Confrères Productions
Confrères Productions is the collaborative partnership among
composer David Conte, poet/librettist John Stirling
Walker and pianist/conductor Doug Reed.
Works to date include:
Blessing (hymn) 1996;
Elegy for Matthew (TTBB/chamber orchestra) 1999
(SATB/chamber orchestra) 2000
(Solo soprano/chamber orchestra) 2001
The Composer (SATB) 2002
What I See In Your Eyes (jazz
ballad) 2001
September Sun (SATB/string orchestra) 2002
The Passion of Rita St. James:
A Modern Musical
Morality Play (chamber opera) 2003
The
Famous (opera) 2006 (in progress)
The Nine Muses (SATB, piano four-hands, percussion) 2007
The Homecoming: In Memoriam Martin Luther King, Jr. (SATB) 2008
Stonewall (opera) 2013
All works are published by E. C. Shirmer Music Company, Boston.
Audio MP3 recordings of The Nine Muses and September Sun can be heard at davidconte.net
The Elegy for Matthew
was commissioned by the New York City Gay Men's Chorus as a memorial to Matthew
Shepard, and had its premiere at Carnegie Hall in
June of 1999, followed by a performance at the celebration of the thirtieth
anniversary of Stonewall in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in
David Conte is professor of composition at the San Francisco
Conservatory of Music. His close relationships with his teacher Nadia Boulanger
and with her first American student of renown, Aaron Copland, informed and
inform his striving as a creative artist committed to works that reflect the
qualities of craftsmanship and harmonic sensibility Boulanger taught and
Copland embodied.
John Stirling Walker was mentored
by Mr. Conte as an undergraduate at Cornell University, and shared with him a
profound gratitude for the influence upon them there of eminent musicologist
William W. Austin, whose contributions to the scholarship of twentieth century
music are well known, but whose humanity and the quality of whose penetration
of spiritual-cultural realities are not yet properly appreciated. Their works
together are published by E.C. Schirmer of
Doug Reed has a long resume of Broadway and other musical theater credits, and continued his service to the world of popular spiritual culture in the U.S. tour of Disney's The Lion King until July, 2017.