Vocal Composition of the Day, Installment 1:
"Clay Hills"
for
Mezzo-Soprano and Piano (1994);
Text by Jean Starr Untermeyer
I composed "Clay Hills" in 1994, but only discovered this year that the text is in the Public Domain for the world. Thus, I am making this song available for performance everywhere.
Although I am fairly certain that I composed this song while I was a student of Harold Shapero at Brandeis University, the musical language is still heavily influenced by the composition teacher I had just before him at the New England Conservatory of Music, Arthur Berger, whose influence I had yet to "shake off".
That is not to say that I do not hold dear some of the music I composed while under his compositional influence; I do, especially two titles: "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" for mezzo-soprano and string quartet on the poem by Wallace Stevens, and "Clay Hills". Mezzo-soprano Susan Klebanow, who gave the premiere performances of both titles, jokingly referred to "Clay Hills" something like "The Fourteenth Way of Not Looking at a Blackbird," and she wasn't wrong: they are both based on 0-1-2 and 0-1-3 trichords in a terse, dodecaphonic musical language that imho fits this text particularly well.
Follow the next URL to view a high quality synthesized scrolling score music video for "Clay Hills" on my YouTube channel which I created to encourage live performances.
"Clay Hills" is available for licensing from me, and for sale from Sheet Music Plus. Follow the next URL to visit the distributor's product page for this title.
Follow the next URL to view a watermarked PDF of "Clay Hills" on my website.
Follow the next URL to listen to a synthesized rendition of "Clay Hills" on my website.
I hope you enjoy "Clay Hills". Thank you for your time and attention.
Stanley M. Hoffman, PhD
Link to my website: https://www.stanleymhoffman.com
Biography Published in Grove Music Online (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Oxford University Press)
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