Rob Mathes Music

ORCHESTRAL SONGS

Orchestral Songs album art (downloadable)

• Disc 1
• 1. Sweep The House Clean
• 2. A Drinking Song
• 3. When You Are Old
• 4. A Tanka (Alone)
• 5. She's With Me
• 6. The Rose, The Lili, The Sun, The Dove
• 7. I Have Wondered
• 8. Embroidered Cloths
• 9. Valentine's Day (Far Away)
• 10. This Winter
• 11. Sweep The House Clean (Trio)
   

• Disc 2
• 1. Nobody Told Me
• 2. Mother Prelude
• 3. Mother Of My Children
• 4. Lullaby Prelude
• 5. Lullaby
• 6. Finally You Appear
• 7. That I Can Do
• 8. Want You, Miss You, Love You

Once I discovered Mahler and Bernstein at the Berklee College Library and left to study with master composer and pedagogue Myron Fink at SUNY Purchase, I realized that I would only truly learn orchestration via experience. Counterpoint and Harmony were one thing. Bach Fugues and Wagner’s Tristan Prelude, not to mention Stravinsky’s Bitonal writing in Le Sacre; these were coming straight from the score through Myron’s brain to my ears. My life was changed.

However, my first orchestrations were all over the place. Conservative string writing combined with clumsy and ill planned writing for winds, always in the midrange. Warmth but no grit and no chances taken at all. Pad like BS that could’ve been played on a bad Oberheim synth. I listened intensely to a ton of great writers and just had to dive in myself.

Therefore, whenever I could I would write songs for my wife Tammy, little gifts for anniversaries and what not, she’d forgive me for the money spent because these were, after all, ardent confessionals. In each one I would try things orchestration wise and would learn, learn, learn, L E A R N!!!!!!!!

The first one was “Want You, Miss You, Love You.” Good harmonies if I must say so myself but cloying and conservative. It gets better though. Then “Mother Of My Children” and “Lullaby” with their requisite preludes. Much better.

Then: finally the entire CD 1, my best work as an orchestrator perhaps other than my “You’ll Never Walk Alone” for Renée Fleming, a few things I have done for Butch Walker and some of the stuff I am writing for Sting now. The poems on CD 1 are hipper too and I am confident and bathing in the glory of Abbey Road (the other recordings were at Criteria in Miami and Masterfonics in Nashville, both great rooms but NOT Abbey Road Studio One).

“When You Are Old,” “Embroidered Cloths” and “Tanka” are the best I have in me. The Jimmy Webb liner note is so kind it is almost absurd. He makes me out to be some kind of genius. WRONG, but very nice anyway and he is so kind to write it. Remember his “Wichita Lineman”??? As a songwriter growing up that was one of the first where I thought, “Wow! That’s a writer.”

Be warned: Orchestral Songs is a departure, a love offering dedicated musically to the masters. Britten, Mahler, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, Corigliano, Beethoven, Bach, Rorem, Bernstein, Sondheim.........the list goes on and on. Giants that make it impossible to ever make the grade. That said, giants that make life literally an endless adventure, a search for clarity of vision. Something else indeed.

The music is all orchestral with some rhythm section and grooves but mostly side steeping harmony and devotional lyrics ala Yeats, William Carlos Williams and Heinrich Heine. Evening Train is my musical testimony. Orchestral Songs is my vacation in romantic dreamland.