SCORES and tabs
From Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, The Yearning is set for accapela SATB choir (w/piano reduction).
"Oh to go back." The good old days - perhaps that never were, but we hanker for them just the same. I so often long for the seemingly simpler times of my youth, the hay fields, the pole barns, the raised wooden sidewalks of Hot Sulphur Springs, the rich, Colorado River headwaters, now drying up. This lush choir piece is about that nagging wistfulness, perhaps most acutely felt as we grow old.
A whimsical poem by James Reeves about cows eating grass, flies, rain, and gossip. For SATB a cappella (w/piano reduction).
Orchestral works
The first in an orchestral trilogy, Night Music, Three Nocturnes For Orchestra. A very descriptive piece about those "demons between midnight and six am that sometime haunt us and keep us awake, or at least half awake." Audio for the first two movements is available here. As I prepare the mix for the final movement as well as their scores I'll post them for download. However, performance materials, including parts conforming to guidelines established by the Major Orchestra Librarians Association will be available for a fee.
In 1993 the school where I was teaching burned to the ground. The fire drew national attention and made the first page of the Washington Post. Georgetown Visitation Prep School is an historic institution in Georgetown, DC, which has witnessed many key events in American History including the sacking of Washington in 1813. They commissioned this work from me for the dedication of the rebuilt Founders Hall two years after the fire.
(NB: That was in the infancy of music notation software when new music was still written with pencil and paper. Thus, the MSS. And yes, even dinosaurs can learn new tricks.)
solos, songs, tabs and chamber music
Snow Falling On Footsteps
Specifically for a consort of Renaissance recorders, Snow falling on Footsteps is hauntingly effective.
On the RECORDINGS page is a music video of this piece illustrated with winter scenes from mainly nineteenth-century Russian and East European painters.
The work is playable on most types of recorders, but works best with a Renaissance consort.
The Perimeter of Conscience
Rhythm in the Streets with added electric guitar, percussion, organ, brass, winds, vintage news broadcasts and electronic sounds is the soundtrack for this video.
Monday May 4th, 1970: The "Other" 4th. The Vietnam War was spinning out of control, President Nixon had just ordered troops into Cambodia, anti-war protests were ubiquitous, 50,000 soldiers had been killed in the war and on that day four American students were shot by American National Guardsmen on an American University on American soil. The Perimeter of Conscience is about our failure of conscience at that time. Electric Guitar, Piano, Strings, Winds, Percussion, news clips, and electronic effects.
I've performed this energetic piano trio several times. It's challenging but well worth the effort.
Homeless was originally a song, but it quickly became both a guitar solo and a duo for recorder (or other melody instrument) and guitar.
It was inspired by an incident at a bus stop in the rain by a Safeway parking lot. A policeman was forcing a homeless person out from under the canopy of the bus stop-into the rain. Those of us waiting for the bus protested, but the policeman said he was just doing his job, responding to a complaint from the Safeway store. Quietly, the homeless person gathered up his belongings and moved out into the rain, just five feet away. The bus came, we got on, and the rain continued. How frail, I thought, are our cozy, little, comfortable lives.
Homeless, Recorder and Guitar
Emily O'Brien, "Helder" Tenor Recorder
Michael Kent O'Brien, Guitar
from the album,
Songs From Home
Homeless, Guitar Solo
Michael Kent O'Brien,
10-string Harp Guitar
"So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow..." (Wm. Carlos Williams)
For me, so much depended upon The Great Depression when, before I was even born, my mother's family lost their farm in western Iowa which they had started around 1835; and upon my father's irascible temper which he always had and never lost. Tradition and circumstance. That's what this song,
History and Old Men,
is all about. Soon to be released. Stay tuned! For now, here's me on a studio demo.
History and Old Men
Michael Kent O'Brien, Harp Guitar