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Arthur Levering: Still Raining, Still Dreaming

One of the things a composer writing music grounded in the Western concert tradition dreads most is the question, “What sort of music do you write?” Almost as a reflex, we tend to say “classical.” And that does give something of an answer, especially if one writes as much (or more) instrumental music as vocal, uses mostly acoustic instruments, and tends to notate the majority of the events in a piece. But of course it doesn’t cover the enormous breakthroughs of the twentieth century which now are part of that tradition, and all too many people think of “classical” as being music like Beethoven or Mozart.

            So the term “classical” is fraught with peril. But what if we forget for a moment all these accumulated associations and go back to the original word? By this, I don’t just mean the specific late eighteenth-century style, but the ideals it drew upon, those of an archaic (and arcadian) beauty and harmony. And even deeper, a sense of balance, of all the elements in a work supporting one another in pursuit of a perfection that bespeaks elegance, grace, a sort of dynamic serenity. This is a “classical” music that can still be written, no matter what the tonal language, no matter what the medium. And it is precisely the music Arthur Levering is writing today.

            Levering (b. 1953) has throughout his career written music that stresses clarity and lightness of touch, even when it is dense with information or intense in its sonic impact. The French use the word “scrupuleux” for this approach, and it’s juste. It doesn’t mean being overly moral or fussy, but rather having a reverence for getting the details right, and this could be another definition of the “classicism” I’ve described above. It seems appropriate that for most of his mature creative life, Levering has lived in Boston (now with joint residence in a sister city, more on that in a moment), one of the bastions of such musical scruples. In this he follows a tradition of similarly-minded composers: Stravinsky upon his arrival in America in 1940, Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, Arthur Berger, and John Harbison, to name a few. Most of these are associated with midcentury “neo-classicism” to some degree or another. But many also engaged with Schoenberg’s tonal revolution, as its influence permeated the academic atmosphere that is a defining strain of Boston’s cultural environment. As a result, music that has the energy, economy, and tensile strength of Stravinsky combines with a high chromatic quotient, and expressionistic gestures, albeit without the angst (which of course could well apply as a description of late Stravinsky as well). If the term “post-neoclassical” weren’t so unwieldly, it might actually be a term to describe Levering’s language. But also, because he is also a supreme individual, it will not appear further here.

            I’ve hinted at the character of Levering’s music, and while the individual works described below will fill out the details, a few introductory words are in order. Levering personally is actually much like his music. He’s a lean man, and his work is similarly economical. There may be a plethora of notes, but in their midst there is never an extraneous one. Arthur is also very funny, but his wit is dry, and one feels a similar humor in his sounds. There are sudden whimsical juxtapositions, and a music one is sure to follow in one direction may suddenly take off in another—though never with a sense of disorientation.

            And while I don’t know his relation to things physical and sportive, there’s a marvelous athleticism to Levering’s music. His rhythmic sense is unerring, and probably does more than anything else to clarify and drive his ideas. While motoric, and embracing repetition, the music doesn’t indulge in ostinati as a crutch. The compact cyclic ideas are constantly permuting, growing, spinning off into tangents. His rhythmic sense goes even further to govern the careful pacing of events. Changes of texture, tempo, and harmony all occur just where they should, and keep up the momentum. One thing that makes him exceptional among composers who feel an allegiance to modernism is his transparent orchestration. It’s more than just a glittering surface; his choice of color and texture is as important a structural tool in the music’s development as any other parameter.

            On a more personal level, an advantage of Levering’s Boston connections is that he has attracted and maintained the support of a cadre of superb performers, most notably pianist Donald Berman and the Dinosaur Annex ensemble. The latter is one of the city’s longest-lived new-music groups, under the direction of Scott Wheeler, a superb composer himself and one whose music shares many aesthetic similarities with Levering’s. And Levering for almost a decade has maintained a distinctly independent existence. A Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 1996–97, he now maintains homes both there and in Boston. It somehow seems appropriate that his “other” home should be the motherlode of Western classicism.

            Still Raining, Still Dreaming (1996, rev. 2001) is a vigorous curtain-opener for this program, written for Boston Musica Viva and commissioned by the Barlow Foundation of Brigham Young University. Scored for the by now standard “Pierrot” sextet of flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), violin, cello, piano, and percussion, the piece is a little tempest. It was begun as a memorial tribute to the Japanese master Toru Takemitsu, as the presence of both “rain” and “dream” in the title suggests. But from the first moment, the music’s whirlwind energy seems to come from a very different place than Takemitsu’s spacious, deep-breathed pacing. Part of this is due to Levering’s own internal metabolism, but it also owes something to a coincidence he discovered early in the compositional process—the title was also that of a Jimi Hendrix song. As a result, Levering pursued an improbable synthesis of the voices of these two completely disparate musicians, a goal that by its very difficulty seems to have given him room to assert his own voice confidently.

            The piece starts with a flourish and immediately sets a breathless pace. Levering is a master of creating buzzing textures: Listen for the recurrent measured tremolo in the strings, and the tension it creates with sustained, crescendoing notes in the winds. There is one respite near the middle, where a tolling texture emerges with large triplet groupings in the piano which create a sort of “countergrid” to the punctuations by other instruments, thinned-out but still in the meter and tempo of the preceding section.

            But just as important to the drive and shape of the piece is Levering’s unerring instinct for instrumental color as a tool for development. He has the knack to know the right moment to “splice” to a different sound. To take an example, one and a half minutes into the piece the piccolo and bass clarinet suddenly play a plain line in rhythmic unison, underscored by bass drum hits and low clusters in the piano. Then just as abruptly the glockenspiel enters, mixed with string pizzicati, and the piano in a higher register than previously heard. It is as though a window were suddenly thrown open. Similar deft touches abound throughout the work. Listeners will select their own over repeated listening (I vote for the muted piano sforzandi doubled by a soft tam-tam). As is often the case with Levering’s work, the result is so information-rich that it seems longer than its less-than-eight-minute duration. But neither does it seem in the least cluttered.

            Echoi, completed in 1999 after several years of work, was written for this recording’s performers, Nicholas Kitchen and Donald Berman. While a three-movement work for soloist and piano, it is not the expected traditional sonata. For one thing, all three movements contain extremely fast music. The “echoes” of the title seem to exist on multiple levels. One feels cross-references of ideas from one movement to another; the extensive use of repetitive motives is another sort of “reverberance”; and finally, the two instruments at times play a sort of “catch” with one another. A good example of this is in the first movement, a set of variations on a 26-note theme. The theme itself is initially disguised, consisting of violin pizzicati interspersed with both its own rapid arco flourishes, and with the piano’s own moto perpetuo texture. In the first variation, now the theme emerges (partially) in the piano instead, in low pitches distinguished by accents and register. It is only at the third variation that we hear the theme in sudden, clear focus, played in unison by both instruments.

            The second movement was derived from an earlier etude Levering wrote for piano solo. It begins with a slow, ritualized, and mysterious gesture—the alternation between a rocking figure in both instruments (off by a sixteenth note until its last reiteration, when they join in rhythmic unison), and stark sustained attacks dying to silence. Then the dam breaks. The piano music is highly original in its simplicity, each hand with a measured tremolo of sixteenth-notes. The violin begins with long sustained tones, but begins to speed up until it is a dervish of arpeggios. Then a brief pause, and both instruments begin an accelerando together that culminates in a final statement of the fast material.

            The third movement, after a brief slow introduction by piano alone, takes off again, into a similar atmosphere of racing sixteenth-notes. (Indeed, it almost feels like a recapitulation of the previous movement.) But then, when both instruments reach their materials’ point of maximum compression, a new, slowly strolling figure emerges in the piano’s bass register, and begins a leisurely promenade toward the end, while the violin exhausts its energies in a few last lightning-quick cascades, now muted. An idea from the first movement slowly surfaces in the piano, drawing the work to its conclusion against an F pedal in the violin. But it’s important to note that this has only described the surface. As in so much of Levering’s music, there is a deeper process under way, in this case the initial theme of the movement is ushered through every possible transposition, and only when all these possibilities have been presented does it end. The music is so fluid in its sprint we don’t hear this, but this is precisely what gives its seeming chaos order, and preserves freshness with all the repetition.

            Sppooo, written in 2001 and dedicated to the composer’s longtime partner, the Italian archeologist Simonetta Serra, is a marvel. This is a piece that makes you wonder why there isn’t already a literature for celesta and vibraphone. But then, it also shows why there’s not such a literature, because it sets the bar so high that few will now ever attempt to equal it. Levering has taken up an extraordinary challenge here, disguised in such a lighthearted surface. How does one write for two instruments of such similar timbres, and ones whose envelopes create so much natural sustain and resonance? How does one create beauty in such a soundworld, that’s not cloying after a few minutes? How can one write music of real beauty for this medium, without sacrificing substance on the altar of superficial prettiness?

            The answer of course lies in developing ideas that never deny the medium’s inherent charm, yet transcend it with their imagination and economy. Not since Tamino played his bells have I felt such an intersection. In each of five taut bagatelle-movements, Levering creates a different “take” on the idea of “celestial clockwork.” In this work, more than any on this program, the composer explores repetition as a tool both to hypnotize and to energize. The music dances, from the stately (#2, #4) to the madcap (#1, #3, #5). At times it can verge on a gentle chaos, as in the shifting polyrhythms of the opening of the final movement. At others it becomes static, illustrating a mysterious and gentle ritual, as in the fourth (a memorial to Michael Tippett, whose harmonies reverberate within the glittering texture). It’s rare in the modernist tradition that a work exemplifies grace, but this is surely one such.

            I first heard Tesserae (2002) for viola and piano at a concert in Boston marking the farewell of the Extension Works ensemble, which I co-directed (along with the pianist on this recording, John McDonald). I remember thinking of the piece at the time as “Beethovenian.” What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it suggests an ability to spin out a stream of imaginative tangents from a compact source. And this work does that with seeming effortlessness; it has a sort of relentless imagination. While a close cousin of Still Raining, Still Dreaming, with its measured tremolo, sharp low thuds, and tolling center section, those similarities in fact demonstrate how a composer can develop a set of devices that s/he then recycles creatively from one work to another. The result is not the same piece recomposed, but a new exploration with similar tools.

            Tesserae is a set of variations on a 32-note theme. Examining the score, the opening statement consists of the piano playing the theme in an extremely disjunct manner, ranging over the entire keyboard, isolated notes combining to create a larger harmony due to the depressed pedal (“tesserae” are the tiny individual tiles of a mosaic, suggested by this aural effect of accumulating sonority). One also discovers an economy of means that is a testament to Levering’s technique—the viola line, made up of buzzing thirty-second notes, is in fact the same material as the piano, stopping from time to time to repeat a given phrase until the other instrument’s line catches up. It’s neither exactly a mensuration canon nor heterophony, but the sense of a common source gives such seemingly dense and complex material its clarity.

            Catena (2000) is a work for piano and a chamber orchestra of sixteen players. (I say “work” specifically, because since the premiere of this version, Levering has added one more piano solo, making it a true concerto in his estimation). “Catena” is “chain” in Italian, and describes a tight musical core—a sequence of sixteen four-note chords—that generates the first movement. Listeners can easily distinguish the progression, as it is orchestrated in the edgy sound of muted brass, alternating with explosive flurries in strings and clarinet. The movement races through a series of transformations, interpreting the chordal sequence liberally; for example, in the fourth section the penultimate chord appears (transposed up a minor third) as a rhythmically active but harmonically static texture in the strings. Another “chain,” spread throughout the entire piece, is a quirky piano figure that breaks a chromatic scale over nearly the entire range of the piano. It is in fact a quotation from Ives’s Piano Study No. 23, and I suspect is a tribute to the soloist/dedicatee, Donald Berman, who is one of the most important specialists in Ives’s piano music. And finally, one of the most striking aspects of this movement is the breadth of its sonority. Levering is able through his orchestration to suggest an immense space his nervous energy then fills, from the brilliant upper register to the bass’s profundity.

            Each movement is separated by a piano solo, and if these sound somehow familiar to the listener, s/he is not in error. Both the conclusion of the first, and almost the entire second (which is in fact a duo for piano and violin) contain almost unchanged sections from Echoi’s last movement. In the spirit of no less than Bach, Levering feels free to recycle his material from one context to another, and there is no sense of anything inappropriate in doing so—the music works in its new setting. The second movement is also a romp, with the chords this time tolling as sustained sounds in the orchestra against the piano’s frenetic counterpoint.

            The final movement is perhaps the most evocative and mysterious of anything the composer has written. It begins as a dialogue between two very different types of music. On the one hand there is a slow, lyrical idea presented in the strings, with the cello as leader. On the other there is an outburst of activity in the piano, percussion, and winds. But neither is conclusive. The strings build to climaxes, but then just stop; the piano’s flourishes die away in echoes. This process repeats several times, though one has a sense that somehow the two are “infecting” one another, and bit by bit they grow closer in their attacks and share more energy. Finally, just when one has assumed the point of the movement will be a “draw” between two irreconcilables, the music springs to life for its final two minutes in a rush that is simultaneously natural and surprising.

            Natural and surprising: I just wrote that unpremeditatedly, and have been pleased to see I’ve caught Levering’s music in a nutshell. In his spirit of economy I’ll back off, and let the music do the work, and give you, the listener, the pleasure.                       —Robert Carl

Robert Carl is chair of the composition department at the Hartt School, University of Hartford. He also writes extensively on new music in books, articles, and reviews for Fanfare magazine.

Still Raining, Still Dreaming for six playersis dedicated to the memory of the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who died in 1996. To those familiar with his catalog the title should seem apt, given the many pieces within it incorporating the words “rain” or “dream.” However, shortly before beginning work on my piece I discovered that Still Raining, Still Dreaming also happens to be a title from a very different source—Jimi Hendrix. Is there a place in the musical firmament where Takemitsu and Hendrix intersect? Probably not, but I have great admiration for both musicians. While there are no obvious musical allusions to either composer in my piece, what I hope emerges is music with a bit of the energy of Hendrix, along with some of the interest in instrumental color found in the music of Takemitsu. The title would seem to imply a rather gentle piece, but along with the rain there is a bit of thunder and lightning, and the dreams may not all be sweet.

Echoi for violin and piano was written over a period of several years. Movement 1 is a set of variations on a 26-note theme. While this theme is repeated many times and is heard at least partially in all possible transpositions, it is often so fragmented and disguised that it ceases to be a theme in the traditional sense. Both of the fast sections (variations 2 and 5) treat the theme in this free manner, generating material through fragmentation and repetition of motives. The theme makes its initial appearance as violin pizzicato notes embedded in a flowing sixteenth-note piano texture, but its clearest presentation occurs in variation 3 where it is stated by pizzicato violin in unison with the piano. Movement 2 is a quasi arpeggio study and is based on a piece written years ago for piano solo. The final movement has a simple A (fast) B (slow) form: After a brief introduction for the piano alone, the thematic material is spun out in continuous repetition. When the theme has been heard in all possible transpositions, the piece comes to an end. Echoi is dedicated to the performers heard here, Nicholas Kitchen and Donald Berman.

What is Sppooo? According to cartoonist Roz Chast, “sppooo” is roughly equivalent to “doughnut” on universe #80355476. It also bears some resemblance to “pilkers” (universe #7833298601). Is that clear? All kidding aside, I hope the childlike quality of the title comes across in the music. The skill required to play the piece, however, is anything but childlike, and I want to thank the two musicians heard on this recording, Fumito Nunoya and Donald Berman.

Tesserae is a very brief work for viola and piano, a set of variations on a 32-note theme. It was written for an old friend, the very fine violist of the Ciompi String Quartet, Jonathan Bagg. The title refers to the individual pieces of a mosaic and alludes, in this case, to the notes of the theme as they are presented two at a time by the piano at the beginning of the piece. In an otherwise thin texture, the liberal use of the damper pedal on the piano allows for a complex harmony that, rather than being plainly stated, “accumulates.”

Catena is a fifteen-minute work for piano and chamber orchestra in three movements, played without pause. Each of the first two movements ends with a slow piano solo (the second of which also includes a solo violin). The material of the first movement consists of a series of sixteen four-note chords and the chain (“catena”) of notes that binds them together. The penultimate chord in the series receives special attention in the fourth of the movement’s seven variations. In the second movement, new but related material is introduced with the theme of the first movement used as a counterpoint (this new material is a reworking of the final movement of Echoi, also heard on this CD). The final movement begins with a further development of the material based on the penultimate chord and combines elements from both the first and second movements. The short, displaced chromatic scale in the right hand of the piano heard at various points in the piece is quoted from Charles Ives’s Piano Study No. 23. Catena has recently been expanded into a piano concerto with the addition of another piano solo, but it is the earlier version which is heard here. The piece is dedicated to pianist Donald Berman.

Composer Arthur Levering has received many awards for his work including the Rome Prize, the Heckscher Foundation Composition Prize, a Barlow Endowment Commission, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. His compositions have been performed by various ensembles including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the New Juilliard Ensemble, the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Boston Musica Viva, Musica d’Oggi (Italy), and the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet (Germany), and they have been played at, among others, New York’s Merkin Hall, Weill Hall, and Alice Tully Hall, at the Aspen Music Festival, the Japan America Theatre on the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Series, as well as at concerts and festivals in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. 

Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble is a leading presenter of music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The group was founded in 1975 as the concert-giving “annex” of the New England Dinosaur Dance Theater, and has been independently incorporated since 1977. While highlighting Boston-area composers, Dinosaur Annex presents works of both twentieth-century masters and contemporary composers from around the globe. Concerts frequently feature world premieres, commissioned pieces, and first U.S. or Boston performances. Dinosaur Annex has gained a reputation for brilliant, stylistically broad, imaginative concert presentations. Members of the ensemble perform regularly with Boston’s finest musical organizations, including the Boston Symphony, Boston Pops, Boston Ballet, Handel & Haydn, Boston Lyric Opera, and Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra. The players’ individual artistry, knowledge of contemporary techniques, and finely honed teamwork deliver consummate performances to composers and audiences alike. Conductors Gunther Schuller, J. David Jackson, John Harbison, David Hoose and Michael Adelson, as well as vocalists Pamela Dellal, William Sharp, and Sanford Sylvan are among the organization’s many featured guest artists. The ensemble, under the co-artistic directorship of Scott Wheeler and Sue-Ellen Hershman-Tcherepnin, is passionately dedicated to bringing cutting-edge music of living composers to a diverse public.

Donald Berman is a champion of new works by living composers, overlooked music by twentieth-century masters, and recitals that link classical and modern repertoires. His recent CDs The Unknown Ives, Volumes 1 & 2, and The Uncovered Ruggles on New World Records have been internationally acclaimed. He is the Artistic Director for the American Academy in Rome concert series in New York and the subsequent four-volume recording on Bridge Records. He has presented recitals, lectures, and master classes recently in Israel, Italy, and throughout the United States. He has performed to critical acclaim in New York City at Miller Theater, Zankel Hall, Merkin Hall, and Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall. Other recent work has ranged from Mozart concertos with the Columbus Symphony to American music retrospectives to recitals linking Haydn and Schubert with new music. He is a prizewinner of the 1991 Schubert International Competition and has been a member of the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble since 1987. Berman has been presented by League/ISCM, Masters of Tomorrow in Germany, French Cultural Services (Fauré Sesquicentennial), and many others. He has premiered concertos and solo and ensemble works with many organizations including Collage, Real Art Ways, Pro Musica Symphony, and on his series Firstworks and Pioneers and Premieres. Berman co-directs the New Music Ensemble at Tufts University. He studied with Leonard Shure, John Kirkpatrick, George Barth, and Mildred Victor.

Nicholas Kitchen is a founding member of the Borromeo String Quartet. With a multifaceted career as a soloist, chamber musician, recording artist, teacher, arts administrator and media innovator, Mr. Kitchen is one of the country’s most active musicians. His appearances as a soloist and chamber musician have taken him across the United States and to more than twenty-five countries, performing in many of the world’s most illustrious concert halls, including the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Tonhalle in Zurich, Dvorak Hall in Prague, the Opera Bastille in Paris, Wigmore Hall in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Suntory and Dai-Ichi Semei Halls in Tokyo, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York, and the Library of Congress in Washington. He has worked with many distinguished conductors, including Michael Tilson Thomas and Otto Werner Mueller, and has recorded for Denon, Albany, Arabesque, Centaur, New World, and Image Recordings. Among Kitchen’s many awards, he has received the Albert Schweitzer Medallion for Artistry and was named a Presidential Scholar in the Arts.

John McDonald, Associate Professor of Music and Tisch College Faculty Fellow (2006–2008) at Tufts University, is a composer who tries to play the piano and a pianist who tries to compose. His recent projects include Peace Process (basset horn and piano), The Creatures’ Choir (an evening-long song cycle for voice and piano), Ways to Jump (a choral work concerning frogs, commissioned by Music Worcester), Piano Albums 2005, 2006, 2007 (collections of piano miniatures that attempt to chronicle some difficulties and joys of daily life through musical observation), and a new work for saxophone and piano commissioned by the Massachusetts Music Teachers Association that responds to Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise. McDonald’s recordings appear on the Albany, Archetype, Boston, Bridge, Capstone, Neuma, New Ariel, and New World labels, and he has concertized widely as a composer and pianist.

Marimbist Fumito Nunoya won First Prize at the 2005 Ima Hogg Young Artists Competition in Houston, Texas. He was also a top prize winner of numerous other competitions, including the third World Marimba Competition and the PAS International Marimba Competition. Born in Akita, Japan, Fumito Nunoya has been performing worldwide as a recitalist and soloist with orchestras including the Houston Symphony. He has taught at the Zeltsman Marimba Festival, Berklee Percussion Festival, Berklee College of Music, and the University of South Florida. He was awarded a full scholarship from the president of the Boston Conservatory, studying with Nancy Zeltsman, and graduated from its distinguished Artist Diploma program in 2006. He is the first marimba (or percussion) major in the school’s history to receive this distinction. Mr. Nunoya is an endorser of the Korogi Marimba.

Scott Wheeler’s music has been commissioned and performed by the Metropolitan Opera, Washington National Opera, and New York City Opera, as well as Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, soprano Renée Fleming, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His first opera, The Construction of Boston, can be heard on Naxos. He studied composition at Amherst College, the New England Conservatory and Brandeis University. Mr. Wheeler has conducted at the Kammermusiksaal of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chamber Ensemble of St. Luke’s in New York, at the Wellesley Composers Conference, and with Dinosaur Annex, which he has led in the premieres of more than a hundred new works. His conducting can be heard on the Bridge, CRI, Capstone and Newport Classic labels. Scott Wheeler teaches at Emerson College in Boston, where he has conducted productions of musical theater works by Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill, George Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim and many others.

Scott Woolweaver, viola, graduated with distinction from the University of Michigan School of Music before moving to Boston for graduate studies with Walter Trampler. He has been a member of the Vaener String Trio, which won the Joseph Fischoff Chamber Music Competition, the Boston Composers String Quartet, which won the 1993 String Quartet Competition in Osaka, Japan, the New England Piano Quartette, which received numerous honors from Chamber Music America and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ives Quartet, based in San Francisco. Currently he is Artist-in-Residence at Williams College and Lecturer in Viola and Chamber Music at Tufts University. He is also a violist in the Chameleon Arts Ensemble of Boston and Boston Baroque, and for more than twenty years has been a violist for Alea III, a contemporary music ensemble-in-residence at Boston University. Mr. Woolweaver is Director of the Adult Chamber Music Institute at Kneisel Hall in Blue Hill, Maine, and is a frequent guest of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society. He plays a Johann Georg Thir viola made in Vienna in 1737.

SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

School of Velocity. Donald Berman, piano; Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, Scott Wheeler, conductor. New World Records/CRI NWCR 812.

Producer: Arthur Levering

Editing engineer and digital mastering: Brad Michel

Digital mastering: Paul Zinman, SoundByte Productions, Inc., NYC

Cover design: Bob Defrin Design, Inc., NYC

Still Raining, Still Dreaming

Recording Engineer: Frank Cunningham

Recorded at Mechanics Hall, Worcester, Massachussetts, September 20, 2005.

Recording Engineer: Joel Gordon

Recorded at Sonic Temple, Roslindale, Massachussetts, December 1, 2003.

Recording Engineer: Joel Gordon

Recorded at Sonic Temple, Roslindale, Massachussetts, November 2, 2003.

Recording Engineer: Brad Michel

Recorded at Sonic Temple, Roslindale, Massachussetts, November 11, 2003.

Recording Engineer: Frank Cunningham

Digital cleaning (noise suppression): Frank Cunningham

Recorded live at Jordan Hall, Boston, Massachussetts,  September 16, 2000.

All music scores: MS (composer) BMI (info@arthurlevering.com)

This recording was made possible by a grant from the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trust.

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