American Death Ballads

"American Death Ballads was composed especially for tenor Brian Thorsett and premiered by him at the San Francisco Conservatory, November 1, 2015, with pianist John Churchwell, and at the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Conference in Chicago, July 10, 2016, with pianist Warren Jones. The choice of texts was inspired partly by Copland's Old American Songs, which I deeply admire, but more by my dear friend and colleague the late Conrad Susa's Two Murder Ballads. The ingenuity of Susa's accompaniments for his ballads in imagining anew the original source material owes a great deal to Copland's accompaniment for his songs. Though the content of my songs are completely original and not based on preexisting melodies, I have tried to expand on this further, as the texts are much longer, and go through many different moods and characters. The four texts I chose include stories about murder, death and dying. Though two of the texts were written in England, they traveled to the colonies almost immediately. The subjects of the texts had spent time in America, and their stories were well known to Americans."  - David Conte