La Noche en la Isla

Winner of the 1979 International Horn Society Composition Prize

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La Noche En La Isla is drawn from Pablo Neruda's collection of brooding, erotic lyrics Los versos del Capitán, and is one of the longer and more dramatic of these poems. The song, like the poem, is a single long arch. It begins softly with quarter-tones and multiphonics in the horn, climaxes with all the performers in their extreme high registers, and ends quietly with horn and baritone in gentle counterpoint over a pedal-drone in the piano. This work was a co-winner of the International Horn Society's Composition Competition (1979). Reviewing the work for The Horn Call, Gayle Chesebro wrote that “. . . the music always reflects the text and exudes the romance of the poetry . . . There is a naturalness to the flow of the music and a unity that might cause one to wonder whether the music or the text was conceived first.'

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