As spring inches toward us, deep In my earthworm heart I’m thinking about music and the rain. More specifically, I’m thinking about Music and the Rain, my song cycle of poems by Michael Dennis Browne for baritone and piano, which will be featured in a Schubert Club...
Factitious: Not genuine, intrinsic, natural, or spontaneous; inauthentic. (Oxford English Dictionary) The melancholic wisps of Brahms’s Intermezzo in B-flat minor, Opus 117, No. 2 are pianistic in a way that Brahms is often not. It feels like harpsichord music, which...
A Joyful Symphony Palm Sunday, April 13, 2025 at 11 AM Worship Plymouth Congregational Church, Minneapolis The Plymouth Choirc, conducted by Philip Brunelle, and Chorister Choir, conducted by Marie Scholtz, perform A Joyful Symphony, an anthem for Palm Sunday on a...
From Canvas to Sound: Transformations Sonja Thompson and Clara Osowski featured As I watched an eagle rise over Montana’s Madison Buffalo Jump last month, I experienced the “widening gyre” described by Yeats: the bird tracIng a spiral on the updraft, shrinking even as...
Music of David Evan Thomas on Spotify I‘ve created a Spotify playlist as a convenient way to hear my commercially recorded music. It gives a pretty fair overview of my work, approaching from afar with the newest release, From the Land of Song, on the album,...
For Liz Pauly Today’s the fourth of July Another June has gone by And when they light up our town I just think what a waste of gunpowder and sky. (Aimee Mann, “4th of July”) Some years ago, I sang in a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebration at the...
Augsburg Fortress has published my new collection: A Time to Dance: Settings for Organ, To play the organ is to dance. The definition of dance in the Oxford English Dictionary —“to leap, skip, hop, or glide with measured steps and rhythmical movements of the...
Reading the Bach chorales If you’ve ever wondered how there can be 1126 works in Wolfgang Schmieder’s Bach Werke Verzeichnis, it’s because the first 224 are cantatas and Nos. 250–438 are chorale harmonizations. The chorales are little worlds unto themselves,...
“Our engraver had a strong opinion against word extensions.” Each musical family has its own technical language. A slur is a universal and effective symbol, but slurs mean different things to different families. To a string player, a slur means “play all the notes on...
Listening to Anna Tivel Idon’t remember how I discovered the songs of the Portland-based folk-singer Anna Tivel. It was probably through Folk Alley, an internet radio station that keeps me company while I’m doing computer work. I admired the clear harmony and...
One month ago, on February 20, 2019, we lost master composer Dominick Argento. The affection I felt for the man and the respect I had for his art can’t be neatly summarized, but here is an appreciation adapted from words at a concert of his music at Hill House in...
Thomas Named National Arts Associate On October 8, 2018, David Evan Thomas was named a National Arts Associate of Sigma Alpha Iota Fraternity (SAI), and initiated into the Minneapolis/St. Paul Alumnae Chapter as a Distinguished Member. According to SAI, “a...
I had been thinking about Donald Hall, wondering how he was getting on. That usually means: pay attention. Twenty years ago, I wrote a song cycle for soprano and piano based on Hall’s baseball writings. In the Country of Baseball, a title I borrowed from one of...
In two recent and marvelous Schubert Club International Artist Series recitals with harpsichordist Richard Egarr, cellist Steven Isserlis played Bach’s 5th Cello Suite, BWV 1011. That work includes a singular sarabande, shown here in in Anna Magdalena Bach’s...
Jeremy Huw Williams and Paula Fan Present Clare Cycle October 30, 2017 6 PM Ultan Recital Hall, University of Minnesota Acclaimed Welsh baritone Jeremy Huw Williams (Welsh National Opera) and pianist Paula Fan (University of Arizona) will present a recital of...
The Twin-Cities based choral organization VocalEssence has announced the winners of the 20th annual VocalEssence Welcome Christmas Carol Contest. David Evan Thomas was one of two composers selected from a field of 77 entries from 24 states In addition to the prize of...
