The work of Roger Stubblefield spans orchestral and chamber music, but it is in his art songs that his voice emerges most clearly. This anthology highlights the core of his outputmusic for voice and piano written in close collaboration and shaped by the emotional and textual possibilities of poetry. These songs are not grand in scale, but they are exacting in detail: songs shaped by text, tailored for specific voices, and bound by an expressive sincerity that resists the decorative or detached. Each cycle offers not simply songs, but portraits of memory, longing, and imaginative insight.

Stubblefields ongoing partnership with pianist-poet Beth Levin generated the song cycles
collected here, including Three Wayward Songs, Personas, and #Dreamer.com. In “Diary of a Pianists Day,” he lets rock motifs and digital overlays mingle with Schubertian textures and coffee steam. These songs, born of real relationships, move fluidly across genre and time, not to show off but to tell the truth in whatever language that truth demands.

Contents:

• Three Wayward Songs for Soprano and Piano, Opus 13 (2014)
  • I. August
  • II. Insistence
  • III. To Imagine Old Age
• Personas for Mezzo-Soprano and Piano, Opus 17 (2015, rev. 2017)
  • I. The Conjurer
  • II. The Voyeur
  • III. The Caregiver
• Diary of a Pianist’s Day for Amplified Soprano, Piano, and Digital Recording Device, Opus 19 (In the style of Andrew McKenna Lee) (2016)
• #Dreamer.com for Mezzo-Soprano and Piano, Op. 21 (2018)