Salvatore Martirano

O,O,O,O, That Shakespeherian Rag collects six of the most important compositions from his relatively small body of work. By the late 50s Martirano had begun to freely incorporate elements of jazz and popular music. O,O,O,O, That Shakespeherian Rag(1959), one of his two magnum opuses, is a prime example of this musical synthesis—a serialist choral setting of passages from three Shakespeare plays, accompanied by a chamber orchestra that includes a jazz ensemble. Schoenberg meets bebop in a wild, intricate and richly allusive mix of words and music. Domenico Scarlatti + Art Tatum = Cocktail Music (1962)—a short virtuosic solo piano concoction. Octet (1963) is a delicately orchestrated canvas of pungent sonorities and airy textures. Chansons Innocentes (1957), are short settings for voice and piano of three e.e. cummings poems. Ballad (1966), for voice and seven-piece ensemble including tenor sax, mixes snippets of a half-dozen standards into a heady cocktail of jazz, dodecaphony, and Broadway. Stuck on Stella (1979), for solo piano, takes its inspiration from, among others, Rachmaninov, Miles Davis, Weber's Konzertstück, and of course, the jazz standard, "Stella by Starlight." It’s been described as “... a nocturnal fantasy with many shifts of mood and narrative incidents... Midnight is announced by tolling left-hand octaves, followed by a chordal passage reminiscent of Debussy. The piece ends with a whiff of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit.”