Alan Seidler

Albany Records is proud to announce the release of vocal and choral music by Alan Seidler. Repertoire includes Playthings and In the Arc of Your Mallet featuring Laura Last, soprano; Two Sacred Pieces (Our Fatherand Psalm XXIII performed by The Collegiate Chorale; and The Mystic Trumpeter performed by Laura Last, soprano, Steven Goldstein, tenor, Graham Ashton, solo trumpet, The Collegiate Chorale, and The Orchestra of Our Time conducted by Joel Thome.

Alan Seidler was born in New York City. He began to piano lessons shortly before his seventh birthday and within a few months was composing short piano pieces and songs, imitative of the Classic and Romantic masters he studied. At age 17 he attended The JuilliardSchool, wherehe studied composition with the late Vincent Persichetti and piano with Josef Raieff. After leaving Juilliard, Seidler’s career took a left turn and he soon became one of the pioneers of the Blues and Ragtime revival of the 1970s. Following a short stint on Radio Pacifica WBAI-FM, he was signedto a recording contract by Blue Goose Records where he recorded several LPs on which he both sang and played piano, offering up his zany originals, deceptively old-fashioned musically, but ultra-hip in spirit and lyric content. The most successful of these was The Duke of Ook, which soon became and still remains a cult classic.

In the late ’70s, he began to write background scores for Broadway and Off-Broadway plays. He composed for the theatre through most of the 1980s while supporting himself primarily as a vocal coach. During the latter part of the ’80s, Seidler returned to advanced study of composition and orchestration, working with conductor/composer Giampaolo Bracali. During these years and through the 1990s, he producedapiano sonata, a string quartet, a wind quintet, many songs and a number of choral works, some of whichare heard on this CD. In 1995, he founded and became President of New Classics Entertainment, now knownas FHE Creative & Performing Artists, Inc. He is presently chairman and Artistic Director of that organization, concurrently serving on the board of The Orchestra of Our Time, to which he was elected in 2008. In the past decade, he has focused primarily on vocal and choral works. His choral symphony, The Mystic Trumpeterwas premiered at New York’s Merkin Concert Hall in October 2006 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music early in 2007.

Seidler has long sought to integrate the sounds of the many musical worlds in which he has lived into the pages of a single work. Many, including the composer himself, believe the closest he has yet come to achieving his goal is the choral syphony The Mystic Trumpeter, based on Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name. The concluding work on the recording, The Mystic Trumpeter was written between 1999 and 2006 and is Seidler’s personal statement on war, the human condition, and the quest for peace.