RODNEY SHARMAN

Home 9 Composers 9 Rodney Sharman

Rodney Sharman (b. 1958) lives in Vancouver, BC. He has been Composer-in-Residence with the Victoria Symphony, the National Youth Orchestra of Canada and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. In addition to concert music, Rodney Sharman writes music for cabaret, opera and dance. He works regularly with choreographer James Kudelka, for whom he has written scores for Oregon Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet and Coleman Lemieux & Co. (Toronto). Sharman was awarded First Prize in the 1984 CBC Competition for Young Composers and the 1990 Kranichsteiner Prize in Music, Darmstadt, Germany. His chamber opera, Elsewhereless, a collaboration with Atom Egoyan, premiered in 1998 and has been staged 35 times internationally. His score for the music-dance-theatre piece, From The House Of Mirth, won the 2013 Dora Mavor Moore Award for outstanding sound design/composition (choreography by James Kudelka, text by Alex Poch Goldin after Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth). He was a 2014 Djerassi Artist-in-Residence, Woodside, California.

Love

by Rodney Sharman

SATB a cappella – CP 1518 – 3:25
from the trilogy: Love, Beauty, Desire
FIRE, AIRE, EARTH, WATER,
all the opposites that strove in Chaos,
powrefull LOVE unites;
And from their Discord drew this Harmonie, – poem by George Sandys (1577-1644)

LOOK & LISTEN

My Prime of Youth

by Rodney Sharman

TBB a cappella – CP 1505 – 3:45
My Prime of Youth is but a Frost of Cares – the poignant poem by Chidiock Tichborne (1586) This composition is designed for accomplished singers. You will be struck by Rodney’s creative use of dissonance and consonance, rendering ebb and flow to the text. Listen to this amazing recording.

LOOK & LISTEN

song about forgetfulness

by Rodney Sharman

SATB a cappella – CP 1513 – 3:35
This exquisite composition was premiered by a large youth choir. Listen to the premiere recording.
The music reflects childhood and remembrance though musical “games”: canons and double canons (rounds), invertible counterpoint (register exchange of identical music), and inversions (turning an ongoing melody upside down), and memory games: repetition, extension and variation. Bill Richardson’s text asks us to think about forgetting as well remembering. Let us recall that Freud said that what we forget is much more interesting than what we remember.

LOOK & LISTEN

Winter Solstice

by Rodney Sharman

SATB a cappella – CP 1514 – 2:40
“So dark, so cold, so lonely. The longest night, the briefest light.” Rodney’s composition captures the wonder and mystery.

LOOK & LISTEN