While cover art may have something to do with the impulse to purchase a particular recording, it’s unclear just how important it is to separately title a CD.Â
I don’t recall titles being an issue in the days of LPs; a list of works and the names of the performers and composers were generally what we saw on album covers.  And the Schwann catalogue (plus Fanfare, Stereo Review, High Fidelity and other record review journals) organized their write-ups just the way we do today, according to the artist’s surname.  Nevertheless, starting about a decade ago I began to create titles separately for discs of my music, in part as a way to keep track of which piece(s) were on which disc.Â
 This has turned out to be a fun thing to do – and takes as much thought as designing titles which matter for the pieces themselves.  If there’s any ‘theme ‘ at all implicit to this particular group of pieces, the CD title offers the listener a guide,  suggesting at least one way to approach this music.  My first try at titling was for the 1996 CD Neon Rhythm – a natural choice considering that the disc features the cool color of winds and most of the music is built on dance rhythms.
 For each later recording there is a small side-story just about the titling process.  The one with the best inside joke is a 2005 Albany disc of small-forces chamber music.  I had the good fortune to have my husband create that cover art.  When Gary and I discussed the music to be included and he heard that one of the titles I was tossing around was “pure colorsâ€, he went away and came back with a design featuring anything but the pure variant of each color !: they’re all off-tone variations of prime colors, and the whole thing is based on versions of a single angled shape.  Considering the ‘angularity’ of several pieces on the disc  — especially WIZARDS, and clarinet solo Astral –  the design concept fit perfectly, and it remains my favorite CD cover so far.
A full list of my CDs with cover thumbnails may be found here.
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