Current Projects

Ulla Kappel Orchestrations

Ulla Kappel is a Danish composer and keyboard artist. She was born in Germany in 1936 to Danish parents who sent her to live with my grandmother’s family in Maribo, Denmark at the start of World War II, and soon followed. She graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen and has had a prominent career as a harpsichordist and organist in Denmark, most notably recording works of Buxtehude, and continues to work as a church organist. She has self-published four printed volumes of her compositions, edited by Ole Breidahl, titled “Min Sangbog” (“My Songbook”) and “Lansbyorganisten spiller” (“The Village Organist Plays”) I, II, and III. Among these works are accompanied art songs, variations on hymns, simple songs in verse, and evocative keyboard miniatures.

In 2025, I received a $2,000 grant from Peabody Conservatory's LaunchPad to support my work in orchestrating and recording seven of Kappel's works with chamber orchestra. This work culminated in a recording session on November 17th, 2025 in Baltimore, Maryland, featuring soprano soloist Claire Galloway and recorded by Ed Tetreault. These video recordings are forthcoming and will be made available on this site and on YouTube.

Pieces featured in the recording session were:

Aftensang (setting and variations on the hymn Bliv hos os når dagen hælder by C.E.F. Weyse)

Novembersang ("November Song", original text and melody)

Forårsblomster ("Spring Flowers", on text by Christian Richardt)

Solens haller ("Sun's Halls", on text by Viola Petitt Neal)

Nattergal ("Nightengale", on text by Per Lange)

Sensommer ("Late Summer", instrumental)

Burleske i skiftende takt ("Burlesque in Changing Meters", instrumental)

Scores are available for perusal upon request. It is my hope that these recordings will spark interest in Kappel's work and lead to further performances of her pieces.

Johanna Beyer Transcriptions

Johanna Magdalena Beyer (b. Leipzig, Germany, 1888; d. New York City, 1944) was a prolific yet elusive composer in the school of American ultramodernism. She largely disappeared from the historical record until 1994, when Larry Polansky announced the establishment of the Frog Peak/Johanna Beyer Project, resulting in the publication of dozens of editions of Beyer’s music and stimulating performers and scholars to take up the challenge of studying and disseminating this almost-lost body of work.

Beyer seems to have been particularly fond of the clarinet, having written a number of works for the instrument, mostly dedicated to Boston Symphony clarinetist Rosario Mazzeo: two unaccompanied Suites, a Suite for clarinet and bassoon, a Sonata for clarinet and piano, a Suite for bass clarinet and piano, and several songs for soprano and clarinet.

Of these works, the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1936), the Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon (1933), and the Suite for Bass Clarinet and Piano (1936) lack definitive editions. My forthcoming 2026 editions of these three pieces will be available for purchase from the artist-run composers' collective Frog Peak Music, with editorial assistance by Beyer's biographer Amy C. Beal, and will complete the cycle of Frog Peak editions of Beyer's clarinet works, 90 years after they were composed.