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Monsters and Songs

Music of David del Tredici

Eric Moe piano

Robert Frankenberry voice & piano

Catalog #: TROY1996
Release Date: May 9, 2025
Format: Digital
Chamber

Pianist Eric Moe’s MONSTERS AND SONGS explores the audacious, deeply personal, and virtuosic world of David Del Tredici’s music. From the torrential energy of Monsters to the searing emotional depths of Here, this Albany Records album highlights the composer’s rousing fusion of musical brilliance, mischievous wit, and risquè storytelling. A fearless celebration of queerness, vulnerability, and artistic defiance, this collection embodies Del Tredici’s ability to provoke, inspire, and move — ensuring his music remains as vital and inviting as the man himself.

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Track Listing

# Title Composer Performer
01 Here, from Gay Life David Del Tredici Rob Frankenberry, voice; Eric Moe, piano; Paul Monette, text author 7:14
02 Ballad in Yellow David Del Tredici Rob Frankenberry, voice; Eric Moe, piano; Federico Garcia Lorca, text author 5:29
03 Now You Know, from My Favorite Penis Poems David Del Tredici Rob Frankenberry, voice; Eric Moe, piano; Antler, text author 6:58
04 Hot to Trot, from My Favorite Penis Poems David Del Tredici Rob Frankenberry, voice; Eric Moe, piano; Alfred Corn, text author 5:31
05 Quietness, from Three Baritone Songs David Del Tredici Rob Frankenberry, voice; Eric Moe, piano; Rumi, text author 7:49
06 Monsters I: Matrimony David Del Tredici Eric Moe, piano 19:40
07 Monsters II: Scylla and Charybdis David Del Tredici Rob Frankenberry, voice & piano; David Del Tredici, lyricist 25:43

Recorded June 10, 2019 at VPAC, Western Connecticut State University in Danbury CT
Recording session producer Judith Sherman
Recording session engineer Jeanne Velonis

Edited, Mixed & Mastered by Judith Sherman

Cover image by Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver

Executive Producer Bob Lord
Artistic Directors, Albany Records Peter Kermani, Susan Bush

VP of A&R Brandon MacNeil
A&R Jeff Leroy

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Publicity Aidan Curran
Digital Marketing Manager Brett Iannucci

Artist Information

Eric Moe

Composer, Pianist

Eric Moe, composer of what the New York Times has called “music of winning exuberance,” and recently described by his physician as a “pleasant male in no acute distress,” has enjoyed extensive support for his work from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, the Barlow Endowment, Meet-the-Composer USA, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, Bellagio, the Camargo Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, UCross, the Aaron Copland House, Ragdale, Hambidge, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Avaloch Farms, and the American Dance Festival, among others. 

Learn More

Robert Frankenberry

Voice & Piano

Robert Frankenberry enjoys a multi-faceted relationship with music as a singer, pianist, conductor, orchestrator, producer, director, and composer. He has conducted operas in a Hookah lounge (Carmen, reconfigured for ensemble cast and using his own folk-ensemble orchestration); on and around a cemetery lake (Ricky Ian Gordon’s Orpheus and Euridice); and on and in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (Daron Hagen’s Shining Brow). As music director for Pittsburgh Festival Opera, he was integral to more than 35 summer festival productions between 2012 and 2021, conducting more than a dozen operatic premieres and several feature-length film projects during that decade. In 2019, he was granted the honor of adapting, arranging, and orchestrating two of Mr. Rogers’ one-act operas for live performance, leading the premiere performances from the keyboard.

On stage, he has performed a wide range of roles including Mozart (Amadeus), John Adams (1776), Bacchus (Ariadne auf Naxos), and the title roles in Don Carlo, The Tales of Hoffmann, Faust, and Willy Wonka. On film, he sang starring roles in all three of Daron Hagen’s Bardo Trilogy operafilms for which he also provided musical direction (Orson Rehearsed; 9/10: Love Before the Fall: and I Hear America Singing), also serving as executive producer for the third film. In 2021, he played the role of Giuseppe Verdi (as well as providing all the piano tracking) in Resonance Works’ feature-length vegetable-puppet film Verdi by Vegetables, which was awarded Opera America’s first-ever Digital Excellence Award.

At the piano, he has premiered many solo and chamber works by living composers, including Eric Moe, Gilda Lyons, Roger Zahab, David Del Tredici, Daron Hagen, Alberto Demestres, David Stock, Barbara White, Juhi Bansal, and himself. He currently performs as a member of entelechron with cellist David Russell and violinist Roger Zahab and Chrysalis Duo with flutist Lindsay Goodman. He is currently a member of the Voice Faculty at Point Park University, Associate Producer for Resonance Works, and Residency Faculty of the M.F.A. in Music Composition program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He can be heard singing and playing on the Naxos, Albany, New World Records, Roven Records, New Dynamic Records, Neuma, PARMA, and Innova labels, as well as various streaming platforms.

Notes

David Del Tredici contained multitudes — a brilliant virtuoso pianist transformed into a composer whose musical language combines torrential streams of orchestral brilliance propelling Brahms and Strauss against intricate atonal breakwaters, finely calibrated contrapuntal and polyrhythmic structures that demonstrate a formidable compositional technique and dazzling emotional mimesis. After earlier fixations on the work of James Joyce, and more substantially — and notoriously — on Lewis Carroll’s Alice, he turned to vocal music of many kinds — songs, choral works, chamber, and orchestral works — which explore a wild range of poetry and experiences with his trademark qualities of strength, vulnerability, and often outrageous humor. He considered this his Secret Music; it exemplifies his indomitable spirit in confronting and remembering his life as a Gay man and celebrating the LGBTQ community.

David has written eloquently about his work, and quotations are excerpted from notes found on his website, daviddeltredici.com

– Roger Zahab

Del Tredici wrote that Gay Life “was initially envisioned as a cycle of eight songs, each touching on the ‘gay experience’ from a different angle. The music came to me in a burst — a burst, really, of gay pride. It began in August 1996 as a result of my experience at The Body Electric School’s weeklong retreat called ‘The Dear Love of Comrades.’ As well, I encountered the poetry serendipitously. The first two songs are settings of poetry created spontaneously by two comrades during the excitement and joy of the retreat.”

But his setting of “Here,” from Paul Monette’s collection Love Alone – Eighteen Elegies for Rog, is deeply touched by Del Tredici’s own loss “…as open fifths provide a stark accompaniment to a man’s shell-shocked soliloquy, intoned on a single pitch: He lies beside his lover’s grave, remembering the horror of the final weeks. Emptiness is the hallmark of this quiet piece, but ultimately anger, sorrow and despair well up and are released in a final wail. “Here” is written in memory of my lover, Paul Arcomano, who died of AIDS in 1993, at 34. Six-foot-three, devastatingly handsome, 20 years my junior, we were together for seven years. This song was written in one day, and I cried the whole time — the first, and only, time this has happened.”

Ballad in Yellow (1997) is a setting of the poem by Federico Garcia Lorca in Jerome Rothenberg’s translation. Originally set for baritone and premiered by William Sharp with the composer at the piano, Del Tredici later transcribed it for piano solo for Robert Helps, a lifelong friend (and Moe’s piano teacher).

Now You Know & Hot to Trot are from My Favorite Penis Poems, a cycle dated 1998/2002 and finally premiered on December 4, 2008 by Robert Frankenberry, tenor and Melissa Fogarty, soprano, with the composer at the piano at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, Symphony Space, NYC. In October 2002 Del Tredici wrote:

“I don’t think I’m alone, when I say that sex has long been a part of my life. Coming to sexuality as late as I did (age 22), I can clearly remember the pain of my non-sexual existence. So it is, that at the relatively late age of 65, I choose in this song cycle to celebrate sex — raw, rough, and risquè. These are not songs of love, longing, or languorous lassitude. Such emotions are already well documented in the art-song literature. My Favorite Penis Poems sings of the unspeakable, or at least the heretofore unsung. Central to all the poems is, of course, the rise and fall of His Majesty, the Penis… Antler’s Now You Know is a whimsical leap into a prenatal, what-if world, where baby boners go “from limp to hard a thousand times” and penises, as well as vaginas, can give birth to “the little baby-to-be-that-is-you… Appropriately enough, I’ve subtitled [Hot To Trot] the Alfred Corn setting, Fantasy on themes of Strauss (steamy) opera, Der Rosenkavalier….”

Prick up your ears, now, as the music swells! Hopefully, this is not poppycock and will not be too hard — on your virgin sensibilities.”

Quietness — from Three Baritone Songs (1999) “is a tiny Rumi poem, exhorting the reader to follow a meditative path through surrender to ecstasy. Each line, Haiku-like, reveals an insight. Some are paradoxical, others profound.”

Monsters (2017) was written for and dedicated to pianist/composer Eric Moe and pianist/actor-singer Robert Frankenberry, who gave the first performance on March 27, 2019 at Casa Italiana, Columbia University, New York City.

Part I: ”Matrimony” – Dedicated to Eric Moe

Prelude and Double Fugue on Themes from two famous wedding marches

The composer writes:

“What might the appeal of matrimony be to a long-entrenched militant gay man like myself? I think the hook is its forbiddenness. Centuries of religious and civil prohibition have made matrimonial access for many an impossible dream. ”The sex-drenched fingers of gay men and women shall never touch the pristine glory that is matrimony:” so spoke the temple elders. Then Gay Liberation arrived, and the walls came tumbling down, leaving that behemoth, or monster, matrimony — vulnerable. And so with my composer’s pen I scratch life into its freshly-exhumed, still breathing body, wondering if its essence, unshackled, would heal me, or at least bring me a modicum of happiness.

POINTS OF INTEREST ALONG THE WAY:

Expressive and flowing, the Prelude has little to do with the rest of the work. There are, however, veiled references to Wagner’s Bridal Chorus and a later fortissimo drubbing of the same tune. Interlude is all scales – and serves as an introduction to the Double Fugue. This is an elaborately developed section which pits the Wagner Bridal Chorus against — on top of — around — the Mendelssohn Wedding March. In Quodlibet each theme is combined in increasingly bizarre and surprising harmonic ways. A Cadenza preceding the finale is tranquil, while still using highly filigreed material. A pianissimo quote from Robert Schumann opens the Finale. From this point to the finish, the music grows steadily more frantic, suggesting on the one hand a wildly successful wedding night, or, on the other, strife and discord.”

Part II:”Scylla and Charybdis” – Dedicated to Rob Frankenberry

A Melodrama for Piano/Narrator

The composer writes: “Scylla and Charybdis, in Greek mythology, were two immortal and irresistible monsters who beset the narrow waters traversed by the hero Odysseus in his wanderings (described in Homer’s Odyssey, Book XII). They were later localized in the Strait of Messina.”

When I came across the above description — I no longer remember the source — I was inspired to make the story into a melodrama and write my own version of Homer’s tale. Melodramas are usually poetry spoken against a musical background. Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss, and Poulenc (“Babar”) have all written them.

But I added a new twist: the pianist would play the music and speak the words simultaneously — a job for two rolled into one! (I thank my friend, composer Frederic Rzewski, for getting there first.)

THE PIECE BEGINS:

A harsh Fugue attends the dramatic birth of Scylla. Charybdis, a whirlpool, arrives more subtly later. Two battles are fought pitting Odysseus and his men against the two monsters. Much happens. There is a visit by the Greek soldiers to Messina’s “Spanish Quarter” where a festival is in full swing — a “Battle-Bagatelle,” is heard, as well as the Canonico Grande. Scylla creates an uproar with her visit to the notorious flesh-pots of Messina. In the final battle, the two sides remain evenly matched until Scylla falters. Pitching forward, she leaves the battlefield — and victory — behind. Suddenly, a song bursts forth from the pianist’s throat — a song of farewell to Scylla and to Charybdis, sung as the two disappear and are transported into the firmament, their spirits taking a place among the stars.”

I feel that Del Tredici took great care — almost from inception — to invest his work with secret Janus-like properties. There is often some sort of correspondence between the history of the genre, the instruments, and the performers or occasion he is writing for. Sometimes the connections are deeply affecting, as for instance in the setting of Paul Monette’s poem “Here.” And sometimes there is an aspect of manic glee hidden underneath a mountain of perversity — for instance… Monsters!

Rob and Eric, clearly he had an excellent grasp of your skills and daring to craft such an extravagantly demanding work for you. When did you each first meet David?

Eric: I first met David in the summer of 1991 at MacDowell in Peterborough NH, where I heard him perform the bravura solo piano part in Haddock’s Eyes and he heard me preview my Grand Étude Brillante. He made an extraordinary comment afterwards — encouraging about my music but challenging my aloofness — that struck home and gave me a personal life goal I hadn’t even considered. In subsequent years I learned a great deal from this most generous of composers — not just how to play his music, but how to fearlessly write music you believe in, how to be a good musical citizen, how to live, and more.

Rob: I think it was really a tripartite experience. The first time I met David was via a re-broadcast in the mid-1980s of the premiere of Final Alice, which was so simultaneously electrifying and scandalous (the bullhorn! a BANJO?!) to my hungry but conservative teenage ear that I listened to it three separate times due to the fact that I could get three radio stations from where I lived about a mile from lake Erie — WQLN (Erie), WCLV (Cleveland), and WNED (Buffalo). It would be hard to overstate the impact this piece of such unashamed compositional self-exposure had on me. The second time I met David was in 2003 between rehearsals I was observing of Haddock’s Eyes and Dracula in Pittsburgh for Music on the Edge. Eric Moe invited me to join the performers for dinner, and I jumped at the chance. David was of course every bit as dynamic and outrageous a figure in person as he was in his music. As I recall, the conversation around the table was sparkling and urbane, but I think I managed not to make a fool of myself, starstruck as I was. The third time I met David was in 2007, when my friend Dennis Tobenski generously invited me to join him in singing the premiere of the piano version of Gay Life with David at the keys. We had a marvelous time and came out of it as real friends.

Rob, I know that as an actor and singer you are profoundly invested with storytelling and language in these vocal works, which range from deep affection to tauntingly transgressive modes. In contrast to so much standard repertoire these unapologetic dramas might tend to raise quite a range of reaction from your listeners — “hitting home” for some while creating a certain discomfort for others. Since David was so proudly “out” in his work, what was it like to premiere these songs with the composer?

Rob: Well, the thing I remember most is the realization that the extremity of the songs — range, length, emotional intensity, queerness/kinkiness of text — calls for a stance that is primarily about being, though there is a heck of a lot of doing to figure out on the way to that transcendence. These songs are HARD! And, despite all of the fast notes or lush harmonies, very naked for both singer and pianist. But the focus necessary to work through the extreme demands paradoxically makes it safe to enter into a queer/transgressive performance space and then let that performativity transform into just being present.

And, in conclusion –

Roger: I met David for the “first time” twice:

Once in public when, having just heard the Cleveland Orchestra’s turn at Final Alice in Severance Hall around 1979, I was wandering in a daze in the lobby and saw him walking down the grand staircase. I was undone by the brilliance and daring of his music — quite unlike anything heard in those years — and then drawn by his charisma and friendliness as I approached. After gushing about how amazing it was I asked for his autograph. He cheerfully obliged and may even have said “see you again.”

The second time was in private, a year or two later when during an evening in Greenwich Village with Tison Street (David’s protégé and my mentor). Tison suggested we stop at David’s place. David welcomed us unexpected visitors very warmly and then they just seemed to pick up or continue with the conversation they’d been having for decades, and I was included as if they had just been waiting for me to join them.

David had this distinctive quality of always being present — through all his stages of life — of pulling you into his stream without much concern for the time and distance since the last meeting, only that you were here now, and that the adventure could continue.

*Album cover provided for Editorial use only. ©Albany Records. The Albany Imprint is a registered trademark of PARMA Recordings LLC. The views and opinions expressed in this media are those of the artist and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views and opinions held by PARMA Recordings LLC and its label imprints, subsidiaries, and affiliates.