Daniel Bukin

Full score and parts are available for purchase via TUX People’s Music.

This short piece is meant to invoke images of the cosmos: vast galaxies, colorful stars, massive nebulas, and other stellar bodies. The chime of the celeste or piano which starts the piece sprinkles this entire work with an air of mystery, just as there is still so much mystery surrounding space. As each section of the orchestra is introduced, the colors of the ensemble, much like the colors of cosmic bodies, becomes richer and more vibrant.

Score is available for purchase through TUX People’s Music.

Full score and are available for purchase through TUX People’s Music.

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This piece is an exploration of how a dream goes from fantasy to reality.

Full score and parts are available for purchase via TUX People’s Music.

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632 – 1687) was a French composer during the Baroque era who, in collaboration with other artists at the time, helped to pioneer early forms of performing arts that we know today, including ballet. Together with the author Molière and choreographer Pierre Beauchamp, the trio wrote Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman). It is a five-act comédie-ballet – a play intermingled with music, dance, and singing – satirizing bourgeois personality, and poking fun both at the vulgar, pretentious middleclass, and the vain, snobbish aristocracy. Marche pour la Ceremonie des Turcs (The March for the Turkish Ceremony) is taken from Act IV and depicts the grand procession of Turkish musicians and dancers.

Full score and parts are available for purchase via TUX People’s Music.

A suffrage anthem originally by Ethyl Smyth.

Full score and parts are available for purchase via TUX People’s Music.

This piece is very special to me, as it was my very first composition that was premiered live by an orchestra. Originally titled “Water”, it was performed by the West Forsyth High School Orchestra in 2009, under the direction of Ryan Peller. I attribute my desire to study music at university to this amazing music educator. I’ve revised this piece at the beginning of 2020, though much of it remains the same. This is an excellent piece appropriate for advanced middle school or intermediate high school orchestras.

Full score and parts are available for purchase via TUX People’s Music.

Full score and parts are available for purchase via TUX People’s Music.

It is a dark and stormy night, and in a large and foreboding castle, frightening creatures are dancing the night away. Vampires, goblins, ghouls, and ghosts. They rule over this palace and are reveling in fiendish delight. Surrounded by blood-red candles and tapestries, they dance this, the Sanguine Waltz. While the word waltz usually conjures up images of lavish balls, champagne, and finery, this piece flies in the face of that and is meant to be disorienting and ghoulish. 5/4 time dominates most of this piece giving it an uneven lilt throughout. Additionally, the word sanguine, in this case, is meant to describe a deep blood-red color.

Full score and parts are available for purchase via TUX People’s Music.

Full score and parts are available for purchase via TUX People’s Music.

Francesca Caccini (1587 – 1641) was an Italian composer, singer, and lutenist in the early Baroque era. She composed extensively for both voice and strings, and her only surviving stage work, La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (The Liberation of Ruggiero from the island of Alcina) is widely considered to be the first opera written by a woman composer. The work is a comic opera in four scenes that tells the story of Ruggerio, a knight who has been bewitched by the
evil sorceress Alcina, and his subsequent escape from Alcina’s island with the help of Melissa, the good sorceress. This sinfonia begins the opera, much like an overture in later operatic works. The original score calls for three treble instruments and one bass instrument. What makes this piece interesting is the use of horizontal harmony rather than the vertical harmony that our 21st century ears are used to. The top three voices cross over each other constantly which creates a captivating musical conversation.

General Performance Notes:
The tempos indicated are approximations based on live performances referenced during the arranging process. You may use slower or faster tempos if you wish.

Full score and parts are available for purchase via TUX People’s Music.

Full Score and parts are available for purchase via TUX People’s Music.

Full Score and parts are available for purchase via TUX People’s Music.

Premiered by the combined Seattle Pacific University Chamber Orchestra and Port Angeles High School Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Christopher T.F. Hanson

The title for this piece has a double meaning. It is a reference to the song that inspired this piece and the long-term purpose of this piece. In May of 2020, I was going through some old files on my computer and stumbled upon a VERY early piece of mine, composed sometime when I was in high school and probably when I was around 17 years old. 10 years later, I listened to it again with a fresh perspective. And while most of it sounded very simple and naive, there was a snippet of this early piece that caught my attention, something that I could use to create something new. I recognized this snippet as the song “New World” from the album Selmasongs by the Icelandic artist, Björk. This album contains music from the movie “Dancer in the Dark”, which portrays the plight of a woman who is going blind but continues working to support her son, so that he may receive surgery to prevent a similar fate. I used this cell of music to create something that was more representative of me as a composer at the age of 27 (hence the name of this first movement). Additionally, I also envisioned this piece as something that grows as I grow as a composer. I plan to compose a new movement for this piece every 10 years, at 37, 47, 57, and so on so that it may be continuously revisited with new eyes.