AP:  An annual $150,000 prize has been established by the foundation of Tony-winning playwright-director Arthur Laurents and partner Tom Hatcher. The Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award will be given for an unproduced, full-length play of social relevance by an emerging American playwright. The prize includes a $50,000 cash award for the selected playwright and a $100,000 grant for production costs of the play’s premiere at a nonprofit theater.

The foundation said Thursday it’s the first major award for playwrighting to be named in honor of a gay couple. The 92-year-old Laurents wrote the books for “Gypsy” and “West Side Story.” Hatcher was Laurents’ partner of 52 years. The actor and real estate developer died in 2006.

Submissions from invited applicants will be accepted June 15 to Sept. 15. The first award recipient will be notified March 15.

According to tax filings, the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation is based in Riverhead, NY and had approximately $5.6 million in assets in 2008.

Laurents’ generosity brings to mind Aaron Copland, who left his copyrights to a foundation that supports American music. The Aaron Copland Fund for Music has been giving grants totaling about $2 million annually for almost 20 years now.  In a recent interview, former Copland Fund president John Harbison said that the income flows primarily from just four pieces of music.  The late Virgil Thomson, another “bachelor composer” (no direct family heirs), also established a foundation with his will. But his music and writing never had the same kind of popular success as did that of Laurents and Copland.

He died in Williston Vermont on May 30 at age 76.

Make my grave shape of heart so like a flower be free aired and handsome felt.
Grave root pillow, tung up from grave & wigle at blown up clowd.
Ear turnes close to underlayer of green felt moss & sound
of rain dribble thru this layer
down to the roots that will tickle my ear.
Hay grave, my toes need cutting so file away in sound curve or
Garbage grave, way above my head, blood will soon
trickle into my ear –
no choice but the grave, so cat & sheep are daisey turned.
Train will tug my grave, my breath hueing gentil vapor between weel & track
So kitten string & ball, jumpe over this mound so gently & cutely
So my toe can curl & become a snail & go curiousely on its  way.

1958 NYC

The above comes from CLEAN ASSHOLE POEMS & SMILING VEGETABLE SONGS (1978, City Lights Books), which I found (first edition!) in a used porn shop in the Castro a few years ago.  Here’s the copy from the back cover:

First harvest of 1958-1978 eternal decades’ poetry by Peter Orlovsky, born July 8, 1933, in the vanished Women’s Infirmary in Lower East Side N.Y. Sometime ambulance Attendant, farmer, house cleaner, skilkscreen handyman, newsboy, Postal Clerk & instructor at Kerouac School of Poetics, he was discharged from Military after telling government psychiatrist, “An army is an army against love.” witness of the ’50s San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, he was portrayed by Jack Kerouac as hospital nurse saint Simon Darlovsky among Desolation Angels, learned driving speech from Neal Cassady & taught heart in return, partook of psychedelic revolution a pillar of strength with Timothy Leary & Charles Olson, companioned Kerouac & William Burroughs in Tanger, was one of the first American poets to make modern passage to India in early ’60s accompanying Gary Snyder & Allen Ginsbrg, studied Sarod, Banjo & Guitar, read poetry in Chicago & at Harvard Columbia Princeton Yale & New York’s St. Marks Poetry Project, survived Speed & Junk Hells, sang in jail at anti-war protest & political convention occasions, was published in historic Beatitude & Don Allen Anthologies of New American Poetry, played Self in early underground Robert Frank Movies, travelled with Dylan Rolling Thunder Review, farmed solitary upstate New York ten years organic & herculean, fed and nursed decades of poetry families. An experienced Buddhist sitter & Vajrayana meditation practitioner, his Dharma name is “Ocean of Generosity.” After 20 years of shy genius this first poem book’s published on earth.

Allen Ginsberg
Aug. 27, 1978

Above shot is from the upcoming film “Howl” featuring Aaron Tveit as Orlovsky and James Franco as Ginsberg.

They’re a small town family.

Robert, Tony and Annamaria.

Maggio is on the faculty at West Chester University, outside Philadelphia. His partner Tony La Salle is an artist. They’ve been together since 1991 and adopted a daughter, Annamaria La Salle Maggio in 2001, when she was one month old. In 2003, they settled in Lambertville, New Jersey.

“We wanted to live in a small community where we’d be known by everyone,” explains Maggio. “Tony has an art gallery where he shows his work. We can walk to school. I’ve written pieces for the local regional orchestra. And when we first moved here, we weren’t the only gay parents who had kids in the school system. That helped a lot!”

Being a parent, though, isn’t an easy assignment. As Maggio says, “You realize that you have more love and more worry in you – and less sleep – than you ever knew you could.”

Actually, that’s also a part of how he describes his newest piece, “Summer: 2 AM.” Scored for soprano and orchestra, it was conceived as a companion to Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer 1915” and commissioned by the Orchestra 2001, a Philadelphia contemporary music group led by James Freeman.

“Knoxville is one of my favorite pieces of music. I wish I’d written it and I’ve probably been subconsciously re-writing it in my own pieces,” says Maggio. “It was one of the first recordings – Knoxville and The Hermit Songs – that I bought when I began studying composition. Given that I was somewhat obsessed with Barber’s music when I was a student makes this commission kind of significant in my life.”

Maggio’s “Summer” is conceived to stand on its own and consists of eight short songs, with poetry by singer/songwriter Mary Liz McNamara.

“In approaching the writing of the piece, some musical and lyrical ideas kept surfacing, such as the image of a rocking chair on a summer night,” write Maggio and McNamara in their program note. “Our soprano, the wonderful Laurie Heimes, is a new mother herself. When we met at her home to discuss ideas for the piece it was a hot, summer day and she hurried in and out of the room, gracefully and with great humor juggling the demands of a newborn.”

Sultry weather, a rocking chair and childhood also figure in the Barber, of course. “The point of view (for our piece) was not of a child but of this very new parent,” continues Maggio. “It seemed a natural, logical pursuit for us: write about this very personal, idiosyncratic and yet almost universal experience.  How does a person realize, not just with the mind but with every part of their exhausted being, that everything, the whole world, has changed?”

Summer: 2 AM premieres May 25 at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia and May 26 at Swarthmore College. Maggio’s piece will follow the Barber (with intermission in between).  Also on the bill is a new violin concerto by Paul Moravec with violinist Mario Bachman and a piano concerto by Andrew Rudin with Marcantonio Barone.

“God bless Matt. Hey, it’s easy for me – he’s in his prime,” says Douglas to Sun Media of Canada. “I said to him, ‘Matt, I love you, man. Boy, that Bourne must really be going strong.’ But good for him. He’s right taking chances. All those young guys – (George) Clooney – they’re taking risks … It’s smart trying to mix it up a bit and maintain those franchises and still get to do a picture that turns you on.”

As for any risk to the career of Douglas, he says, “At this point and at my age, why not? It’s not all autographs and sunglasses.”

Hovda had indeed passed away, exactly two months prior, after eight years of declining health and a three-month stay in a hospice in northern Arkansas.  Hovda, 69, shared a home in Fayetteville with her companion of 20 years, the conductor Jeannine Wagar.

A native of Minnesota, Hovda spent much of her career in New York and was a respected and beloved member of the contemporary music community.  Her many friends and colleagues across the country are still learning of her passing.

A FaceBook page, “Eleanor-Hovda-Remembering” has about 100 members and Brooks hosted a memorial salon at his home on February 6. But at the time of this writing The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette remains the only newspaper to run an obituary of the composer whose works were commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, the Boston Musica Viva and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, among many other institutions and ensembles.

In an extensive interview this past weekend, Wagar explained that she and Hovda kept her grave condition quiet. After Hovda died, “I was just too fragile to let the word out on my own” says Wagar. In the preceding 18 months, Wagar’s orchestra, the North Arkansas Symphony, fell apart financially and ceased operations and Wagar’s mother died in the same hospice room where Hovda spent her own final months.

Wagar, who has remained in Arkansas, returns to New York this week to begin sorting through Hovda’s many scores and recordings in the couple’s apartment in the Greenwich Village artist complex known as Westbeth.

The following chronology of Hovda’s final years, based on Wagar’s account, shows that the composer’s independent and creative spirit remained until the end, as did a determination to learn and explore, even into the realms beyond death.

Academic immersion and southern retreat

In the late 1990s Hovda held a succession of short-term faculty positions at Yale and Princeton Universities and Bard College.  According to Wagar, she thrived in the academic environment but became increasingly constrained by the time demands coupled with the desire to continue writing and performing her own works.  Hovda already held a B.A. from American University in Washington, D.C. and an M.F.A. in dance from Sarah Lawrence College, but during that same period she also enrolled in N.Y.U. in the Ph.D. program for performance art studies.

“She was taking all these weird wonderful classes but got burned out,” says Wagar. “Meanwhile I got this job out of the sky in Fayetteville. We decided to keep the apartment in New York but she’d come down and serve as composer in residence with the orchestra and be able to recover. She loved to teach but was doing too much, just a ton of stuff.”

In her position with the North Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Hovda visited 10 elementary schools in the region and with the students wrote a series of simple pieces, which were then incorporated into a work for full orchestra.  She also wrote a tongue-in-cheek fanfare, though Wagar says that it remains incomplete.

The couple quickly become ensconced in the local scene, which Wagar describes as progressive and “pretty far out.” They even collaborated with the presiding mayor of Fayetteville, Dan Coody, on an impromptu performance inside an empty water cistern in late 2001.

Wagar recalls that Coody, acting in his official capacity, had visited the 40-million gallon tank after it had been emptied for the kind of cleaning that happens only every few decades. When he sang into it and found a 60-second decay, he knew Wagar and Hovda would enjoy making a visit as well. With a battery of wind, string and percussion instruments, the trio held two improvisation sessions under Hovda’s direction.  The second, which was recorded, included a fourth participant — a crow that twice slipped in through the small passageway to sing a few notes.  Hovda named the piece “Only One Crow.”

Working through health problems

Back in New York in 2002, Hovda sought treatment for a problem tooth, which revealed a tumor in her palate. A series of surgeries in New York disfigured her face and impaired her ability to speak.  While five years of reconstructive procedures in Arkansas were successful, Wagar now views the dental troubles to be the beginning of a long and slow decline.

For the next seven years Hovda remained in seclusion, primarily in Fayetteville. She continued to write music, primarily new annual works for the Nancy Meehan and Laura Pawel Dance Companies.

She also delved into new theories of sound and physics.

According to Wagar, Hovda had a strong background in research science, dating to the early 1960s when she and her first husband worked for the federal government in Washington.  “She knew a lot about physics and sound but it was top secret at the time,” says Wagar. “They would shoot waves up into the ionosphere that would come back as images. The theory was that if there were nuclear activity, it would show up.”

“That triggered the research she did when she was ill,” continues Wagar. “A new theory of harmonics came to her in a flash and like a good scientist she tried to disprove herself.  She spent 10 to 12 hours a day on that for five or six years and was ready to get it out there to the public.”  The work resulted in boxes of writings, graphs and charts as well as a new direction in Hovda’s composing style.

But the couple faced a series of crises in 2008.  In March the finances of the Northern Arkansas Symphony fell apart and it ceased operations.  Hovda was in New York that March, performing one of her scores for a season of Laura Pawel’s company.  Still there a few weeks later, she consulted a doctor about her flagging energy and was diagnosed with breast cancer.

After a year of treatment, Hovda received a clean bill of health in May 2009.  That same month she gave a performance, again in New York, with the Nancy Meehan Dance Company. It would be her last public appearance.

The following summer in Arkansas, Wagar and Hovda shared the tasks of finalizing the estate of Wagar’s mother, who had died, during the same tumultuous March, 2008. In August, Hovda had further health complaints and was given the terminal diagnosis of bone cancer.

Extended life

Several episodes of intense pain soon made it clear that Hovda should not remain in the couple’s home.  She took up residence in the Circle of Life Hospice, located in the Fayetteville suburb of Springdale.  Only a few close friends were contacted and invited to visit. Among them was David Gilbert, the conductor to whom Hovda was married from 1964 to 1973, a period when he was an assistant at the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein and Boulez.

“It was a wonderful thing,” recalls Gilbert of the August visit.  “She was quite lucid, had no pain and actually felt good.  I came with a New York contingent, mostly her dancer friends.  She just perked right up. We took her walking and had lunch on a patio and she was actually dancing in the halls at one point.”

To the surprise of her doctors and the hospice staff, Hovda did not allow death to rush in. According to Wagar, over the succeeding three months — an unusually long stay in hospice — her death was called six times, but she kept returning, awake and full of insights and stories.

“When she first got there she said, ‘Okay since I’m here, if you guys are studying death, I’ll explore for you,’” recalls Wagar. “And the doctors said, ‘Fine’. But then she took it seriously.”

Wagar wrote notes of the statements Hovda made each time she reawakened and is keeping them private with plans to make them into a book.  But she did pass along one particularly musical episode — of Eleanor hearing angels sing in duets, trios, quartets and full chorus.

“Eleanor wasn’t the type of person to get into all that,” says Wagar. “She had a strong spirituality but hated to talk about it and she hated religion or any kind of belief system that would put you into a certain way of thinking. She would say that you have a direct connection to your higher power from within.”

“I expected her to pass away within days of my visit but it took all the way to November,” says Gilbert.  “Apparently, she made medical history by doing that. It was unbelievable but being Eleanor that doesn’t surprise me. She almost taught us all how to approach death when it comes.”

“She was turning her life over every day and when she died it was beautiful,” says Wagar. “She went out completely lucid, with love coming from the other side.”

A simple “No, thanks” would have sufficed.

I’d actually forgotten about that, having put out of my mind some of the stormier aspects of bringing to market that title and the two volumes of “Gay American Composers” discs at CRI.  But Laura and I have remained friends for years and she herself reminded me of the letter about a year ago when we had a little reunion at Symphony Space.

The occasion was the premiere of David Del Tredici’s song cycle “My Favorite Penis Poems,” which Laura had programmed in her capacity as music curator. (The most startling aspect of that event, by the way, certainly wasn’t David’s typically eloquent music, nor the two singers performing at times in their underwear. No, it  was approaching the venue on Broadway and seeing “PENIS POEMS” on the big bright lighted ribbon of a marquee.)

A couple of months ago when the New York Times announced that Laura had been named the new artistic director of Symphony Space, succeeding the illustrious Isaiah Sheffer, I hesitated to put her on this website about (out) GLTB artists in classical music. But recently Laura contacted me, praised the site, and said she wanted to be on it.  With pleasure.

Though she doesn’t officially take the reigns of Symphony Space until July 2010, Laura already has had a broad influence in the programming decisions and she’s kindly pointed out a few of the more queer-friendly events coming up, including:

A concert (earlier this month) of Gavin Creel, star of the current Broadway revival of “Hair”

Another Del Tredici premiere, written for guitarist David Leisner on April 29, 2010.

A recital of the all-female Colorado Quartet on May 7, 2010.

“I have been trying to reach out to the gay arts community in NY to get them to pay attention,” emails Laura, adding that Symphony Space also shows lots of operas in HD.

As for Laura Kaminsky the composer, she’s at work on a string of new pieces including a quartet for the Cassatt, which will be part of an all-Kaminsky program at the Greenwich House on April 15.  How she has time to run Symphony Space, write music and teach at SUNY Purchase is a wonder, but she also makes time for a girl friend, the artist Rebecca Allan.

Like many of Hoiby’s other theatrical works, “Bon Appetit!” was created in collaboration with his companion Mark Shulgasser.  The couple have long lived in a far western nook of the Catskills, the little town of Callicoon, Sullivan County, New York, where Shulgasser also writes about astrology and runs a used bookstore.

Composer Lee Hoiby and his partner/collaborator Mark Shulgasser at The Falls, Long Eddy, New York.

“Bon Appetit!” the opera runs about as long as an episode of “Bon Appetit!” the TV show (less than half an hour).  For the libretto, Shulgasser

went directly to the source and used Child’s own words, taken from two 1971 broadcasts.

Richard Strauss once said that he could set a knife and fork to music, but Hoiby seems to go one better, since the opera is about the making of a chocolate cake.  All of Child’s lovable foibles and self-deprecating humor come through. She puts egg yolks into a pan and then drops it on the kitchen floor and carries on undaunted.  She also sets up a race between an electric mixer and a hand-cranked one.  Hoiby wisely doesn’t interfere with the chef’s magic. There’s no additional jokes or layers of irony in the tuneful score, which includes a light and colorful orchestration.

“Bon Appetit!” was released last year on CD by Albany Records in a fine performance by soprano Kathryn Cowdrick. It’s one of a spate of recent recordings drawing on the vast catalog of 11 operas and dozens of art songs from the composer who turned 83 years old earlier this year.

Hoiby’s knack for selecting good texts is evident in two new discs of his songs. “A Pocket of Time” (Naxos) is a particularly radiant recording, with the composer at the piano accompanying soprano Julia Faulkner and baritone Andrew Garland. The generous recital features 22 songs that date from 1950 to 2007, when the recordings sessions took place. Hoiby’s exquisite craftsmanship and elegant yet unadorned American style is always present.

The range of poets includes Elizabeth Bishop, William Blake, Wallace Stevens and Thornton Wilder, among others.  “Lady of the Harbor” sets the Emma Lazarus text inscribed on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…”) to a noble and dignified melody, yet infuses it with an accompaniment that’s syncopated and jaunty, perhaps in imitation of the waves of the New York harbor.  The fantastical “Jabberwocky” (Lewis Carroll) goes against the expected and makes the text into an ominous warning.

I’m particularly drawn to Hoiby’s settings of Walt Whitman in “I Was There,” a cycle of five songs for baritone and piano written in 1988.  There’s Whitman’s adulation of masculine heroes (“O Captain! My Captain!”), his spiritual introspection (“A Clear Midnight”), and his exalted embrace of comrades (“Joy, Shipmate, Joy!”).  Unfortunately the melodic range of these songs seems a little high for Andrew Garland, or perhaps he’s just pushing too much and the strain comes through. I remain partial to the original recording by the lighter voiced baritone Peter Stewart (released on CRI in 1994), for whom Hoiby composed the cycle.

The other new disc, “Songs of Lee Hoiby,” comes from soprano Ursula Kleinecke-Boyer with pianist Maria Perez-Goodman (Albany Records).   The album features some of the same material, but there are also selections with texts by Wilfred Own, Ezra Pound, John Donne and e.e. cummings.  But despite the thoughtful program, the recording itself is not very satisfying. Kleinecke-Boyer has a large voice, probably better suited to opera, and fudges on much of the English diction.  The piano accompaniment, often so magical with Hoiby, is too recessive in the audio mix.

Since both of these new discs and the Stewart recording from the ‘90s all cover some of the same ground, it’s obvious that Hoiby has entered the repertoire of American singers. His biggest hit, appearing on all three discs, may be “Where the Music Comes From.” It’s a setting of Hoiby’s own poetry and might be considered a statement of the composer’s artistic mission. It reads in part:

I want to be where the music comes from,

Where the clock stops, where it’s now…

And to be one with the river flowing,

Breezes blowing, sky above,

And oh, I want to love.

When it comes to living composers played by American orchestras, Jennifer Higdon is a leader of the pack.  Her orchestra piece “Blue Cathedral” was written in 1999 and received 19 performances last year — more than any other orchestra piece written in the last 25 years.  During the same period, she was the third most widely performed living composer after her more senior colleagues John Adams and John Corigliano.  (Statistics from the League of American Orchestras.)

Higdon is a 47-year-old out lesbian who lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the Curtis Institute.  She met her partner Cheryl Lawson when they were in high school band together in Tennessee.  A few years ago, Lawson abandoned her career in events management to work full time at Higdon’s in-house publishing company.  Considering that Higdon’s music receives more than 200 performances a year, there’s plenty to keep the two of them busy.

Lately I’ve thought of Higdon as the Rachel Maddow of the classical music world. Like the MSNBC commentator, she’s good humored and straight talking but doesn’t make a big deal about being out.  She’s also kinda butch, with a short no-nonsense haircut and a southern accent.  Her music shares some of her personal characteristics — it’s direct, appealing and easy to understand. And like her speaking voice, it usually moves at a fast clip.

To meet Higdon in person, it might be easy to underestimate her she, since she stands about 5 feet 4 inches tall.  A few years ago, she told me that at conferences, “other composers will talk over my head and not pay attention to my presence in a room. But the minute they find out who I am, they come over to talk.”

As I said, composers do keep score, and not just of how their own music is doing.

Plenty of Higdon’s music has been coming out on recordings.  In 2004, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra released an all-Higdon disc that featured her popular “Blue Cathedral,” and also the powerful Concerto for Orchestra. Commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the concerto is an imaginative showcase for the different sections of an orchestra. When I heard it at Tanglewood about five years ago, the writing had that rarest of musical qualities — a feeling of inevitability.

Higdon’s latest release is a collection of chamber and solo works for flute, which was her instrument back in high school.  The central performer for the new collection on Koch is Susan Glaser.

“Zaka,” the opening piece for flute and four other instruments, has all the best traits of Higdon’s music. It’s colorful and lively, like confetti has been thrown in the air and hangs there dancing around in front of you for minutes on end.  “Rapid Fire,” a flute solo, may be Higdon’s most widely performed and recorded work, but not because it’s easy on the flute player. To the contrary, it’s incredibly demanding and full of unusual effects for the instrument.  The opening moves like lightning with lines of melody jumping between the different registers so fast that it feels like there’s more than one instrument actually playing.  “Summer Shivers” and “Autumn Reflections” are more subdued and lyrical, and thus a welcome departure on this rather hyperactive disc.  The set ends with “Dash,” another cheerful and zippy essay.

Higdon has been especially busy during the last few seasons writing concertos for some major soloists.  Her Violin Concerto for Hilary Hahn premiered early this year in Indianapolis and the dynamic jazz/improve trio Time for Three is currently playing her Concerto 4-3 all over the place. Higdon’s Percussion Concerto has recently appeared on a disc of the London Philharmonic Orchestra with soloist Colin Currie, for whom it was written.  Again with this piece, she keeps the soloist plenty busy and the dramatic finale resembles a trap set solo at a rock concerto — fast, loud and pounding.

The one realm of classical music that Higdon has not yet conquered is opera, but she’s actually on that too. The San Francisco Opera recently announced that they’ve commissioned her first opera, slated for premiere in 2013.

A more thorough portrait of Jennifer Higdon from 2003 is available in my book Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.

Those were a friend’s first words to me during an intermission at a concert late this past spring at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.  He could have been speaking of so many different folks, such as the Americans Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, or Leonard Bernstein, to name just a few. Or from the classics there’s Tchaikovsky or Handel, for that matter.  But on this occasion the swooning was prompted by music of John Corigliano.

We heard a fair amount of Corigliano this past season in Albany. There were works on two different programs of the Albany Symphony Orchestra, a little tone poem and then his big theatrical flute concerto “Piped Piper Fantasy.”  In April his luscious “Fern Hill” for chorus and orchestra was performed by the Albany Pro Musica, which is when the intermission remark was made.

Corigliano turned 70 last year and is one of our country’s most prominent composers. He’s been out for ages, and his partner is the 40-something composer Mark Adamo, who’s first opera “Little Women” has been a knock-out hit at small companies and college music schools.  Corigliano’s had his own success with music for the dramatic stage. His only opera, “The Ghosts of Versailles,” was written for nothing less than the Metropolitan Opera, where it premiered back in the early 1990s.

While he’s got a large catalog of works in many genres, Corigliano’s most famous pieces are probably his two Hollywood film scores, “Altered States” (1980) and “The Red Violin” (1997).  He won an Academy Award for the latter. And when he received the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his Second Symphony, he became the only composer besides Copland to receive these top honors in such divergent realms of the cultural universe.

The American Classics series on Naxos has been releasing lots of Corigliano’s music lately and since the CDs (or the downloads) are moderately priced at around $9 each, they make for a rather low-risk way to sample his music.  And much of it is indeed beautiful, as my friend remarked, but there’s also something grand and apocalyptic about Corigliano’s sonic universe.

Take for example “A Dylan Thomas Trilogy,” performed on a recent CD by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Leonard Slatkin.  It’s a rather autobiographical work, more than an hour long, that pulls together disparate pieces written from the late 1950s to the late 1990s. While it incorporates the youthful and tuneful “Fern Hill,” it also explores the dark emotions of midlife (“Poem in October”) with rather terrifying vividness.

Playing with time through a mixture of nostalgia and mystery is another thing Corigliano masters.  “Three Hallucinations (from Altered States)” blends together distant sounds of Renaissance music and sacred hymns with angular, modern turbulence and noise. Performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor JoAnn Falletta, the piece is actually the filler on a recent Naxos disc with that features a more recent work, “Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan.”  It’s hard to believe, but Corigliano swears he never heard a note of Dylan’s music so he was able to take some of Dylan’s lyrics and make his own songs out of them, even the iconic “Blowin’ in the Wind.”  The orchestral song cycle, performed by soprano Hila Plittmann, is certainly convincing and original, and again there’s a characteristic mixing or alternating of springtime folk-music optimism and doom and gloom poundings and mutterings from the orchestra.

Yet another new disc features one of Corigliano’s newest major works, “Circus Maximus,” a seven movement piece, scored for a ginormous wind band, played by the University of Texas Wind Ensemble led by conductor Jerry Junkin.  Over filled with irony, sass and sarcasm, as well as blaring sound effects and even gun shots, I found it just too raucous and loud even for my modern-attuned ears.  The composer’s notes suggest it’s a comment on the crassness of our commercial society. My response is — well as if we need any reminding.

It’s interesting that Corigliano dubbed the piece his Symphony No. 3, considering that he once declared he’d never ever write a symphony.  It was the AIDS crisis that convinced him to take on such a lofty mantle as the symphonic form.  His 1991 effort, Symphony No. 1 “Of Rage and Remembrance,” perfectly captured the grief and anger of those days and has earned Corigliano a permanent place of honor among the pantheon of gay composers.