American composer Carson Cooman has written hundreds of works and is also quite active as an organist and editor. A good deal of his music has been recorded, some of it by Naxos; the present album, on the New York-based Artek imprint, is distributed by that label. It's a little surprising to read in the composer's introductory note that the pieces included "were specifically chosen to create an interrelated program," for they're quite diverse. Cooman identifies the sources of his style as "the gestures and structural ...
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American composer Carson Cooman has written hundreds of works and is also quite active as an organist and editor. A good deal of his music has been recorded, some of it by Naxos; the present album, on the New York-based Artek imprint, is distributed by that label. It's a little surprising to read in the composer's introductory note that the pieces included "were specifically chosen to create an interrelated program," for they're quite diverse. Cooman identifies the sources of his style as "the gestures and structural templates of Medieval and Renaissance sacred and secular music and my intertwined interest in American neo-romanticism and athletic modernism." One might add some of the sources of the last two as major influences, notably Copland, the impressionists, and perhaps Bartók, whose treatment of the solo instrument seems to have shaped the three-movement Enchanted Tracings (Piano Concerto No. 2). The early music forms tend to show up in Cooman's writing for brass, which accounts for three of the...
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