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30' | Recording | Sheet Music |
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2 versions: Chamber Orchestra and Chamber Ensemble
Chamber Orchestra
2222/31210/Timp/Perc(1)/Strings
Chamber Ensemble
Flute/Perc(2)/Harp/Viola |
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The Frog Prince with music by Victoria Bond and text by Bob and Anne McGrath will be performed in Oakland, CA on November 9 |
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg: In Tune with Justice
Program Note
Because Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a towering figure and an inspiration to me, I wanted to write a work that added music to her forceful words. Knowing that she loved opera, this was a natural. I chose Mozart’s overture to “The Marriage of Figaro” as the basis for my composition, borrowing freely and adapting his energetic pulse, so appropriate to RBG’s own boundless energy. My music weaves in and out of Mozart’s themes, beginning with a fast-paced overture and continuing with underscoring and interludes that highlight RBG’s words. I added quotes from “America the Beautiful” and “The Star Spangled Banner” to this mixture, expressing the patriotic pride that RBG felt towards this country. Jane Vial Jaffe has created a compact script, framing RBG’s words with her own original narrative and bringing into relief the struggle and triumph central to the story. |
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Victoria Bond's "Thinking like a Mountain" for narrator and orchestra, is based on an essay by American environmentalist Aldo Leopold. It tells how Leopold experienced an epiphany and converted from a hunter who shot wolves to someone whose life's work became protecting them and their habitat. The composition was commissioned by the Shanghai Symphony and performed and recorded by that orchestra. |
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Thinking Like A Mountain
The essay Thinking Like A Mountain crystallizes Aldo Leopold’s philosophy about the balance of nature and our ethical relationship towards its preservation. It is the personal confession of one who momentarily upset that balance and whose remorse became the catalyst which prompted him to become a leader in the environmental movement.
In setting this powerful essay, I wanted to paint a portrait of the mountain. I was fascinated by the overlapping life cycles of the many elements which shared the mountain’s space, from the slow progression of the rocks to the flickering instant of the insects. They simultaneously inhabited the same world and I saw a parallel in the music, where multiple tempos and melodic lines can co-exist. Rather than illustrating the literal sound effects of nature, this music seeks to give voice to an inner natural order built on the primary elements of acoustics as described by Pythagoras. At this level, mathematics and the natural order have much in common with the structure of mountains.
This composition was commissioned by a consortium including Explore Park in Virginia, The Billings Symphony in Montana, The Elgin Symphony in Illinois and the Shanghai Symphony in China.
_____Victoria Bond
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My variations are based on the theme of the Andante movement of the Brahms String Sextet number one in B-flat major, Op. 18. They consist of twelve variations and a coda. The theme itself is divided into two sections, each of which is repeated. I took the theme’s chromatically descending bass line as a first motive, out of which I constructed a twelve-tone row, and the theme’s ascending melodic line as a second motive. The twelve variations are divided into two sections: the first six of which consist of variations on the first motive, and the last five of which begin with a passacaglia bass line based on the second motive. Over this bass line, presented by itself in variation eight, the first three variations are contrapuntally added in reverse order, so that variation nine adds variation three; variation ten adds variation two to three and variation eleven adds variations one to the combined variations two and three, so that they are all sounding simultaneously. The seventh variation, called “celestial navigation,” is a distillation of the entire piece and forms the dividing line between sections one and two. |
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Protone Music; ASCAP
baritone-pno
From an Antique Land - Song Cycle on poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Gerard Manley Hopkins |
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A reduced orchestration and abbreviated version of the original Frog Prince, this is suitable for performances with Peter and the Wolf. |
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A woodwind quintet version of the original Frog Prince. |
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