Sheree Clement
Sheree Clement
Using intricate shimmering colors over re-imagined fragments of tunes, Sheree Clement builds surprising narratives. She upends the listener’s expectations in works using politically charged texts, found sounds, and unusual structures. All to wake us up to the upheaval and possibilities of now.
Clement’s works have been performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Atlantic String Quartet, the Canyonlands Ensemble of Salt Lake City, Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, at the Composers Conference in Vermont, the Washington Square Contemporary Music Ensemble and the Orchestra of the League of Composers.
Her New York credits include concerts at Merkin Hall, Carnegie Recital Hall, and Miller Theatre. Other credits include the University of Michigan, Kresge Hall at MIT, Oberlin Conservatory, Tulane University, and the Tanglewood Music Center.
Table Manners
Year: 2020
Duration (in minutes): 12
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: solo voice(s) a cappella
Publisher: Rude Awakening Music
Description: A duet / duel for two sopranos and forty pounds of silverware. The struggle between finding connection with each other vs. settling for having material stuff, conveyed with comedy and drama punctuated by mercurial moments of openness. Text by Phillis Levin. Commissioned by Ariadne Greif, with funding from the Queens Council on the Arts New Works Grants.
Swimming Upstream
Year: 2018
Duration (in minutes): 15
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: opera, solo voice(s) with chamber ensemble
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2018. Swimming Upstream is a staged, dramatic monologue for soprano in four scenes. An ageless woman, Molly, defends the headwaters of the Androscoggin River that she treasures, decries pollution of tap water, and describes the losses created by habitat destruction. Includes video and audio. Commissioned by the Association for the Promotion of New Music, with funding from the Queens Council on the Arts, for a premiere in honor of Earth Day, 2018.
Stories I Cannot Tell You
Year: 2017
Duration (in minutes): 18
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: orchestra and chamber orchestra
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2017. 'Stories I Cannot Tell You' is in three movements of approximately the same length, that are roughly, fast – slow – fast, played without pause. The work opens with a steady, slow beat in the bass drum that reappears as the transitional element between movements. The music opens up the sound space with upward sweeping gestures each slightly different from its predecessor. Fragments and phrases appear, dissolve and reappear, as we wander deeper into a progressively darker ‘story.’ Tunes or gestures that had been ‘main events’ turn into transitional events, and with each successive repetition a phrase is compressed. In the middle movement, two waltz-like fragments appear in A-B-A form, bracketing a vibraphone solo – reminiscent of cocktail music from the early 1960s, trying to be lighthearted but falling short. The solo exits, submerged in dark pulsing chords in the strings, alternating with winds. In contrast to movements one and two, the third movement states its dark musical business in the opening and pursues it directly.
Chunks of this third movement music ‘landed on me’ as I drove home to New York City on I-95. So much so, that I had to pull over and write it out – it was too distracting to keep driving. The trip followed an overnight taking care of my ailing Dad immediately after he had an emergency surgery in St. Agnes Hospital, in Baltimore. He was a flight risk and his awareness migrated between lucidity and a few nether-worlds loosely tethered to past traumas. You may be able to hear persistent questions from our conversation played by the brass section. While the piece is not programmatic, it is all about life’s big issues: death, the stories we can’t tell, and how these stories play out in life.
Avian Moments
Year: 2015
Duration (in minutes): 6
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: flute ensemble, flute quartet
Description: 2015. Twittering, fluttering, trilling, floating upwards, spiraling in and out of tonality, these three short pieces mimic and explore birdsong, including the multi-phonics produced by an avian syrinx. This work is dedicated to Jayn Rosenfeld, flutist extraordinaire.
Objects, Food, Rooms
Year: 2013
Duration (in minutes): 7
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: solo voice(s) with solo instruments
Description: A setting of text from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. premiered by Janet Pape and Gilles Noirez on a concert presented by the Lions Club Paris Quai D'Orsay.
Viola Trio
Year: 2013
Duration (in minutes): 13
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: string ensemble
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2013. In 2008, Lois Martin, violist extraordinaire, asked me to write a piece for her. I completed the piece in 2010, and made minor revisions in 2013 and 2014. She premiered it in a recital in 2014 at the Tenri Cultural Institute.
The piece uses a freely atonal / extended tonal language, and incorporates classical / romantic era tropes and devices, in structure, phrasing and motivic material, but instead of the patient and poised or methodical development it thrashes through the ideas quickly and urgently, rushing through four movements in just 13 minutes.
Soliloquy
Year: 2012
Duration (in minutes): 5
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: solo brass instrument
Instruments: any brass, horn
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2012. A lyric and virtuosic work that explores the upper register of the French Horn and the notion of solitude in the woods.
Four Poems by Emily Dickinson
Year: 2011
Duration (in minutes): 8
Difficulty: Medium (college/community)
Category: choral
Description: 2011. 4 short works, the beginning of a larger collection of short works for chorus. The 4 poems here are:
'I Felt A Cleaving'
'Split the Lark'
'Escaping Backward..'
'Savior! I've no one else to tell - '
Round Trip Ticket: A Theme with Variations for Seven Players
Year: 2007
Duration (in minutes): 13
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: larger chamber ensembles - more than 4 players, mixed instrument ensemble
Instruments: any low voice, any male voice, any string, any voice, any woodwind, bass voice, cello, clarinet, flute, percussion, piano, piccolo, violin
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2007. Round Trip Ticket consists of a theme with eleven variations that venture further afield with each iteration. One percussionist plays marimba and vibraphone, the other plays small, wooden or handheld instruments and conga. The ensemble twitters, imitating birds, and slides through lush chromatic harmonies.
Wherewith I Strive
Year: 1995
Duration (in minutes): 12
Difficulty: Medium (college/community)
Category: small chamber ensembles - 2 to 4 players, solo voice(s) with chamber ensemble
Instruments: any female voice, any medium voice, any string, any voice, any woodwind, flute, harp, mezzo soprano, piccolo
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2002. “Wherewith I strive…” was composed between 1982 and 1995. It is in four movements. The first and fourth are “Songs,” – short, mostly tonal, with straightforward phrases. They surround a larger second movement that sets a fragment of the Book of Job. This movement is largely atonal and really forms the center of the piece. The third movement is a flute Interlude.
The Texts
The two “songs” (first and fourth movements) feature very rhythmic poems. The first one is an Epigram by the Elizabethan poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt. It is short and introduces some of the emotional tone of the piece. The brisk and perhaps cheery music contrasts with the text’s overt self-pitying despair.
The last song is by a contemporary poet, Phillis Levin.
Variations / Obsessions
Year: 1985
Duration (in minutes): 10
Difficulty: Medium (college/community)
Category: larger chamber ensembles - more than 4 players, mixed instrument ensemble, mixed instrument quintet
Instruments: any brass, any string, any woodwind, cello, clarinet, flute, trumpet, violin
Publisher: APNM
Description: 1985. Commission by Parnassus Contemporary Music Ensemble. premiered by Parnassus, Anthony Korf, conductor. 1985, Merkin Hall.
Chamber Concerto
Year: 1982
Duration (in minutes): 15
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: orchestra and chamber orchestra
Instruments: bass clarinet, cello, clarinet, contrabass, flute, horn, piccolo, trombone, trumpet, viola
Publisher: G. Schirmer Inc. & Associates
Description: 1982. Premiered in August 1985 at Tanglewood Music Festiva, Kent Nagano, conductor. Subsequent performance: Pro Arte Orchestra, Gunther Schuller, conductor, in Boston. Speculum Musicae, Don Palma, conductor, NYC. San Fancisco Contemporary Music Players, Don Palma, conductor, and the Oberlin Conservatory Contemporary Music Ensemble. Recorded on New World / CRI 617.
String Quartet
Year: 1980
Duration (in minutes): 8
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: small chamber ensembles - 2 to 4 players, string ensemble, string quartet
Instruments: any string, cello, viola, violin
Publisher: APNM
Description: 1980. premiered at the Composers' Conference, by the Atlantic String Quartet in July 1980. in repertoire for approximately two years. League of Composers / ISCM competition winner, 1980.
Glinda Returns
Year: 1979
Duration (in minutes): 9
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: electronic and computer works
Instruments: electronics, tape
Description: 1979. for 4 channel tape. Glinda, the good witch, in the Wizard of Oz, returns and gives us charm, blessing and reassurances against the forces of evil. composed in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, using analogue devices and media.
Thirteen Piano Preludes
Year: 1978
Duration (in minutes): 45
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: piano
Description: 2014. Over the course of the past 35 years, I have periodically ‘checked in’ with my first instrument -- the piano -- and wrote short, self-contained works that spoke to the ether: poems and short stories written ‘for the practice room walls’, for some future, unknown audience. These thirteen pieces, between one and eight minutes long, speak with a personal, often private and poetic voice, querying, asserting and exploring. They range from epigrams to torrid essays.
They were premiered in small groups over the same timespan at various concerts, largely in New York City; Eliza Garth gave the first performance of the whole, huge set in St. Mary’s City, Maryland, and then and Baltimore, MD and New Orleans, LA. In 2014.
For works composed intermittently over a long period of time these Preludes are fairly sequential and connected, with figures, themes and textures reappearing and developing over the course of the series, perhaps because with each work I was revisiting the same creative well. The connections make them work well performed in groups of three or four, although when played in the given sequence, the thirteen pieces make an attractive tour-de-force: they form a forty-five minute arch, with an extreme range, from powerful and thundering to gossamer and twinkling.
Eliza Garth recorded them at Dreamflower Studio in 2015. They will be released on her solo CD, Tour de Force, on Albany Records in March 2018.
Music From A Summer Afternoon
Year: 1978
Duration (in minutes): 5
Difficulty: Medium (college/community)
Category: orchestra and chamber orchestra
Instruments: harp
Description: 1978. Rich, atmospheric and enigmatic.
Tour de Force, Eliza Garth, piano
Includes Thirteen Piano Preludes by Sheree Clement, and Of Points Fixed and Fluid by Perry Goldstein, Performed by pianist Eliza Garth
Composers: Sheree Clement, & others
Label: Albany Records
Label's Website: www.shereeclement.com
Product ID: TROY1714
Music from the APNM
Double Decker CD, containing works by APNM member composers. One CD is chamber music; the other is computer + electronic music.
Composers: Sheree Clement and many others
Label: New Focus Recordings
Label's Website: www.shereeclement.com
Product ID: FCR248
Speculum Musicae
Sheree Clement: Chamber Concerto;
David Rakowski: Imaginary Dances;
Susan Blaustein: Commedia;
Allen Anderson: Charrette;
CRI CD 617
Composers: Sheree Clement; David Rakowski; Susan Blaustein; Allen Anderson.
Label: New World Records
Label's Website: www.shereeclement.com
Product ID: CRI 617
Buy URL 2: http://www.newworldrecords.org/album.cgi?rm=view&album_id=17400
Speculum Musicae
Commedia, Imaginary Dances, Charrette, Chamber Concerto
Composers: Blaustein, Rakowski, Anderson, Clement
Label: New World Records
Label's Website: www.shereeclement.com
Product ID: NWCR617
Buy URL 2: http://www.newworldrecords.org/album.cgi?rm=view&album_id=17400
Table Manners
Composer: Sheree Clement
Description: A duet / duel for two sopranos and forty pounds of silverware. The struggle between finding connection with each other vs. settling for having material stuff, conveyed with comedy and drama punctuated by mercurial moments of openness. Text by Phillis Levin. Commissioned by Ariadne Greif, with funding from the Queens Council on the Arts New Works Grants
Video URL: https://player.vimeo.com/video/560544327/
Clement’s works have been performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Atlantic String Quartet, the Canyonlands Ensemble of Salt Lake City, Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, at the Composers Conference in Vermont, the Washington Square Contemporary Music Ensemble and the Orchestra of the League of Composers.
Her New York credits include concerts at Merkin Hall, Carnegie Recital Hall, and Miller Theatre. Other credits include the University of Michigan, Kresge Hall at MIT, Oberlin Conservatory, Tulane University, and the Tanglewood Music Center.
Table Manners
Year: 2020
Duration (in minutes): 12
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: solo voice(s) a cappella
Publisher: Rude Awakening Music
Description: A duet / duel for two sopranos and forty pounds of silverware. The struggle between finding connection with each other vs. settling for having material stuff, conveyed with comedy and drama punctuated by mercurial moments of openness. Text by Phillis Levin. Commissioned by Ariadne Greif, with funding from the Queens Council on the Arts New Works Grants.
Swimming Upstream
Year: 2018
Duration (in minutes): 15
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: opera, solo voice(s) with chamber ensemble
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2018. Swimming Upstream is a staged, dramatic monologue for soprano in four scenes. An ageless woman, Molly, defends the headwaters of the Androscoggin River that she treasures, decries pollution of tap water, and describes the losses created by habitat destruction. Includes video and audio. Commissioned by the Association for the Promotion of New Music, with funding from the Queens Council on the Arts, for a premiere in honor of Earth Day, 2018.
Stories I Cannot Tell You
Year: 2017
Duration (in minutes): 18
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: orchestra and chamber orchestra
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2017. 'Stories I Cannot Tell You' is in three movements of approximately the same length, that are roughly, fast – slow – fast, played without pause. The work opens with a steady, slow beat in the bass drum that reappears as the transitional element between movements. The music opens up the sound space with upward sweeping gestures each slightly different from its predecessor. Fragments and phrases appear, dissolve and reappear, as we wander deeper into a progressively darker ‘story.’ Tunes or gestures that had been ‘main events’ turn into transitional events, and with each successive repetition a phrase is compressed. In the middle movement, two waltz-like fragments appear in A-B-A form, bracketing a vibraphone solo – reminiscent of cocktail music from the early 1960s, trying to be lighthearted but falling short. The solo exits, submerged in dark pulsing chords in the strings, alternating with winds. In contrast to movements one and two, the third movement states its dark musical business in the opening and pursues it directly.
Chunks of this third movement music ‘landed on me’ as I drove home to New York City on I-95. So much so, that I had to pull over and write it out – it was too distracting to keep driving. The trip followed an overnight taking care of my ailing Dad immediately after he had an emergency surgery in St. Agnes Hospital, in Baltimore. He was a flight risk and his awareness migrated between lucidity and a few nether-worlds loosely tethered to past traumas. You may be able to hear persistent questions from our conversation played by the brass section. While the piece is not programmatic, it is all about life’s big issues: death, the stories we can’t tell, and how these stories play out in life.
Avian Moments
Year: 2015
Duration (in minutes): 6
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: flute ensemble, flute quartet
Description: 2015. Twittering, fluttering, trilling, floating upwards, spiraling in and out of tonality, these three short pieces mimic and explore birdsong, including the multi-phonics produced by an avian syrinx. This work is dedicated to Jayn Rosenfeld, flutist extraordinaire.
Objects, Food, Rooms
Year: 2013
Duration (in minutes): 7
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: solo voice(s) with solo instruments
Description: A setting of text from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. premiered by Janet Pape and Gilles Noirez on a concert presented by the Lions Club Paris Quai D'Orsay.
Viola Trio
Year: 2013
Duration (in minutes): 13
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: string ensemble
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2013. In 2008, Lois Martin, violist extraordinaire, asked me to write a piece for her. I completed the piece in 2010, and made minor revisions in 2013 and 2014. She premiered it in a recital in 2014 at the Tenri Cultural Institute.
The piece uses a freely atonal / extended tonal language, and incorporates classical / romantic era tropes and devices, in structure, phrasing and motivic material, but instead of the patient and poised or methodical development it thrashes through the ideas quickly and urgently, rushing through four movements in just 13 minutes.
Soliloquy
Year: 2012
Duration (in minutes): 5
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: solo brass instrument
Instruments: any brass, horn
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2012. A lyric and virtuosic work that explores the upper register of the French Horn and the notion of solitude in the woods.
Four Poems by Emily Dickinson
Year: 2011
Duration (in minutes): 8
Difficulty: Medium (college/community)
Category: choral
Description: 2011. 4 short works, the beginning of a larger collection of short works for chorus. The 4 poems here are:
'I Felt A Cleaving'
'Split the Lark'
'Escaping Backward..'
'Savior! I've no one else to tell - '
Round Trip Ticket: A Theme with Variations for Seven Players
Year: 2007
Duration (in minutes): 13
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: larger chamber ensembles - more than 4 players, mixed instrument ensemble
Instruments: any low voice, any male voice, any string, any voice, any woodwind, bass voice, cello, clarinet, flute, percussion, piano, piccolo, violin
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2007. Round Trip Ticket consists of a theme with eleven variations that venture further afield with each iteration. One percussionist plays marimba and vibraphone, the other plays small, wooden or handheld instruments and conga. The ensemble twitters, imitating birds, and slides through lush chromatic harmonies.
Wherewith I Strive
Year: 1995
Duration (in minutes): 12
Difficulty: Medium (college/community)
Category: small chamber ensembles - 2 to 4 players, solo voice(s) with chamber ensemble
Instruments: any female voice, any medium voice, any string, any voice, any woodwind, flute, harp, mezzo soprano, piccolo
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
Description: 2002. “Wherewith I strive…” was composed between 1982 and 1995. It is in four movements. The first and fourth are “Songs,” – short, mostly tonal, with straightforward phrases. They surround a larger second movement that sets a fragment of the Book of Job. This movement is largely atonal and really forms the center of the piece. The third movement is a flute Interlude.
The Texts
The two “songs” (first and fourth movements) feature very rhythmic poems. The first one is an Epigram by the Elizabethan poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt. It is short and introduces some of the emotional tone of the piece. The brisk and perhaps cheery music contrasts with the text’s overt self-pitying despair.
The last song is by a contemporary poet, Phillis Levin.
Variations / Obsessions
Year: 1985
Duration (in minutes): 10
Difficulty: Medium (college/community)
Category: larger chamber ensembles - more than 4 players, mixed instrument ensemble, mixed instrument quintet
Instruments: any brass, any string, any woodwind, cello, clarinet, flute, trumpet, violin
Publisher: APNM
Description: 1985. Commission by Parnassus Contemporary Music Ensemble. premiered by Parnassus, Anthony Korf, conductor. 1985, Merkin Hall.
Chamber Concerto
Year: 1982
Duration (in minutes): 15
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: orchestra and chamber orchestra
Instruments: bass clarinet, cello, clarinet, contrabass, flute, horn, piccolo, trombone, trumpet, viola
Publisher: G. Schirmer Inc. & Associates
Description: 1982. Premiered in August 1985 at Tanglewood Music Festiva, Kent Nagano, conductor. Subsequent performance: Pro Arte Orchestra, Gunther Schuller, conductor, in Boston. Speculum Musicae, Don Palma, conductor, NYC. San Fancisco Contemporary Music Players, Don Palma, conductor, and the Oberlin Conservatory Contemporary Music Ensemble. Recorded on New World / CRI 617.
String Quartet
Year: 1980
Duration (in minutes): 8
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: small chamber ensembles - 2 to 4 players, string ensemble, string quartet
Instruments: any string, cello, viola, violin
Publisher: APNM
Description: 1980. premiered at the Composers' Conference, by the Atlantic String Quartet in July 1980. in repertoire for approximately two years. League of Composers / ISCM competition winner, 1980.
Glinda Returns
Year: 1979
Duration (in minutes): 9
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: electronic and computer works
Instruments: electronics, tape
Description: 1979. for 4 channel tape. Glinda, the good witch, in the Wizard of Oz, returns and gives us charm, blessing and reassurances against the forces of evil. composed in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, using analogue devices and media.
Thirteen Piano Preludes
Year: 1978
Duration (in minutes): 45
Difficulty: High (professional)
Category: piano
Description: 2014. Over the course of the past 35 years, I have periodically ‘checked in’ with my first instrument -- the piano -- and wrote short, self-contained works that spoke to the ether: poems and short stories written ‘for the practice room walls’, for some future, unknown audience. These thirteen pieces, between one and eight minutes long, speak with a personal, often private and poetic voice, querying, asserting and exploring. They range from epigrams to torrid essays.
They were premiered in small groups over the same timespan at various concerts, largely in New York City; Eliza Garth gave the first performance of the whole, huge set in St. Mary’s City, Maryland, and then and Baltimore, MD and New Orleans, LA. In 2014.
For works composed intermittently over a long period of time these Preludes are fairly sequential and connected, with figures, themes and textures reappearing and developing over the course of the series, perhaps because with each work I was revisiting the same creative well. The connections make them work well performed in groups of three or four, although when played in the given sequence, the thirteen pieces make an attractive tour-de-force: they form a forty-five minute arch, with an extreme range, from powerful and thundering to gossamer and twinkling.
Eliza Garth recorded them at Dreamflower Studio in 2015. They will be released on her solo CD, Tour de Force, on Albany Records in March 2018.
Music From A Summer Afternoon
Year: 1978
Duration (in minutes): 5
Difficulty: Medium (college/community)
Category: orchestra and chamber orchestra
Instruments: harp
Description: 1978. Rich, atmospheric and enigmatic.
Tour de Force, Eliza Garth, piano
Includes Thirteen Piano Preludes by Sheree Clement, and Of Points Fixed and Fluid by Perry Goldstein, Performed by pianist Eliza Garth
Composers: Sheree Clement, & others
Label: Albany Records
Label's Website: www.shereeclement.com
Product ID: TROY1714
Music from the APNM
Double Decker CD, containing works by APNM member composers. One CD is chamber music; the other is computer + electronic music.
Composers: Sheree Clement and many others
Label: New Focus Recordings
Label's Website: www.shereeclement.com
Product ID: FCR248
Speculum Musicae
Sheree Clement: Chamber Concerto;
David Rakowski: Imaginary Dances;
Susan Blaustein: Commedia;
Allen Anderson: Charrette;
CRI CD 617
Composers: Sheree Clement; David Rakowski; Susan Blaustein; Allen Anderson.
Label: New World Records
Label's Website: www.shereeclement.com
Product ID: CRI 617
Buy URL 2: http://www.newworldrecords.org/album.cgi?rm=view&album_id=17400
Speculum Musicae
Commedia, Imaginary Dances, Charrette, Chamber Concerto
Composers: Blaustein, Rakowski, Anderson, Clement
Label: New World Records
Label's Website: www.shereeclement.com
Product ID: NWCR617
Buy URL 2: http://www.newworldrecords.org/album.cgi?rm=view&album_id=17400
Table Manners
Composer: Sheree Clement
Description: A duet / duel for two sopranos and forty pounds of silverware. The struggle between finding connection with each other vs. settling for having material stuff, conveyed with comedy and drama punctuated by mercurial moments of openness. Text by Phillis Levin. Commissioned by Ariadne Greif, with funding from the Queens Council on the Arts New Works Grants
Video URL: https://player.vimeo.com/video/560544327/
