Maurice Wright
Maurice Wright is an American composer, born in Front Royal, Virginia, in 1949. He studied at Duke University and Columbia University and teaches composition at Temple University. His catalogue includes orchestral, chamber and percussion music and the electronic opera The Trojan Conflict, first performed in 1989. Recordings include his piano Sonata, played by Marc-André Hamelin with Ives's Concord Sonata, and the orchestral Night Scenes.
Divertimento, Sym No. 2, Night Scenes
Mario Davidovsky was a founding member of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. His compositions apply classical compositional form to electronically generated sounds. His Divertimento is rich and subtle, and might even be described as impressionistic.
Maurice Wright’s Night Scenes, although not program music per se, is loosely inspired by nocturnal imagery, from the fantastical turn the imagination takes in the late hours. It is alternately agitated and full of dreamy string harmonic…
Sonata No. 2 ( "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860") - Sonata
“This is not a nice sonata for a nice piano player,” wrote Charles Ives about his most famous work, “but something the writer had long been thinking about.”
All four movements were programmatically conceived around figures in the Transcendentalist movement (c. 1936-1860) in Concord, Massachusetts. The “Emerson” movement had begun as a piano concerto, the soloist representing Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the orchestra, the masses listen to him; “Hawthorne” was conceived for “a piano or a dozen pianos…