Fisherman Songs (world premiere)
by Mark Gustavson
featuring
Christopher Herbert, baritone
Timothy Long, pianist
with an introduction by
Amy Folk, Southold Town historian
and
a reading of W. B. Yeats's poem The Fisherman by
Franklin Hill Perrell, critic
at
Poquatuck Hall
1160 Village Lane, Orient, NY 11957
Sunday, June 8th, 2025, 5:00pm
by Mark Gustavson
featuring
Christopher Herbert, baritone
Timothy Long, pianist
with an introduction by
Amy Folk, Southold Town historian
and
a reading of W. B. Yeats's poem The Fisherman by
Franklin Hill Perrell, critic
at
Poquatuck Hall
1160 Village Lane, Orient, NY 11957
Sunday, June 8th, 2025, 5:00pm
Program
Fisherman Songs (2011) for baritone and piano
by Mark Gustavson
As Above, So Below (Henry David Thoreau)
Nighttime (Ken Abrames)
The Fisherman's Prayer (Anon.)
The Baite (John Donne)
from Halieutica (Oppian of Corycus)
The Fishing Rod (Shen Yüeh)
The Fisherman (W. B. Yeats)
Presentation
On the East End of Long Island, prominent maritime traditions include a rich history of whaling, shipbuilding in Greenport, a strong fishing culture centered around Peconic Bay, the use of indigenous watercraft like canoes, and the preservation of this heritage through the East End Seaport Museum, which highlights the region's maritime past with exhibits and events centered around the historic Greenport waterfront. The program presents a song cycle comprised of seven songs, written by the American composer Mark Gustavson. This cycle is inspired by the wonderful poem The Fisherman by W. B. Yates that uses the Irish fly fisherman as a symbol of integrity and as Yeats ideal audience.
Fisherman Songs is a song cycle of seven eclectic songs for baritone and piano. The work was completed in 2012. Nighttime is the central song and the longest. Originally, I was only going to compose Nighttime as a single song. The text is by Ken Abrames from his book “The Perfect Fish.” This song is about fly fishing for striped bass at night, Mr. Abrames favorite time for fishing as well as mine. However, one evening while driving to Smith Point beach to go fly fishing in the surf, I was listening to a couple of unfamiliar songs on the radio. I parked the car in the sandy lot by the ocean and continued to listen. The music ended and the announcer said, “You have been listening to “Hermit Songs” by Samuel Barber. “—Huh.—", I thought to myself. In a flash, Barber’s title turned into Fisherman Songs. Soon after I began to collect texts centering on different ways to fish. I settled on six more songs using texts by John Dunne (The Baite), W.B. Yeats (The Fisherman), Henry David Thoreau (text from Walden), Shen Yuëh (The Fishing Rod), Opian of Corycus (Halieutica), and an anonymous author (Fisherman’s Prayer).
When the song cycle was completed, I felt I had changed. During this time, I let go of certain long held views about music and composing in exchange for new ones. During this time, too, my Dad had passed while I was a fairly new father. I definitely matured and I hope my music did as well
Mark Gustavson. composer
The American composer Mark Gustavson was born in Brooklyn, NY and grew up in the Chicago
suburbs. He began studying clarinet at eight and composing when he was sixteen. In high school
he studied clarinet at the Music Institute of Chicago. He later went on to study clarinet and
composition at Northern Illinois University, University of Illinois, Columbia University, and
Conservatory of Amsterdam.
Recently Gustavson has been composing electroacoustic works with solo performers or video.
His most recent work, Deep Song, for viola and 2-channel fixed audio was commissioned by the
violist Paul Cortese who will be perform and record the work in Barcelona this summer. And
Which is Which for clarinet and 2-channel fixed audio will be premiered at the New York City
Electroacoustic Music Festival later in June.
Mark has received numerous honors, including recognition from ASCAP, BMI, the American Academy
of Arts & Letters, League-ISCM, New Music Consort, a finalist in the Alea III International
Composition Prize and the Gaudeamus Foundation. In addition, Mr. Gustavson has been awarded the
Joseph H. Bearns Prize in Music and a Fulbright Fellowship. He has received commissions from, among
others, Paul Cortese, Stony Brook University, the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, Parnassus, Fromm
Foundation, Koussevitzky Music Foundation and the New York Youth Symphony and his album
"Dissolving Images" on Albany Records was made possible by the generous support of the Fromm
Foundation, the Alice M. Ditson Fund and Aaron Copland Recording Fund.
Gustavson's works have been performed throughout North America and Europe and represented at
prestigious festivals such as the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Sonic Boom,
Tanglewood, Banff, Fromm, Gaudeamus, and others. His music is available on Albany Records and is
published by C. F. Peters Corp.
Christopher Dylan Herbert, baritone
Christopher Dylan Herbert is passionate about the transformational properties of music. As a singer, he aims to find truth and relationships in music. As an educator, he focuses on his students’ development and connections to music. As a person, he seeks to be a positive and peaceful, and to promote the value of music to society.
Herbert was born in New York to a family with many connections to the theatre. He began his musical journey at age nine when he started playing viola in school. His public music education, supplemented with extracurricular study, led to his participation in youth symphonies, string quartets, and musicals. After his voice changed, he began to study singing in addition to viola. He attended Yale University as an undergraduate, and it was there that he gained a love for ensemble singing and opera. During his twenties, he received a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and he pursued a number of careers in consulting, public relations, and non-profit management. Throughout these various employments, Herbert managed to simultaneously pursue a career in classical vocal music, which included apprenticeships and fellowships at prestigious young artist training programs, among them Aspen Music Festival, Music Academy of the West, Central City Opera, and Tanglewood.
In 2010, Herbert joined the quartet New York Polyphony, with whom he performed hundreds of concerts throughout the world until 2020. Two of the albums recorded with this group received Grammy® nominations in the Small Ensemble/Chamber Music category, and an additional record was a finalist for a Gramophone Award. His tenure in New York Polyphony deepened his appreciation for European music written before 1600, and it led him to pursue a doctorate in music at The Juilliard School. His doctoral studies focused on the music of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, about which he wrote his dissertation and several articles. His 2020 album, Voices in the Wilderness, highlighted the contributions of eighteenth-century female composers and received critical acclaim, most notably from NPR’s Morning Edition. Herbert is also part of a Getty Foundation-funded research team based at Winterthur focusing on the 1784 Ludwig Denig Manuscript.
Herbert is Vocal Area Coordinator and an associate professor at William Paterson University, a public institution in New Jersey. Herbert considers his work with his students to be the most significant experience of his life. He is proud to have reinvented the voice program at William Paterson, and to have worked closely with his colleagues to raise the profile and diversity of the vocal faculty. Starting in 2017, he introduced a regular practice of presenting staged works in his department, and he tripled student participation in vocal studies during a time of decreasing enrollments in higher education.
Herbert’s greatest musical influences include J.S. Bach, Mozart, Leontyne Price, Jacob Collier, Gabriel Kahane, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. He is a board member of The Plimpton Foundation. In his free time, he enjoys dancing and gardening. He lives in New York with his husband, conductor and pianist Timothy Long, and their dog Pumpkin.
Timothy Long, pianist
Timothy Long is a distinguished conductor, pianist, and composer who is Artistic and Music Director of Opera at Eastman School of Music and an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. He is an enrolled citizen of both the Muscogee Nation and the Thlopthlocco Tribal Town and is matrilineally Choctaw.
At the age of 16, Tim made his piano concerto debut with the Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra, and has since performed as a soloist with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Lawton (OK) Philharmonic, the Beethoven Society Orchestra of Washington DC, the Sociedad Filarmonica de Conciertos of Mexico City, the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute Orchestra, the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra, and the Eastman Philharmonia.
His work on Thomas Adès’s operatic tour-de-force Powder Her Face at the Aspen Music Festival led to his appointment as assistant conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and he was subsequently named an associate conductor at the New York City Opera.
After early years playing as a violinist in the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Tim’s passion for symphonic conducting has resulted in engagements with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the Prince George Symphony, the Regina Symphony, the Eastman Philharmonia, the Prague Summer Nights Orchestra, the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, and the Trondheim Sinfonietta. His operatic conducting engagements have included such companies as Boston Lyric Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Opera Colorado, Utah Opera, Tulsa Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Anchorage Opera, Pacific Opera Victoria, City Opera Vancouver, The Juilliard School, Yale Opera, the New York City Opera, and off-Broadway with The New Group.
As a pianist and harpsichordist, Tim has performed throughout the world at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, the Kennedy Center, National Sawdust, the Kimmel Center, Jordan Hall, Wigmore Hall in London, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Herkules Hall in Munich, Dvořák Hall in Prague, La Halle aux Grains in Toulouse, the Oregon Bach Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Caramoor Festival, and the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago, among many others.
At City Opera Vancouver, Tim conducted the 2017 World Premiere of Missing, a groundbreaking new work by Marie Clements and Brian Current about the 5,000 missing Indigenous women in Canada. In 2019, he conducted a Canadian tour of Missing with Pacific Opera Victoria, the Regina Symphony Orchestra, and the Prince George Symphony Orchestra. He conducted the American Premiere at Anchorage Opera in 2023. This extraordinary composition is the first opera to be sung in both the Gitxsan and English languages.
Recent highlights include Handel’s Semele for Wolf Trap Opera, and the In Harmony: Side by Side series with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center. This season includes Silent Light by Paola Prestini and Royce Vavrek, and H&G by Allen Shawn, Anna Maria Hong and Jean Randich, for Eastman Opera Theatre. After joining the Metropolitan Opera last season as an assistant conductor, he will return this season for Puccini’s La Bohème, the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program’s Orchestra Workshop, and Antony and Cleopatra by John Adams.
2024 marked the world premiere of Tim’s project, The North American Indigenous Songbook. As president of The Plimpton Foundation, Tim created this project to establish a repertoire where none existed before. Each year, the foundation is commissioning eight Native American, First Nations, and Métis composers to write songs that are available for all to sing. National Sawdust has partnered with The Plimpton Foundation to present these premieres. The first round included the esteemed composers R. Carlos Nakai, Dawn Avery, Raven Chacon, Sage Bond, Charles Shadle, Timothy Archambault, Connor Chee, and Martha Redbone.
Tim’s recordings include Alburnum, with internationally renowned baritone Brian Mulligan (Bright Shiny Things, 2022), Beauty Intolerable: Songs of Sheila Silver (Albany Records, 2021), the American Classics recording of Dominick Argento song cycles with Brian Mulligan (2017 Naxos), the Opera America Songbook (Opera America, 2012), and The Music Teacher (Bridge Records, 2008), starring Wallace Shawn, Parker Posey, and Elizabeth Berkley. He has appeared on NPR’s More Than Music, CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, NBC’s Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, CNN’s First of All with Victor Blackwell, and was recently featured in the New York Times.
Tim is passionate about his role as president of The Plimpton Foundation (theplimptonfoundation.org), which promotes the work of Native American and First Nations performing artists through scholarships, grants, and commissions. He is proud to be on the Board of Directors of OPERA America, and is a 2024 inductee into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame.
The American composer Mark Gustavson was born in Brooklyn, NY and grew up in the Chicago
suburbs. He began studying clarinet at eight and composing when he was sixteen. In high school
he studied clarinet at the Music Institute of Chicago. He later went on to study clarinet and
composition at Northern Illinois University, University of Illinois, Columbia University, and
Conservatory of Amsterdam.
Recently Gustavson has been composing electroacoustic works with solo performers or video.
His most recent work, Deep Song, for viola and 2-channel fixed audio was commissioned by the
violist Paul Cortese who will be perform and record the work in Barcelona this summer. And
Which is Which for clarinet and 2-channel fixed audio will be premiered at the New York City
Electroacoustic Music Festival later in June.
Mark has received numerous honors, including recognition from ASCAP, BMI, the American Academy
of Arts & Letters, League-ISCM, New Music Consort, a finalist in the Alea III International
Composition Prize and the Gaudeamus Foundation. In addition, Mr. Gustavson has been awarded the
Joseph H. Bearns Prize in Music and a Fulbright Fellowship. He has received commissions from, among
others, Paul Cortese, Stony Brook University, the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, Parnassus, Fromm
Foundation, Koussevitzky Music Foundation and the New York Youth Symphony and his album
"Dissolving Images" on Albany Records was made possible by the generous support of the Fromm
Foundation, the Alice M. Ditson Fund and Aaron Copland Recording Fund.
Gustavson's works have been performed throughout North America and Europe and represented at
prestigious festivals such as the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Sonic Boom,
Tanglewood, Banff, Fromm, Gaudeamus, and others. His music is available on Albany Records and is
published by C. F. Peters Corp.
Christopher Dylan Herbert, baritone
Christopher Dylan Herbert is passionate about the transformational properties of music. As a singer, he aims to find truth and relationships in music. As an educator, he focuses on his students’ development and connections to music. As a person, he seeks to be a positive and peaceful, and to promote the value of music to society.
Herbert was born in New York to a family with many connections to the theatre. He began his musical journey at age nine when he started playing viola in school. His public music education, supplemented with extracurricular study, led to his participation in youth symphonies, string quartets, and musicals. After his voice changed, he began to study singing in addition to viola. He attended Yale University as an undergraduate, and it was there that he gained a love for ensemble singing and opera. During his twenties, he received a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and he pursued a number of careers in consulting, public relations, and non-profit management. Throughout these various employments, Herbert managed to simultaneously pursue a career in classical vocal music, which included apprenticeships and fellowships at prestigious young artist training programs, among them Aspen Music Festival, Music Academy of the West, Central City Opera, and Tanglewood.
In 2010, Herbert joined the quartet New York Polyphony, with whom he performed hundreds of concerts throughout the world until 2020. Two of the albums recorded with this group received Grammy® nominations in the Small Ensemble/Chamber Music category, and an additional record was a finalist for a Gramophone Award. His tenure in New York Polyphony deepened his appreciation for European music written before 1600, and it led him to pursue a doctorate in music at The Juilliard School. His doctoral studies focused on the music of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, about which he wrote his dissertation and several articles. His 2020 album, Voices in the Wilderness, highlighted the contributions of eighteenth-century female composers and received critical acclaim, most notably from NPR’s Morning Edition. Herbert is also part of a Getty Foundation-funded research team based at Winterthur focusing on the 1784 Ludwig Denig Manuscript.
Herbert is Vocal Area Coordinator and an associate professor at William Paterson University, a public institution in New Jersey. Herbert considers his work with his students to be the most significant experience of his life. He is proud to have reinvented the voice program at William Paterson, and to have worked closely with his colleagues to raise the profile and diversity of the vocal faculty. Starting in 2017, he introduced a regular practice of presenting staged works in his department, and he tripled student participation in vocal studies during a time of decreasing enrollments in higher education.
Herbert’s greatest musical influences include J.S. Bach, Mozart, Leontyne Price, Jacob Collier, Gabriel Kahane, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. He is a board member of The Plimpton Foundation. In his free time, he enjoys dancing and gardening. He lives in New York with his husband, conductor and pianist Timothy Long, and their dog Pumpkin.
Timothy Long, pianist
Timothy Long is a distinguished conductor, pianist, and composer who is Artistic and Music Director of Opera at Eastman School of Music and an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. He is an enrolled citizen of both the Muscogee Nation and the Thlopthlocco Tribal Town and is matrilineally Choctaw.
At the age of 16, Tim made his piano concerto debut with the Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra, and has since performed as a soloist with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Lawton (OK) Philharmonic, the Beethoven Society Orchestra of Washington DC, the Sociedad Filarmonica de Conciertos of Mexico City, the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute Orchestra, the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra, and the Eastman Philharmonia.
His work on Thomas Adès’s operatic tour-de-force Powder Her Face at the Aspen Music Festival led to his appointment as assistant conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and he was subsequently named an associate conductor at the New York City Opera.
After early years playing as a violinist in the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Tim’s passion for symphonic conducting has resulted in engagements with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the Prince George Symphony, the Regina Symphony, the Eastman Philharmonia, the Prague Summer Nights Orchestra, the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, and the Trondheim Sinfonietta. His operatic conducting engagements have included such companies as Boston Lyric Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Opera Colorado, Utah Opera, Tulsa Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Anchorage Opera, Pacific Opera Victoria, City Opera Vancouver, The Juilliard School, Yale Opera, the New York City Opera, and off-Broadway with The New Group.
As a pianist and harpsichordist, Tim has performed throughout the world at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, the Kennedy Center, National Sawdust, the Kimmel Center, Jordan Hall, Wigmore Hall in London, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Herkules Hall in Munich, Dvořák Hall in Prague, La Halle aux Grains in Toulouse, the Oregon Bach Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Caramoor Festival, and the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago, among many others.
At City Opera Vancouver, Tim conducted the 2017 World Premiere of Missing, a groundbreaking new work by Marie Clements and Brian Current about the 5,000 missing Indigenous women in Canada. In 2019, he conducted a Canadian tour of Missing with Pacific Opera Victoria, the Regina Symphony Orchestra, and the Prince George Symphony Orchestra. He conducted the American Premiere at Anchorage Opera in 2023. This extraordinary composition is the first opera to be sung in both the Gitxsan and English languages.
Recent highlights include Handel’s Semele for Wolf Trap Opera, and the In Harmony: Side by Side series with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center. This season includes Silent Light by Paola Prestini and Royce Vavrek, and H&G by Allen Shawn, Anna Maria Hong and Jean Randich, for Eastman Opera Theatre. After joining the Metropolitan Opera last season as an assistant conductor, he will return this season for Puccini’s La Bohème, the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program’s Orchestra Workshop, and Antony and Cleopatra by John Adams.
2024 marked the world premiere of Tim’s project, The North American Indigenous Songbook. As president of The Plimpton Foundation, Tim created this project to establish a repertoire where none existed before. Each year, the foundation is commissioning eight Native American, First Nations, and Métis composers to write songs that are available for all to sing. National Sawdust has partnered with The Plimpton Foundation to present these premieres. The first round included the esteemed composers R. Carlos Nakai, Dawn Avery, Raven Chacon, Sage Bond, Charles Shadle, Timothy Archambault, Connor Chee, and Martha Redbone.
Tim’s recordings include Alburnum, with internationally renowned baritone Brian Mulligan (Bright Shiny Things, 2022), Beauty Intolerable: Songs of Sheila Silver (Albany Records, 2021), the American Classics recording of Dominick Argento song cycles with Brian Mulligan (2017 Naxos), the Opera America Songbook (Opera America, 2012), and The Music Teacher (Bridge Records, 2008), starring Wallace Shawn, Parker Posey, and Elizabeth Berkley. He has appeared on NPR’s More Than Music, CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, NBC’s Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, CNN’s First of All with Victor Blackwell, and was recently featured in the New York Times.
Tim is passionate about his role as president of The Plimpton Foundation (theplimptonfoundation.org), which promotes the work of Native American and First Nations performing artists through scholarships, grants, and commissions. He is proud to be on the Board of Directors of OPERA America, and is a 2024 inductee into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame.
