Welcome

 

“My passion to write music arises out of a most basic human desire to touch other human beings. I compose because it gives me such pleasure to enable others to laugh, to dance, to feel tender, to be entertained. If music doesn’t communicate to an audience, why write it?”

– Paul Salerni

Thanks for visiting my webpage. During the Quarantine, the first song I wrote was a reaction to the crisis, a setting of a poem of Dana Gioia’s.  Keith Phares recorded his part in Ohio, Miles Salerni in Bethlehem. Thanks to them for their wonderful work.

 

As consolation for not having been able to visit Italy during the Covid summer, I wrote this set of variations on an Abruzzese folk song. All of the photos in the video were taken in Salle, the mountain village in the Abruzzo where my grandparents were born. Many of the folks in the photos are my cousins.

Here’s a recent performance of an orchestra piece, “A Time to Dance,” the second movement of a two-part piece. The orchestra is the student/faculty/community hybrid called the Lehigh University Philharmonic. I’ve been conducting this orchestra this season.

 

 

 

 
Please visit my YouTube channel to listen to various works:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQY7g66fuC5BYMUAQ-oMNhQ

Here are some specific compositions you might enjoy:

Something Permanent (song cycle on poems by Cynthia Rylant)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T6qNB8jP1k

For Love or Money,  song cycle on poems by Dana Gioia

 

Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, song of advice for a healthy diet

A Bethlehem Carol:

 

 

Various press notices:

 

“But overall, it is not the craft of composition that stays with the listener, but what I would call the art—the emotional and spiritual content of these genuinely lovely pieces. It is, as Salerni promised, music that sings and dances.” -Henry Fogel, review of “Touched” CD in Fanfare

“His music ‘pulsated with life, witty musical ideas and instrumental color.'” -Philadelphia Inquirer

“…impressive was Mr. Salerni’s ‘Bad Pets,’ three playful cabaret songs based on Mr. Gioia’s sly ‘Alley Cat Love Song,’ Mark Doty’s frisky ‘Golden Retrievals’ and Robert Frost’s placid ‘Cow in Apple-Time.'” – The New York Times

Please read Fanfare review of Touched-Henry Fogel

 

 


 

 

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