A celebration of the change of season: a concert of songs on the autumn themes of transition, mortality, and nature. The Saunter into Autumn, which took place on Friday, October 13, 2023 at Area 405 in Baltimore, featured an eclectic program of contemporary art song sung by some of Baltimore's best and brightest artists: sopranos Katie Procell and Arianna Arnold sang works by Baltimore-based composers Peter Dayton and Michael Rickelton, as well as works by Tania León and Carl Smith. Baritone (and pianist) Aaron Thacker gave the world premiere of Dayton's "In the Desert" song cycle, setting poetry by Stephen Crane. Peter Dayton and established collaborative pianists Valerie Hsu and Aaron Thacker accompanied these brilliant singers.

This concert was supported by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. https://msac.org

Modernist Songs, for Soprano & Piano (2023)*                    Peter Dayton (b. 1990)

1. Night                                                                                  Text by H.D. (1886-1961)
2. Postscript                                                                   Text by Hart Crane (1899-1932)

Arianna Arnold – Soprano | Peter Dayton – Piano

Atwood Songs, for Soprano & Piano (2018)                                      Tania León (b. 1943)

1. Notes towards a poem that can never be written     Texts by Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)
2. Memory
3. Eating Fire
4. Habitation
5. Four Evasions

Arianna Arnold – Soprano | Valerie Hsu – Piano

In the Desert, for Dramatic Baritone & Piano (2023)*                           Peter Dayton        

1. Poem III (“In the desert…”)                                    Texts by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
2. Poem XXI (“There was, before me…”)
3. Poem XLII (“I walked in a desert…”)
4. Poem CXXV (“A row of thick pillars…”)                                                                                                           

Aaron Thacker – Bass-Baritone | Valerie Hsu – Piano

--Intermission--

Time & Memory: Suite for Voice & Piano (2012)                       Michael Rickelton (b.1983)

1. Lulled by the Drift of Rain                                                                Texts by William S. Trout (1909-1980)
2. Sic Transit
3. Intermezzo (reflection on March)
4. September Noon
5. Intermezzo (reflection on Abendrot)
6. Fourth Act
7. In March                                                                                                                                             

Katie Procell – Soprano | Aaron Thacker – Piano

When Israel out of Egypt Came, for Voice & Keyboard (2015)              Carl Smith (b. 1949)

                                                                                Text by A.E. Housman (1859-1936)

Katie Procell – Soprano | Peter Dayton – Piano

(Encore: In a Landscape, for Piano (1948), by John Cage (1912-1992))

*Indicates a world premiere

Release Date: March 10, 2023

Following his 2022 release, STORIES OUT OF CHERRY STEMS, this latest collection of vocal music by Baltimore-based composer Peter Dayton reinforces his establishment as a mature and formidable talent in the world of art song. ALL IN THE SOUND captures the heart of the genre: duet between voice and accompaniment. Characteristically and integrally, Dayton’s songs exhibit internal compositional logics of pervasive rhythmic patterns and intervallic relationships that create music that still viscerally satisfies. The album takes listeners on a captivating journey through physical, emotional, and abstract imagery. Triumphantly, Dayton’s music realizes the poignancies possible in the duet that is art song.

"This collection of vocal music comes from the imaginative mind of composer Peter Dayton, who specializes in creating fresh contemporary repertoire for voice and accompaniment...the boldly innovative "The Second Coming," with text by Yeats... merited an instant replay... Dayton, a rugged individualist, proces he can also create a convincing genre composition, although it still bears his stamp of sophistication." - Joshua Rosenblum, Opera News October 2023

Liner Notes:

Hot on the heels of his 2021 Stories out of Cherry Stems, this latest vocal music album from Baltimore-based composer Peter Dayton continues to establish him as a mature and formidable talent in the art song world. All in the Sound drills down into the heart of the genre: duet between voice and accompaniment. Dayton’s music realizes the achingly poignant possibilities inherent in this duet.

The work of this album is made all the sweeter given its context. Every piece was recorded in summer 2021, shortly after vaccines for COVID-19 became widely accessible in the United States. For the featured musicians, this album was the first in-person recording project they were able to undertake in over a year. The joy of social reconnection and returning to communal musicmaking is palpable across the album. In addition to the communities established within the recording studio for this project, community resonates across the album in other ways. Many pieces have been commissioned by friends, such as the title song set “All in the Sound,” commissioned by the soprano Katie Procell who performs it; or “Fresh in the Triumph,” commissioned by the husband of a dear friend for his spouse’s birthday. Similarly, Dayton composed “A Red, Red Rose” as a meaningful gift for dear friends – an engaged couple geographically separated for months by the pandemic.​

Often in reaction to the text he has chosen to set, Dayton begins his compositional process by developing an internal logic for each composition. For example, “Evening,” the third movement from the cycle “Just a Leaf: Three Natural Songs,” rests on a foundation of continual expansion and collapse between the intervals of a fourth and a sixth, most audible in the accompaniment. From the germinative seed of these alternating intervals, the piece grows into an evocative depiction of a winter evening with trees singing in the wind. His approach echoes the way some poets find it easier to expand their creativity by using “restrictive” poetic forms defined by rhyming or metric conventions. 

This internal-logic approach also ensures that Dayton stays creatively fresh when composing accompaniment – especially for the piano. Perhaps because of his facility with improvisation, he finds it all too easy to fall into instinctual voicings, hand positions, or registrations when playing piano. In reaction, his compositional approach results in sometimes extremely challenging piano parts. Rejecting musical complacency, he writes for the piano in ways that are at once complex, technically challenging, and musically interesting. 

For Dayton, the technique of first establishing a piece’s internal logic is vital for musical success. He notes that he prefers not to compose exclusively using the metric of what he “likes” or what sounds “good” or “natural.” Were he to take this approach, he declares laughingly, his entire output would luxuriate in a “soup” of minor ninth chords. Instead, working within pre-established restrictions facilitates his creative decision-making. Inside the rules he sets for himself, he measures success when a piece also becomes viscerally satisfying to the senses. And this album does not disappoint. 

The care and attention that Dayton uses to craft each single movement can also be found in his organization of this album. Listeners will perceive several different trajectories or threads connecting the album together – for example, the trajectory of the poets whose texts Dayton sets. The first six songs and cycles feature American modernist poets, before transitioning in “Like a Red, Red Rose” to poets from the British Isles. Of particular note, Dayton himself wrote the text for the closing piece, “Fresh in the Triumph,” based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s novel establishes a pessimistic refrain, quoting a funereal song, “Fear no more…” from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline, embodying the fatalistic notion that only death can be a release from care, toil, and fear. In his own words, Dayton rebuts this sentiment, emphasizing the transcendent quality our passing moments take on. Here, Ben Hawker’s soaring Broadway-style tenor suggests that we can instead survive in those instants forever.

Another trajectory is that of instrumentation. Dayton plays with our expectations as audiences of art song, juxtaposing the “traditional” instrumentation of voice and piano with other instrumentations: voice and violin, voice and harp, voice and guitar, and voice and celesta. Piano accompaniment bookends the album, and the other instrumental accompaniments lie at the album’s heart. The inclusion of the penultimate song cycle “The Second Coming,” a piece for horn and four low voices, augments this contrast. These comparisons collectively reveal the hallmark intimacy and community at the heart of Dayton’s music.​

If the poems and the instrumentation form the “warp” and “weft” of the tapestry that is All in the Sound, the route through the texts provides the tapestry with its “color.” For this album, Dayton presents a “color wheel” that contrasts the power, beauty, and rhetorical impact of the poetic imagery. “All in the Sound” and “Just a Leaf” evoke emotion using natural imagery. “Botticellian Trees,” with delicious text painting in the violin, continues in this nature image-based vein, before transitioning to the increasingly abstract “If They Delight” and “Beyond Dimension.” “Like a Red, Red Rose” features an almost perfect Venn diagram of physical, emotional, and abstract imagery. In contrast, the almost constant rhythmic churning of the celesta in “Wilde Colours” marries the physical senses with the emotions, and “The Second Coming” is literally occult. Dayton closes the album with the sharp, poignant, tear-inducing “Fresh in the Triumph,” which uses the language of 1990s folk-pop Broadway musicals to craft a clear counterargument to the fog-filled chromatic harmonies of “The Second Coming.” In this closing piece—and the album as a whole—Dayton has made robust, powerful contributions to the world of art song that will continue to inspire. 

-Dr. Ryan A. Koons

August, 2022

Release Date: May 13, 2022

Composer Peter Dayton and Navona Records present STORIES OUT OF CHERRY STEMS, an album of original vocal chamber music with carefully curated texts spanning multiple centuries. Soprano Katie Procell and numerous selected performers navigate a persistent tension between simplicity and complexity delicately threaded throughout the program, providing a solid stage for the texts of notable poets Pablo Neruda, Oscar Wilde, and more. The strengths of vocal and instrumental chamber music merge into a cohesive powerhouse in this recording, brimming with sung stories that compliment Dayton’s compositional style. https://www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6424/

Selected as Critic's Choice Opera News Magazine, October 2022. Read the article here. "Dayton continually creates fresh and interesting sounds with these forces while Procell enthusiastically illuminates his idiosyncratic explorations with her gleaming soprano" - Joshua Rosenblum

LINER NOTES:

As meticulous as Peter Dayton is in his music, he gives equal attention to words. As he tells it, it is through poetry that he first began exploring ideas of structure in art, long before turning to music. Each of the four sets of songs on "Stories Out of Cherry Stems" deal with different texts in inventive, often surprising ways. All of them feature the talents of soprano Katie Procell, who brings an expressive and singular performance to each piece. There is a natural, effortless quality to the vocal lines, which is as much a credit to Dayton's compositions as to Procell's interpretations. None of this musical material is simple. Yet every line spills from the tongue as if it could not have been uttered in any other way.​

The conviction of these performances is evidence of the close working relationship between the composer and singer, who met in 2018 when Dayton attended a concert Procell was giving of Olivier Messiaen's Harawi (1945). Stunned by her performance, Dayton introduced himself and suggested working together on a future concert. Numerous collaborations quickly blossomed between the singer and composer, including the two pieces which bookend this album: Entwine Our Tongues: Sapphic Fragments (2019) and Desiderata: Ten Pieces of Wisdom (2020).

In Entwine Our Tongues, Procell sings with four reed instruments: two oboes and two clarinets (with doublings on English horn and bass clarinet). The texts come from Jordi Alonso's Honeyvoiced (2014), a book of poems based on the writings of Sappho. The song cycle opens with a flurry of activity in the instruments and an immediate bold entrance from Procell. Dense, shimmering harmonies vanish as quickly as they arrive, while Procell's grounding melody holds everything together. A truly standout moment of this piece is the penultimate movement, in which Procell is left unaccompanied to maneuver through complexly sensuous lines set to a text describing the hope that her desires might coincide with another's. The absence of the ensemble here is as palpable as is Procell's total self-sufficiency in her a cappella performance. The moment her solo ends, the reeds re-enter, launching the listener into the final, gently rocking movement.​

The other ensemble piece of this album is Lost Daughter: Songs on the Myth of Persephone (2020/2021), for soprano, flute, viola and harp. Dayton selected each text of this cycle from a different source and time period, exploring various aspects of motherhood and grief. The piece begins plaintively; the three instruments seem at times to be one instrument-assemblage: a strange and subtle organ. Procell's dramatic and technical facility is on full display. She floats delicately over the top of the instruments, suddenly shifting her weight into heavier lines. Gentle gliding tones burst into nimble chromatic runs and wide leaps, then settle back into steady low incantations, barely above a whisper. Contrasting the first four movements, Dayton casts the fifth almost entirely as a spoken narration of Louise Glück's Persephone, the Wanderer (2006), while the three instruments weave around each other in careful heterophony. Procell is equally expressive in her dramatic reading as in her singing, bringing out all the wit and insight of Glück's modern commentary on the ancient myth.​

The remaining pieces are duets between Procell and a single instrument. Si Solamente (2017), for soprano and cello, sets three poems by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Each deals in its own way with intimacy, with presence and absence. In three long movements, this piece is a haunting tour de force for both singer and cellist. There are two striking moments of athletic vocalise from Procell in the second movement. In the third movement the singer muses on a paradoxical desire for a lover's silence in order to more fully feel their presence through the possibility of that silence being broken. Dayton avoids any obvious renderings of silence in this movement. His use of a simple vocal melody anchors the poem's strophic form, while the cello moves through variations on a two-note repeating phrase, constantly reinventing itself but retaining its essential identity.​

Desiderata, for soprano and saxophone, opens by invoking a similar theme, as Procell reminds the listener to "remember what peace there may be in silence." The performance of this piece's ten aphorisms—each punctuated by its own brief silence—matches the sincerity and humility of the text. Every one of these miniatures is as complete a composition as any of the longer movements on this album. Within them is found the same commitment to melody and line, the same careful attention to detail that characterizes Dayton's style. There is a persistent tension between simplicity and complexity delicately threaded through all these songs: twisted stems of cherries from which stories are spun. Each story is given charismatic life by Procell and her fellow performers.

-Stuart Wheeler

November, 2021

Hoodleoos: Illustrations of cute anthropomorphic birds

Website: https://hoodleoos.com, updated with new images every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

About Hoodleoos

What is a hoodleoo? It is some relation of the Columbidae family of pigeons and doves, with all of the practical questions about how their wings work like human fingers, what would the purpose of tail feathers be, etc. neatly side-stepped. They’re cute, distant relations of Columbidae with a hobbit-like disposition, that’s good enough. Though they are the adorable, rotund stars of this world, it is the world that they live in, sustain, and maintain, that has really fired my imagination. Emphasis on leisure, conversation, public transportation, community, sharing, recreational art-marking, accessibility, and unbridled joy have fueled my creations in these drawings, with a number of deeply personal drawings taken from family memories, as well as little jokes paying tribute some of my favorite works of art and locations. The use of bubbles: speech bubbles, thought bubbles, electronic transmission bubbles has been key in these drawings, presenting more than one enclosed picture in a single image. This has struck me as being true to how we live on a daily basis, split between perceptions of our immediate surroundings, and (often equally vivid) imaginings of other places, times, situations, concepts. We think about our future plans, we talk to people about our past plans and what we were thinking about saying in the future which we are currently experiencing. The use of pictures as objects within some of these drawings is an extension of this, as vivid as a thought, but viewable by all. While I do use text in many of these, as much as possible I hope that it is incidental to understanding the story or scenario that unfolds. If some of the illustrations have a puzzling element, I hope that the cuteness of this world’s inhabitants encourages engaging with the stories, to figure out what these busy but unhurried birds are up to!

About These Drawings

I began drawing these hoodleoos around the middle of December 2021, and have been steadily producing illustrations since. I will be updating this website with new images every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with an image from any point in my creative journey, and this will go on until I stop, I suppose. The order of illustrations is completely random from my (as of November 2022) collection of nearly 200 images. As I create more, they will be added to the end of the queue, also with some randomization.

About My Approach

My approach to these illustrations is bound up with my materials. These illustrations are all hand-drawn and colored using (with few exceptions) various weights of drawing, multi-media, and watercolor paper (Strathmore, Grumbacher, Canson) and Tombow Dual-Brush water-based brush pens. The color schemes of different illustrations play with the various parameters of these water-brush pens. For instance, in numerous illustrations I only employed brush pens that have a single common number as in their 3-character color code. For some illustrations I employed brush pens grouped into a single color family or combinations of color families designated by the manufacturer. For some illustrations, I have randomly selected between 9 and 10 brush pens. Different personal codes designate these different approaches. Here are some of them which you might see with various illustrations:

• TCLS([color]) - Tombow Color Limited Selection, an approach to color selection not based in the manufacturer-designated codes or color-categories using a limited selection of colors, either singly or in combination.
• TCS[###] - Tombow Color Series (Example: TCSXX6), the Xs and numbers refer to the number of the 3-character color code that is the point of commonality for the colors employed in the illustration.
• TCSComp[#]([color]/[color]) - Tombow Color Series Complimentary, the number refers to the series of complementaries the parentheses refer to the color families involved, such as Blue and Violet.
• TCRS(X#) - Tombow Color Random Selection, made using 9 or 10 randomly selected brush pens (that exclude previous selections). The letter refers to a single selection series, the number refers to the number within the selection series (Example. TCRSA2, the second random selection in the first selection series).
• TCSS([color]) - Tombow Color Superspectrum Series, employs colors from all 3 related parts of the manufacturer-designated color family (ex. Red: Violet-Red, Red, Yellow-Red)

Origins

This entire, ongoing project exists thanks to my wonderful husband Douglas Johnson. At the key moments of in the origin story of this Happy World of Hoodleoos, Doug has planted the grain of an idea (a millet grain probably) which has brought a flock of ideas swarming and pecking around it. It started in the early spring of 2020. Doug brought home a plastic bird feeder to hopefully bring a little life to the balcony that I was spending more time looking out over than ever previously. I was skeptical that it would have many customers, considering my balcony is on the 16th floor of my building. There are few times I have been happier to be proven wrong. Finches, grosbeaks, and (most importantly) mourning doves have, since that day, made a daily commute to my balcony to feast on sunflower chips, millet, suet, and plenty of other tasty morsels. Hours of entertainment for me! After a while I began to call the big mourning doves that came bustling and bonking around my balcony the nickname “hoodleoos” after the various sounds they make when flying or calling to each other. They are my (albeit messy) friends, and we’ve tried to make as hospitable and nutritious a place for these city-dwelling scrapper birds as possible. Doug’s next pivotal contribution was the literal shower thought that launched the proverbial thousand ships. During one of the few family visits in the post-vaccine era, I was idly wondering how our balcony birds were faring without us (would the feeders last through the trip?) when Doug drew a stout dove in profile with his finger in the steamed glass of our hotel shower. I was enraptured! HOODLEOODLEOO! It was perfect, hilarious, adorable. The shower glass was streaked in steam hoodleoo cartoons by the end of the trip. My imagination was fired with these adorable little Busytown-like creatures. As my work has been virtual but Doug’s remains hands-on, I had taken to writing out my daily schedule on a sheet of paper for Doug, to which I began to add little Hoodleoo-doodles; sometimes one in a particular costume (like Huck Finn or as a three-piece suit businessman), sometimes in a little scenario (like birdwatching or conducting a vocal group). As my drawings became more elaborate (and therefore, fundamentally, sillier), Doug once again stepped in to provide the materials for the drawings you will find on this site: the Tombow water-based markers and various drawing and mixed media papers were his own excellent curations. The 2021 end-of-year winter holidays, when the Omicron variant yet again drove us all into our own bubbles again was when these drawings really took off. These happy, loving, eager, enthusiastic hoodleoos are something of my own wish-fulfillment for a better, kinder world, made from my far-seeing vantage in the sky. Thank you, Doug, for being the wind beneath the wings of my wonderful, big, bonking hoodleoos.

Bonk??

“the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left”

-Umberto Eco (“Postscript to the Name of the Rose”)

Along with some of doves’ favorite foods -millet & sunflower chips- you’ll see the word “BONK” a lot here, whether freestanding or in a pun on another word. What’s the deal? It’s a word I’ve adapted to mean many things, possibly most anything! Here are some of the ways that I use it:

• To describe the motion of pigeons and doves walking, bobbing their head forward as their legs move backward: bonk bonk bonk!
• To describe the health and strength of particularly big, round birds (e.g. “that bird is big and bonking!”)
• To onomatopoetically describe the visual impact of suddenly seeing a particularly big, round bird (“bonk!”)

In the world of the hoodleoos, Bonk is a positive thing. It’s displayed on signage, shirts, incorporated into names of people, places, and things. It is an aspiration of birds to get big and bonkin’, and to happily bonk around with their world! Bonk is the bird pursuit of happiness (and millet).

Exhibitions

• "Hello, BIRDS" - Area 405, Baltimore Maryland, April 8-May 7, 2023 in conjunction with Stillpointe Theatre's production of "Nevermore"

After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was impossible to put on live music concerts, I began hosting piano livestream concerts centered around the holidays and times of year when I might be at home and playing piano for my family. By bringing some of the intimacy and familiarity of seasonal music to the homes and screens of friends and family who were all doing their best to keep a social distance, I hoped to infuse that time of isolation with more companionship and comfort. Concert programs have often incorporated an eclectic mix of jazz standards, showtunes, classical piano music, and piano arrangements of video-game music.

Release date: March 12, 2020

Liner Notes: 

Liner Notes:
This album was created to celebrate and supplement the 80th retrospective showing of paintings by British artist John Hitchens (b. 1940); it is also a celebration of a correspondence, creative exchange, and friendship that has endured since 2012, when I first reached out to request permission to display the works of John’s father, Ivon Hitchens, whose paintings inspired my suite for oboe (doubling cor anglais) and violin, Open Air. The correspondence and exchange truly grew into a friendship after I composed a work for solo piano, which I then orchestrated, inspired by John’s three-panel painting From Sombre Lands. I incorporated a visit to John into the same itinerary in which I recorded the orchestral version, entering the bucolic world of West Sussex and visiting John’s studio at Greenleaves, a creative clearing tucked away amidst a jungle of rhododendron trees.

Since then, I have had the privilege to visit John twice more, with a growing stack of physical letters tracking our creative and personal journeys over the years. This exchange and friendship has produced numerous compositions and paintings: John’s From Sombre Lands inspired my Piano/Orchestral piece From Sombre Lands, which inspired John’s 2016 painting From Sombre Lands, Orchestral Version, which inspired my 2017 orchestral composition Symphonic Poem: From Forgotten Lands. My experiences of pastoral Petworth, Byworth, Bignor Hill, and the Roman Road inspired my 2014 string orchestra piece Grounds, which inspired John’s 2019 painting Grounds. These pieces, and the creative journeys they represent are presented here, with the bonus postscript of a piece in which I composed using the letters of John’s first and last name for its elemental materials. I feel safe in saying that, for both John and myself, our aesthetic tastes are broad-ranging, yet I feel my own music is more of a departure from John’s usual sources of musical inspiration than his paintings are for me. Other artists whose works have inspired my music include Ivon Hitchens, Fernando de Szyszlo, and Graham Sutherland, artists whose work includes a level of abstraction. Meanwhile, John’s usually prefers less narrative genres for the music that accompanies his painting practice: house music, minimalism (I am indebted to John for introducing me to Simeon Ten Holt). Of the many languages and styles that can be seen in John’s vast and powerful portfolio, I find beauty and pleasure in every period, phase, or stage, and am fascinated by the ways in which my own work has stimulated him to create works that show John exploring new styles, incorporating older styles into his current practice, and generating work that, in turn, challenges me to explore new sounds. Comparing the paintings From Sombre Lands and From Sombre Lands, Orchestral Version reveals John returning to colors, brushstrokes, shapes, and techniques from his earlier œuvre. John’s Grounds uses colors almost never seen in John’s recent work: greens and violets! A painting like Grounds will perhaps mean a responding work that departs from my colors will be necessary! John’s creative fertility seems to show no slowing, so I see no end in sight to our exchange of letters, artwork, ideas, and goodwill. For a composer who is constantly stimulated, moved, and creatively inspired by artwork and poetry, to have artwork inspired by my own compositions has been one of the great honors of my career.

Congratulations, John, and thank you. – Peter Dayton

For further information about the journey of my friendship and correspondence with John Hitchens, visit peterdaytonmusic.com/Dayton-hitchens-story