Welch College Music Department Chairman James Stevens has stayed busy composing during the pandemic with over 1,000 publications released in the past year with various outlets, according to Provost Matthew McAffee. The publishing outlets include Sheet Music Plus, Shawnee Press/Hal Leonard, Spotify, Pandora Radio, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and others that include music for choral, piano, organ, and various instrumental solo/piano combinations.
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Several of Stevens’s choral anthems over the past year have been released by Shawnee Press of Hal Leonard. These include “Song of Grace and Hope” with Gaye C. Bruce and “Jesus Is the Way” with Karen Crane. These and Stevens’s other recent choral music with Hal Leonard consist of practical compositions and arrangements for the local church choir.
“One publication, ‘Italian Preludes, Nos. 1-8,’ is a piano album and book released in the heart of the pandemic at a time when Italy was suffering great losses with the songs representing various moods of the time,” McAffee said. In July, the “Italian Preludes” was listed as number 10 of The Top 100 Radio Airplay Chart at Music Zone Reporter (http://www.zonemusicreporter.com/charts/top100.asp).
In July of 2020, Stevens was named as a Whisperings Piano Solo Artist at SoloPiano.com, which consists of many of the world’s leading pianists/composers and founded by famed pianist David Nevue. This site carries Stevens’s music from his albums, “Minimal Piano,” “Italian Preludes, Nos. 1-8,” “Quiet Christmas Piano,” and his most recent album and book, “Autumn Moods,” released October 9, 2020.
Since the beginning of 2020, Stevens has also released four new collections of original organ music, much of which has been recorded by Harvard University Organist and Composer in Residence, Carson Cooman, including all the compositions from Stevens’s October 2020 book, “Swan Serenades for Organ, Nos. 1-5.”
Dr. James Michael Stevens has served as Chairman of Welch College’s Department of Music since 2004. For more information on the music department at Welch College and the various programs of study offered by the department, email Mark Lancaster at mlancaster@welch.edu.