Original Compositions for Trumpet and Harp

, based on the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, has enjoyed successful runs at the American Music Theatre Festival, The American Repertory Theatre in Boston, the Brooklyn Academy's Next Wave Festival, and the Houston Grand Opera. John Rockwell of The New York Times termed Frida, "the best opera/musical theater of 1991...a fascinating, magically engrossing evening....Mr. Rodríguez's music is genuinely original and genuinely accessible, a neat combination not that often achieved." Rodríguez's charming children's opera Monkey See, Monkey Do has had more than 1,000 performances since its premiere in 1986, making it one of the most often performed contemporary American operas in the repertory. The ensemble Voices of Change received a 1999 Grammy nomination in the Best Small Ensemble Performance category for the Rodríguez work Les Niaďs Amoureux.
Rodríguez's orchestral music also encompasses wide-ranging styles, from challenging works for large orchestra such as Oktoechos and Favola Boccaccesca to ballets such as Estampie and The Seven Deadly Sins to music for children such as the popular Colorful Symphony (with a text from Norton Juster's The Phantom Toll Booth) and the circus story, Trunks.
Among Rodríguez's recent compositions are: The Tempest, premiered by the Boston Symphony and the Underground Railway Theatre puppet troupe in April 2001; Forbidden Fire , premiered at Festival Miami's all-Rodríguez gala in October 1998; Sinfonía ŕ la Mariachi , premiered by the San Antonio Symphony in March 1998; Hot Buttered Rumba for the 10th anniversary of the Orange County Performing Arts Center in California, premiered September 1996; Fanfare for Trumpets and Caracolas for the National Symphony, premiered in October 1995; the string quartet Meta-4 , a ballet for the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company, premiered in February 1994; Máscaras , a cello concerto for Carlos Prieto, premiered at the Cervantino Festival in October 1994; and Scrooge, a one-act opera for bass, chorus, and orchestra based on Dickens's novel A Christmas Carol, first heard in El Paso in December 1994.
The San Antonio Symphony appointed Rodríguez composer-in-residence in February 1996; he composed two works for them during his term. The first, Sinfonía ŕ la Mariachi , was premiered in March 1998; the second, Bachanale: Concertino for Orchestra, will be premiered 7 May 1999. Rodríguez is active as a guest lecturer and conductor and is on the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas. He served as composer-in-residence with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra from 1982 to 1985 under the auspices of the Meet-the-Composer/Orchestra Residency program. In addition, he held residencies at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Bennington College, Bowdoin College, the American Dance Festival at Duke University, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Conductors who have commissioned Rodríguez include Eduardo Mata, Neville Marriner, and Antal Dorati. Rodríguez's music is regularly performed by leading orchestras and opera companies such as the Dallas Opera, National Opera of Mexico, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Dallas Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, and the Cleveland Orchestra among many others. His music is published by G. Schirmer.

Program Notes:

Invocation of Orpheus (1989) was commissioned by the Internation Trumpet Guild and premiered by Stephen Burns in Santa Barbara in August, 1989. The work opens with Invocation (I), an offstage cadenza for the solo turmpet, who represents the legendary singer, Orpheus. The onstage harp, representing Orpheus' lyre, answers the trumpet's calls, after which the trumpet joins the harp onstage. The strings then accompany them in an Aria (II), Rodriguez' harmonization of L'Invocation di Orfeo, a fragment from a lost opera by the earliest Italian opera composer, Jacobo Peri (1560-1625). The aria, beginning with the words, Gioite al canto mio, expresses Orpheus' exultation at the power of his music, which was said to charm wild animals and, eventually in the story, even death itself:

Rejoice at my singing, o verdant forests.
Rejoice, my fields, the hillsides and all around.
Echos resound from every hidden valley,

Reborn in my bright sun, radiant with splendor.
With its brilliance it puts to shame all below.
Enflames the spirit's ardor and brightens all the day
And makes heaven and earth slaves to love.

In Chaconne (III) the composer draws from his own incidental music for an Orpheus-based theater piece, Sexual Mythology, Part I: The Underworld by Fred Curchack (b. 1948). Rodriguez weaves nine-bar variations, each phrase a step higher than the preceding one, over his setting of Curchack's lyric Invitation, which begins:

Come across this borderline
That separates your world from mine...
Illusions of the mind and heart
Imagination's shadow art...

A second Cadenza (IV) follows for the trumpet, again accompanied by the harp, which, as in the opening, echos the trumpet's phrases. In the brief Epilogue (V) the strings return and all forces play the serence closing phrases of Curchack's Orpheus Sonnet:

But though I sing with all my being, this
Song is as of nothing to a kiss.

The musical language of Invocation of Orpheus is quasi-tonal, with the quotation from Peri and the prominent use of vertical sonorities built in thirds and sixths which cross frequently over the "borderline" into triads. These sonorities are fused into the composer's characteristic "richly lyrical atonality" (Musical America) in a style "romantically dramatic" (Washington Post) and full of the composer's "all-encompassing sense of humor" (Los Angeles Times).

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Title: Trois Sonneries de la Rose + Croix
Composer: Eric Satie
Instrumentation:Trumpet, Harp
Publisher: Only available for piano-solo
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Satie originally wrote Sonneries de la Rose+Croix for trumpet(s) and harp(s). This version was performed only once: at Galerie Durand Ruel during a Soirée Rose+Croix, March 19, 1892. After this, the manuscript got lost and nowadays only the version for piano is available.
It is not clear for how many trumpets and harps Satie intended the piece. There are some indications that the instruments even refer to registers on a harmonium or other portable organ. This would suit both Satie's "ecclesiastical" office with the Rose+Croix and accounts left by Santiago Rusinol of Satie's fluency on the harmonium.
Whatever may be the case, from the piano score it is very evident which lines are meant for trumpet and which for harp, so it was not very difficult to extract the seperate parts from the score. And this may or may not be the first time in over a hundred years that the original piece, as Satie intended it, is played.

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Title: Fantasia Concertante
Composer: György Selmeczi
Instrumentation:Trumpet, Harp, Chamber orchestra
Publisher: http://www.hungaroton.hu/
Recording: Contemporary Hungarian Music for Trumpet and Harp
Duration: 11:00
Written for: György Geiger and Éva Maros
Composition date:1994-1996
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I wrote my concert fantasy in 1994 but it was completed only in 1996 and dedicated to Éva Maros and György Geiger. The basic idea of the piece is the breaking open of the frames of the concerting form and the unusual role of the solo instruments (a lyric, gentle, almost baroque-like trumpet part and a percussion-like harp, really marked in some places). The fantasy's musical language is strongly bound to the Eastern-European folklore, in which the string orchestra has not merely an accompanying function but is a full-value participant in the "game". Thus, the horns sounding in the centre of the piece place the musical events in an enlarged space.

György Selmeczi

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Title: Rhapsody
Composer: Mary Jeanne Van Appledorn
Instrumentation:Trumpet, Harp
Publisher: Arsis Press, Washington, D.C.
Recording: Moore, Weber, Liebermann and others
Duration: 8:00
Written for: Willie Strieder and Gail Barber
Composition date:1994
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Rhapsody for Trumpet and Harp is inscribed to artist-trumpeter Willie Strieder and long-time friend and artist-performer known world-wide for her contribution to the creation and performance of harp literature, Gail Barber.
Recalling those ancient wandering Greek minstrels (Rhapsodists), who sang the epic poems from the Iliad of Homer... and sometimes their own compositions... Rhapsody is such a ballade or recitation, virtually a twentieth-century song without words.
Unlike the usual concept of a rhapsody being an instrumental composition irregular in its form (like an improvisation), Rhapsody for Trumpet and Harp displays a regular alternation of two contrasting sections, A B A B A.

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