Vocal Music

A setting of the traditional hymn tune written for the funeral of my father-in-law, John Marvin McNamara.

A challenging, atonal setting of T. S. Elliot’s iconic poem. Score and parts available upon request.

Songs of Passage, Book II, focuses on life’s most imponderable journeys, beginning with Walt Whitman’s great meditation on the passage from life into death, “The Last Invocation.”

Songs of Passage, Book I, takes its name from the title of the first song in the book, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Birds of Passage.”

Songs of Remembrance explores the realm of memory, regret, and loss.

My Six Songs for Philip Frohnmayer were written to honor this friend and colleague, a remarkable baritone singer, and a yet more remarkable man, during the time of his courageous struggle with cancer.

Excerpted from Walt Whitman’s long poem, Sea-Drift, this cycle of texts tells of the hopefulness and longing of a lone sea bird, sitting fast upon a nest, whose mate has flown off in search of food and, having met with some disaster, never returned.

I wrote this song for my wife Sharon on the occasion of our wedding in 1999.

Psalm in April is written in memoryof my father, William Iverson Horne. He chose the 27thPsalm to be read at his funeral.

Songs for Ellenis a collection of songs that I wrote for soprano Ellen Frohnmayer.

My Shakespeare songs draw their texts from five of the poet’s famous love sonnets.