Paul Crabtree

"...a composer of impressive power who responds well to his sources and who can write utterly compelling music that relates beautifully to our time."
Palm Beach Post.

Paul Crabtree's innovative music explores the worlds of popular culture and highbrow art to find what is eternal in the everyday.

Follow this link to a San Francisco Chronicle article. June 1, 2001

Before graduating from the Music Faculty at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Musikhochschule in Cologne, Germany, Paul Crabtree was the keyboard player in a catastrophically unsuccessful garage band called Goats' Opera. He grew up with an equal interest in rock culture and classical music, but was disappointed that his academic training never acknowledged the world of rock and pop, and transplanted to California in his early 20s.

Exposure to the musically permissive culture in the Bay Area led him to integrate the various strands of his personal history, to embrace and intermingle ideas as diverse as Latin poetry and 1960s girl groups;

Glenn Miller is Missing sets Emma Lazarus' poetry (about the ecstasies of music) as a jitterbug.
Five Romantic Miniatures (from The Simpsons) bring cartoon sentiments into the concert hall.
Annunciata combines the wiltingly love-lorn Victorian poetry of Emmeline Stuart-Wortley with Gabriel's message to the Virgin.

Crabtree also uses objets trouves both alone and alongside standard texts;

Three Letters to My Father use the texts of enigmatic hand-written notes which he found among family papers.
Pax et Bonum is a response to the sudden death of a young tenor friend, whose last letter is quoted ironically alongside a Shakespeare sonnet on immortality.
When Are We Leaving? intermingles a similar sonnet with some of Iris Murdoch's final ramblings as she was falling victim to Alzheimer's disease.

His most ambitious work is The Museum Guard, a one-hour chamber opera for performance in art museums, based on the novel by Howard Norman.

^ Return to Top

Choral Music
Mixed Voices:

Sacred

Annunciata (Stuart-Wortley/Ave Maria) Yelton Rhodes Music

I am the Rose of Sharon Yelton Rhodes Music

Spirit Songs -

Ezekiel Saw the Wheel
Berliner Chormusik Verlag
My Lord, What a Morning
Berliner Chormusik Verlag
I Want to be Ready
Berliner Chormusik Verlag
Fix Me, Jesus
Berliner Chormusik Verlag
Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?
Berliner Chormusik Verlag
Click here for a 2006 radio performance by Chicago a cappella.

Sunset on Calvary (Middle English) Yelton Rhodes Music

Three Sacred Songs about Religion, Sex and Politics

1. Mandorla Mea (Rives)
2. When David Heard (2 Samuel/Law)
3. Burn Down the Mission (Teilhard de Chardin)

Tenebrae -

Tenebrae Responsories on Songs by Bob Dylan (trad.) Berliner Chormusik Verlag
Interview on Texas Public Radio
Antiphons for the Tenebrae Service (trad.)
Miserere (Psalm 51)

Secular
An American Persephone (Ovid, Hughes, Millay, Corrie)

Five Bird Songs (Folk Song Arrangements) Yelton Rhodes Music

1. The Lark in the Morning
2. Fly Up, My Cock
3. Twa Corbies
4. She's Like the Swallow
5. The Lark in the Clear Air

Five Romantic Miniatures (from The Simpsons)

1. Abe - You remind me of a poem
2. Lisa - I like Langdon Alger
3. Homer - Marge, you make the best...
4. Marge - I love you so much
5. Homer - Marge, I need you

Glenn Miller is Missing (Lazarus) Yelton Rhodes Music
Mit Lust Tät Ich Ausreiten (traditional) Yelton Rhodes Music
Night (Percival) Yelton Rhodes Music
Per Gladium Crux - Stanford Te Deum (Ambrose)
ReCuperario (sonnet #27)
Songs at Year's End (Hughes) Berliner Chormusik Verlag

There Came a Day
The Seven Sorrows
Snow and Snow
The Warm and the Cold

Sorrows End (sonnet #30)
Three Rose Madrigals Yelton Rhodes Music

1. O How Much More (sonnet #54)
2. The Forward Violet (sonnet #99)
3. O Never Say (sonnet #109)

Three Victorian Love Lyrics Yelton Rhodes Music

1. Renouncement (Meynell)
2. First and Last Kiss (Bourke Marston)
3. Remember (Rossetti)

War Music Yelton Rhodes Music

1. Lovely on the Water
2. When I Was On Horseback

When Are We Leaving? (sonnet #60/Murdoch) Frank E. Warren Music

Women's Voices:
Spinning Dance
Green Summer (Three Monochromes)

1. Summer Dawn (Morris)
2. A June Day (Todhunter)
3. Summer (Conder)

Men's Voices:
Three Letters to My Father
Pax et Bonum (sonnet #81)

Orchestral Music:
Vegas - Nightscape on Themes of Frank Sinatra (13mins.)
3333-4321-Timp+1-Str.

Vocal Music:

Three Sonnets on Old American Hymn Tunes
(Male Voice and Pipe Organ)

1. Alas, 'Tis True/Down at the Cross
2. Accuse Me Thus/Need
3. That You Were Once Unkind/Orwigsburg
(#1 is in the volume American Art Song for the Sacred Service, published by Classical Vocal Reprints )

ON THE DRAWING BOARD
Dive: a water music
(Ovid/Hughes/Kline, Kingsley, Feeney, Worniecki)
Cantata for soprano, chorus, oboe, cello, harp, harpsichord, portative organ and percussion.

The Museum Guard (Norman)
Chamber Opera