pneuma (gr. Soul). This piece imagines the working of a modern computer working through the parsing of natural language. As the buffers clear with each fanfare, the incessant drive of digitized words are parsed. Each strike of percussion represent the mechanistic process of representing language while the pitched instruments soar above it painting in sound the meaning that the digital process cannot grasp.

From the time of the ancient world, human civilization has celebrated the special mathematical ratio called The Golden Proportion. Mathematicians use the greek symbol Phi to indicate this special number. Scientists have discovered the presence of this ratio throughout the natural world and it is an unavoidable part of being alive. This work unfolds, like the shell of a nautilus, with each section adding to the prior music in perfect proportion.

This work celebrates the simplicity of melody . Opening with a flourish of wonder in the harp, the main theme emerges like the wonder of a child beholding the richness of the world. There are shadows and bright sunshine and the individual personalities of the woodwind instruments amble across the stage of a child’s encounters with the adults who fill his life.

This work was a study in blending the orchestral palettes of winds, brass, strings, and percussion. After an introduction filled with breathless waiting and expectation, the primary melody leaps out from a pair of woody oboes. Each section gets a turn to introduce itself with a unique theme. After this, the painter begins to mix the colors and melodies with layers of musical texture. Listen closely to hear how all the sections layer over each other like pigments in a oil painting.

Pure adventure, this piece opens with the rough chant of sailors working the rigging of a vessel on it way to sea. The simplicity of their vigorous sea chanty yields as the wind picks up and the ship is pushing into adventure. Fog and misty await as the ship enters uncertain gloom before the opening chanty returns with the ship rising and surging on the waves of a storm-riled ocean.

The famous memorial poem of Alfred Lord Tennyson comes to life with an orchestral recitation. The heavy hoofbeats of the opening phrase, ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. forms the musical backbone of a celebrated episode of valor mixed with loss. The story of the ill-fated ride is punctuated with the national music of the British and the Russians in a great musical clash that gives way to the broken retreat of our valiant cavalry. As with the poem, the work ends with a call of remembrance for their courage.

A companion work to Gustav Holst’s celebrated work, The Planets, this rounds out the known planets of 1917 with our our homeworld. Like the greater work which inspired it, Terra uses the latin name for our planet as it celebrates what makes Earth different than all the rest of our solar system, life. In seven parts (after a certain fashion), this work brings echos of our weekly cycle with a 7/8 meter throughout. See if you can figure out what the seventh section of this work is.