The Music of James Woodman
An Appreciation by Carson Cooman

Born in Portland, Maine in 1957, educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton University, and New England Conservatory, and a resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts since 1979, Woodman is a lifelong New Englander. He has said that his identity as an American composer is important to him, and that he intends his music to speak with an American voice. The clean lines and clear textures of his style thus owe as much to New England as they do Renaissance and Baroque Europe.

Yankee practicality informs not only Woodman’s compositional style, but also his choice of genres. Although he has written numerous secular and concert works, his output is devoted entirely to combinations and forces that can be found in the church: the organ and the voice (solo and choral). In addition to concert works, practical music for the church—hymns, canticles, responses, anthems—can be found in abundance: commissions from numerous religious organizations or written in response to his years as Composer-in-Residence at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Paul in Boston.

To do what he does in piece after piece—writing music that is so fresh and yet so direct—is both difficult and impressive. There are treasures in his catalogue that display a wide range of expressive modes: the ecstatic The Midwife’s Tale (1996)—a work for chorus and string quintet from the Arundel manuscript, the four useful chamber sonatas for solo instrument (English horn, horn, trumpet, and cello) with organ, the deliciously amusing Four Mirthless Songs for soprano and organ, the extended mythological cantata Narcissus. The list is long with works that are as much a pleasure to play and sing as they are to hear.

[from the notes to the CD Organ Music by James Woodman, Erik Simmons, organist, Soundspells Productions CD139]