Photo by Maria Franco.
"...When the writing was more solidly chordal — as in Gregory Hall’s April (2005) — the singing was decidedly better...."
—Review by Allan Kozinn of The New York Times of April, a choral work performed by the New York Virtuoso Singers at the 2008 American Composers' Alliance Festival of New American Music.
******************
..."Gregory Hall’s Waking...the Theodore Roethke poem of just six stanzas is milked for all it is worth. It does show a writer for voice who knows how to put the right note(s) to every word, something not always evident amongst other composers of song..."
—Review by Barry Cohen of The New Music Connoisseur of The Waking, performed at the 2008 American Composers' Alliance Festival of New American Music.
******************"...Using Ravel and Couperin as a model, Mr. Hall's Le Tombeau de Honegger is essentially a neoclassic composition, in which only the pitch style differs from earlier composers, not the generally enjoyable rhythms and tempi. The third movement, Hornpipe, is analogous to Couperin's Rigadoun made memorable in Ravel's by now classic composition. Its delicious rhythm is irresistible..."
—Review from The New Music Connoisseur of Le Tombeau de Honegger, performed by Blair McMillen at the 2004 American Composers' Alliance Festival of New American Music.
******************
"...the best of these was Greg Hall's solo piano piece For Graham Fitkin, an earnestly pleasing study in textures that expertly navigates harmonies ranging from Roy Harris-style polytonality to jazzy upper tertian aggregates..."
—Review by David Cleary from The New Music Connoisseur of For Graham Fitkin, performed by the composer at the 2001 Ought-One NonPop festival.
These days I'm interested in the possibilities of a musical language involving chords made up from the stacking of thirds in alternating major/minor or minor/major steps (or other combinations). Another aspect of music which has become increasingly important to me since '96 is the application of traditional voice leading concepts to my "non-traditional" harmony and melody. I appreciate composer Graham Fitkin's implied philosophy that "pop harmonies, rhythms, etc. can be applied to strict-as-Bach development techniques." After all, real progress in any genre of music comes from mixing with other genres -- but in a disciplined way.
This contrapuntal work instinctively simplifies the texture of my music in order to highlight melodic and contrapuntal combinations which might not be as apparent in a more complex texture. The resultant counterpoint follows many older (pre-20th century) rules, but comes out consistently "dissonant". I now refer to this modified counterpoint as "21st-Century Baroque" writing.
Listen to a radio interview from 2000 at Kalvos and Damian's Music Bazaar.