Edward Smaldone
Edward Smaldone (b. 1956) has evolved a musical language that is as visceral as it is intelligent, an accomplishment prompting the American Academy of Arts and Letters to observe that the composer’s “serious concern with the foundational aspects of musical coherence never conflicts – indeed, it becomes a means of achieving—a compositional language that is vital, expressive and original.” This quote is from the citation accompanying the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship in 1993, launching a career that has garnered many other awards, commissions, performances and recordings. Other awards are from ASCAP, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo Corporation, the Charles Ives Center for the Arts, the Percussive Arts Society, and the American Music Center. He was named 2016 “Composer of the Year” by the Classical Recording Foundation at their annual Gala at National Sawdust, in Williamsburg. In 2016 he received the John Castellini Award, (Queens College) and in 2017 the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the City University of New York Graduate Center.
His music is noted for its motivic tautness, clear architectural lines, richly chromatic palette and rhythmic vitality, a combination of East Coast training (having studied with notable 20th Century figures such as George Perle, Ralph Shapey, Henry Weinberg and Hugo Weisgall) as well as maintaining a 40+-year career as a professional jazz guitarist, pianist and singer. The combination of spontaneous energy and carefully constructed detail is designed to lead the listener on a musical path that deftly combines clear direction with spontaneous expression. There is a clear sense of long-range structure and harmonic direction at every level. The immediacy of the music finds attraction on first hearing and repeated hearings are rewarded with new discoveries. His most recent commissions (2019 and 2020) include a Clarinet Concerto (Murmurations) for Søren-Filip Brix Hansen and Den Kongelige Livgardes Musikkorps, (the Wind Orchestra for the Queen of Denmark), scheduled for premiere in Copenhagen (at the 2021 KLANG Festival), and a Piano Concerto (Intersecting Paths) for Niklas Sivelöv and the League/ISCM Orchestra, scheduled for 2021 at the Miller Theater in New York City. (Both of these premieres were postponed because of the COVID-19 Pandemic.)
Smaldone is Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College, having joined the full-time faculty in 1989 and was the Director of the School from 2002 – 2016. His music appears on a dozen CDs, on the New Focus, CRI, New World, Capstone, Ablaze and Naxos labels. His music is published by LK Music, (ASCAP). He is the co-author (with Perry Goldstein) of the last two revisions of "A New Approach to Sight Singing," W.W. Norton.
Smaldone
Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra (1993)
The Rhapsody for piano and orchestra was commissioned by the Queens Symphony Orchestra in celebration of their 40th anniversary and was premiered by Michael Boriskin as soloist and Arthur Fagen as conductor; pianist, conductor and orchestra are the works dedicatees. In the program notes of the CRI recording, Perry Goldstein writes: “Though working in a free atonal harmonic idiom, Smaldone’s affection for jazz-tinged harmonies is apparent.”
Smaldone
The Beauty of Innuendo
Commissioned by the Oratorio Sinfonica Japan, and performed in Tokyo, Beijing, Brno, New York and Chicago. Recorded on Ablaze Records. The title is a line from the Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens:
I do not know which I prefer,
the beauty of inflections
or the beauty of innuendoes
The blackbird whistling
or just after.
The line indicates the dilemma of the choice between the beauty of an event, vs. the beauty of the memory of it. The composition explores the beauty found in the memory of something that is not experienced directly. This performance is from the Ablaze CD recording, with the Brno Philharmonic, and Mikel Toms, conducting (recorded in Brno, June 2013).