These are a distillation of my guiding principles through many years of teaching, serving as an academic leader, and meeting, working with, and understanding many very successful musicians. They don’t really belong on this composer-and-photo-art site. Or do they? Clark’s Rules for Musician Success Teaching is not so much imparting knowledge as it is facilitatingContinue reading “CLARK’S RULES”
Category Archives: 2010-19
Angels of Bright Splendor
2013 . . . . computer music, optional solo treble instrument . . . . duration: 7 minutes In Zuni origin mythology, according to Wikipedia, thunder sounded, and all The People climbed from darkness, emerging into the daylight world. Seeing the Sun (Awonawilona) and not used to such intense light, they cried. Where their tearsContinue reading “Angels of Bright Splendor”
Landscapes in Motion
2016 . . . . mezzo-soprano, viola, piano . . . . duration: 8 minutes Premiered 6 February 2018 by Youna Hartgraves (voice), Ames Asbell (viola), Joey Martin (piano) Riding Backwards on a Train “The cider mill beside the river, cows grazing by a dead tree,a red barn stuffed with hay. An old square houseContinue reading “Landscapes in Motion”
Špilberk Castle
Tuba / euphonium quartet 2019 duration: 8 minutes Dating back to the 13th century, Špilberk Castle has a dark history. Standing on a hilltop in the Moravian city of Brno, surrounded by chestnut trees in a beautiful park, its dungeons served for six centuries as a prison, holding war prisoners, Polish political prisoners, persecuted religiousContinue reading “Špilberk Castle”
Sur la Neige
2019 oboe, clarinet duration: 8 minutes Written for Pleasant Street Players Ian Davidson and Vanguel Tangarov, colleagues at the Texas State School of Music, Sur la Neige is a snow fantasy on three quoted musical ideas. The work begins with an obscure quote from Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, elaborated and then transitioning into a quoteContinue reading “Sur la Neige”
Kladno Sketches
2019 duration: 10 minutes 1. Zámek – peaceful gardens 2. Poldi – ironworks 3. Svobody – Freedom plaza Kladno is a Czech city in the Central Bohemian Region 25 kilometers northwest of Prague. In the middle of the 19th century, the discovery of coal there led to the establishment of one of theContinue reading “Kladno Sketches”
A Peaceful Place
Digital sound sculpture 2019 duration: 5:16 The title, from the poem “The Murder of Lidice” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, is an expression of the feeling evoked by the verdant valley below the Lidice Memorial. Though horrible tragedy struck this place on 10 June 1942, now the sloping lawn and babbling creek are a safeContinue reading “A Peaceful Place”
SUSPIRA
Canonic meditation on the Salve Regina chant 2017 computer music duration 5:30
Carte du Ciel
2019 digitally synthesized sound sculpture duration: 8 minutes Carte du Ciel was an ambitious second phase of an international star-mapping project initiated in 1887 by Paris Observatory director Amédée Mouchez. A new photographic process revolutionizing the gathering of telescope images inspired the first phase, the Astrographic Catalogue of a dense, whole-sky array of star positions.Continue reading “Carte du Ciel”
A New Lidice
2019 SSAA choir, string trio duration: 7 minutes A New Lidice is the third piece composed commemorating the story of Lidice near Prague, a charming Czech village that was brutally destroyed by the Gestapo in 1942. LIDICE REMEMBERED expressed the dark brutality of the atrocity, while RAINBOW RISING celebrated the power of hope symbolized byContinue reading “A New Lidice”
Thomas Clark - composer / digital artist 