Our 7th Ode to Lotta song – “Lotta’s song”– is dedicated to my dear friend Maggie Dace Hollis (1948-2013) pictured here. Continue reading →

Our 6th Ode to Lotta song – my setting of Victor Hugo’s heart-wrenching 1847 poem “Demain, dès l’aube” – again resonates deeply with the life of Lotta Hitschmanova. Continue reading →

Our 5th Ode to Lotta song – my setting of Victor Hugo’s remarkable poem “Stella” – resonates on multiple levels with the life of Lotta Hitschmanova. Continue reading →

Our 4th Ode to Lotta song – my arrangement of “Ging heut’ morgen über’s Feld” by Gustav Mahler – occupies a critical, transitional moment in the Cantata, and in the life of Lotta Hitschmanova. Continue reading →

Our 3rd Ode to Lotta song is a setting of Victor Hugo’s humorous love song, “La coccinelle.” A 16-year-old boy removes a ladybug from a girl’s neck – causing a kiss to fly off forever! This song has been included in Ode to Lotta for 2 reasons. Continue reading →

The second Ode to Lotta song is “Rise Up, My Love,” which appears in the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible. As a youth in the 1920s, Lotta Hitschmanova was surrounded by love, and her new country of Czechoslovakia was thriving.

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“Ode to Lotta: a Canadian Choral Cantata” opens with “As dawn breaks,” a choral arrangement of Erik Satie’s Sarabande No. 1 for piano, with lyrics that evoke Nature waking up on a summer morning.

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“Ode to Lotta: a Canadian Choral Cantata” – to be premiered by the Vancouver Chamber Choir on Nov 28  –  is by far the most challenging creative project I have taken on in my “late in life” choral composing career. Why have I done this?

Three basic reasons emerge:

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“Ode to Lotta: a Canadian Choral Cantata” is premiering in Vancouver on Nov 28. Over the next 5 weeks I will be posting about what led me to create the very first, large-scale choral work of my “late in life” composing career. Continue reading →

At a certain age, we risk forgetting our names, our occupations, and even our website URLs……and thus, visual aids can sometimes help us.