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Achtung, Schattenjagers

Thursday, November 23rd, 2023

We’ve fallen off of this a little bit, Matt Specter and I, but at one point we were excited to send this Chapter of The Story, Chapter 51, “Zek,” out every Thanksgiving. It was originally a Specter chapter, but I think it has truly come to belong to all of us.

Every year that one of us remembered, it went to at the very least, the people depicted in it, and often whichever poor souls we deemed deserving of attempting to relive a moment of our lives in Cincinnati.

It was new 26 years ago. Don’t let that sink in.

Reviews have always been mixed, but I like to think we created a Story Cinematic Universe that rivals the fair-to-middling productions by Tolkien, Marvel, Roddenberry, and Lucas.

This year, there is one Schattenjager in particular who needs to read it: James Brunner is dealing with a diagnosis of colon cancer, possibly as a result too many pops and pushes back in the 1990s (we never did learn how those cubes worked). He’s started a Yoda’s Thanksgiving of medical and surgical treatments.

Hopefully, laughter is still good medicine (the best medicine, of course, is usually, well, medicine), and hopefully this is still funny:

No quote fits this chapter.

_____________

“Mmm, come, come.  With a Jedi it is time to eat as well,” said Yoda.

Yoda had laid out quite a spread.  We didn’t know what anything was, but
there sure was an awful lot of it.

“Eat, eat.  Mmmm, good food, yes?  M-hm-hm-hm-hm-hm-hm.  Ohhh.”

We sat down around the tiny table, careful not to bang our heads on the
low ceiling.

“Mmmm…Came you very far, yes?  Hungry you must be!  Eat, eat.”

We looked at each other hesitatingly.  Quite frankly, the stuff looked
and smelled gross.  Finally, Saunders decided we had better not make an
incident, and started scooping himself some glop.

“Why all the food?” asked Saunders conversationally, as the rest of us
followed his lead and helped ourselves.

“Is it not holiday in universe from where you came?”

I almost dropped by plate of swamp algae.  I wasn’t shocked that Yoda
knew where we were from, but Yoda’s use of the word ‘Holiday’…

I looked at my watch, which still continued to function as if I were
walking around earth.  The date said 11/27.

“You made us Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked Yoda.

“Yes!  Yes…good food we have, talk we will.  Work I not on holidays,
whatever universe may they be in.  Come, eat, eat.”

I paused for a moment, then said genuinely and sincerely, “Thank you.”
The others turned to look at me, shocked by my sudden mood swing.
Slowly they seemed to realize that this really was our Thanksgiving
dinner, and that we should be truly thankful for it.  Yoda had gone to
great trouble to make us feel welcome.  I smiled, and took a bite of my
food.

It was nasty.  I chewed slowly, fighting the urge to spit it back out.
Everyone around me was having a similar reaction, except for Yoda, who
ate with wild abandon, constantly commenting on the quality of the food.

Suddenly, he stopped, and looked up in shock.

“Ohhh…” he said, “Forgot I the most important thing!”

We all watched with intent curiosity as he picked up an empty bowl, got
up from the table, went over to the corner of the room, and opened a
large door, revealing a small horse-like creature.  Yoda placed the bowl
on the ground in front of the horse-thing, then calmy went to its side
and punched it in the gut.  The horse responded by vomiting into the
bowl.  We stared in a mixture of horror, confusion, and nausea, as Yoda
brought the bowl back to the table, and began to spoon it over his food
like gravy.  Suzanne had her hand over her mouth, and Loren looked
green.

Yoda finished scooping, and offered the bowl to us.

“Use the horse puke,” he said, “Use the horse puke!”
__________________________

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Podium Concerns

Tuesday, September 26th, 2023

If you’re like me, you’ve been following the drama unfolding at the Cleveland Institute of Music surrounding their current orchestra director, Carlos Kalmar. If you haven’t, here’s an article from last week that sums things up: https://van-magazine.com/mag/cleveland-institute-of-music-carlos-kalmar-discrimination-bullying/

It occurred to me that a few ideas about the direction we all ought to take as ensemble leaders might be in order.

We live in a time and place where educators are expected to pay close attention to the emotional needs of their students. Gone are the days when sarcasm, vitriol, and personal attack were accepted as marks of sincerity or even genius in a conductor. We have all been musicians in this type of situation: I myself played for several years in a community group led by a man whose podium talk resulted in an almost continuous turnover in the membership of the group.

I stayed because we played well, and I had a group of friends in the band, but we could have been better if that director’s nastiness hadn’t driven away many good musicians. I never felt personally attacked, but I saw good people and good musicians bullied out of the group by a director who relied on intimidation and verbal abuse.

As a twenty-something trombonist in that group, I felt challenged and pushed to be the best musician I could be, and I felt that I was learning from people who were vastly more experienced than I was (I learned how to tear apart a Sousa march and make it really hum along in that band).

As a forty-something father, I wouldn’t want my children to come in for that kind of abuse, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t stick around for it, either. (Even though I never felt like a target, that director eventually declined to write a recommendation supporting my application to graduate school, so that’s about where I stood with him).

Today, it is incumbent on us as musicians, leaders, and music educators to find a balance between rigor (and the honesty that goes with it) and kindness.

So: some friendly suggestions, take them or leave them:

  • Be aware of the variety of ability levels, ages, and backgrounds in our community groups. Some of your musicians have multiple music degrees, while others have only part of a high school experience. Some are retired and have plenty of free time, while others might be full-time college students with full-time jobs.
  • Remember that your two-hour rehearsal should include a break. This is built into the class schedule as the 15 minutes past two hours, but many of us just wrap 15 minutes early… it may be time to revisit this policy. At one time, the Civic Orchestra used this as a coffee break, and there was socialization (the coffee pot is still in the locker!).
  • Balance teaching music and making music. There should be some of both in your rehearsal; I tend to lean more on teaching early in the rehearsal cycle and making music later.
  • Strongly consider playing or singing every note at every rehearsal. This isn’t always what we would do in a daily rehearsal, but remember that someone who misses a weekly rehearsal could very well go two weeks without looking at their music.
  • On a related note: tell musicians what they should practice, but in the back of your mind, don’t depend on outside practice. They all have busy lives.
  • Similarly, consider giving a week’s warning to a section before you jump into that one difficult passage.
  • Consider holding sectional rehearsals: we all have musicians in the group who could run their section if you split the group up. This eliminates the trombonist’s dilemma of waiting through long stretches while others practice their parts.
  • Have a plan: going into rehearsal with a detailed plan keeps you focused and gives energy to the proceedings. My plan usually consists of a set amount of time for each piece along with a list of “spots” and possible solutions.
  • That said, be flexible: the military adage is that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy,” and it’s true in rehearsal, too.
  • Consider recording your rehearsal.
  • Don’t forget to practice yourself: mixed meter is the bane of my existence, but I love modern music, so what’s a guy to do? I wave my arms around like a crazy person with a baton at home until I’ve got it.
  • Everyone in the group is doing the best they can that day. It will never be perfect, and any imperfections are not personally directed at you.
  • Say “please” and “thank you” a lot. All of our arm-flapping would be pointless without the people in front of the podium.
  • Don’t be afraid to acknowledge your own shortcomings—and then work on them!
  • Before you say something, use the THINK acronym: is what I’m about to say True, Helpful, Inspiring, Necessary, and Kind? Above all, be kind.

I became aware of Bible verse that has a lot to do with how we perceive ourselves on the podium and as teachers, and when it was in the sermon a few weeks ago, it really stuck with me:

“…Jesus said [to the Pharisees], “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’.“

Matthew 9:12-13 (New International Version)

There’s a whole context here, but the question we should be asking is whether we are demanding sacrifice from or offering mercy to our students and musicians.

For many years, I didn’t offer mercy to students, and demanded only sacrifice, and it made all of us miserable. I hope that you can learn from my mistake in this! Students have trouble learning and musicians can’t make music when they are constantly asked to sacrifice for our vision of their art but not granted mercy in return when life keeps them from achieving that vision.

I’m happy to discuss any of this with anyone, and certainly, I would love to benefit from everyone else’s experience, so don’t hesitate to reach out.

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Miller’s Habits: A Reflection

Thursday, August 22nd, 2019

Photo of a list on slightly rumpled white paper, stapled to a bulletin board.

My copy of Ms. Miller’s Habits of Mind, standing watch on my office bulletin board.

 

In the fall 1991, my tenth-grade year, I took an English composition class with Ms. Betsy Miller. Her class was the first class I ever took that only dealt with writing, and she ran it as a writer’s workshop: we kept journals, read, wrote papers, discussed them, edited each other’s work. She was a passionate and dedicated teacher who put in countless hours outside the school day: she joked once that as she lugged a carton full of our work out to the parking lot, Mr. Van Fossen, our geometry teacher, would walk by empty-handed and jingle his keys at her.

Ms. Miller was in her mid-30s when I knew her, and was one of those “cool” teachers: stylishly-dressed, with a house in Columbus’ Victorian Village, and progressive in her outlook—just try to call her Miss Miller or Mrs. Miller!  Her approach was frank, direct, and honest. She was able to set us at ease with her and with each other, which was crucial, because we would be sharing our writing with our classmates as we edited each other’s work, and discussed it in class. I hope that students come to college having had teachers like her and find more like her once they are there.

One day, as a journal prompt, Ms. Miller handed out a list of Habits of Mind. I love lists, and taped my copy into my journal, and wrote about it, not just in class that day, but off and on throughout the semester. At the end of the term, when composition turned into British Literature, which I took from a different teacher, I carefully removed my copy of Habits of Mind from my journal and put it in the back page of my planner, and from there to my bedroom wall. When I went to college, I left it at my parents’ house, but I kept thinking about it. It had made its mark on me.

The years passed. At some point after the dawn of social media, I reconnected with Ms. Miller—now married to one of her colleagues (although she kept her maiden name), and retired from teaching. I mentioned Habits of Mind, and how I would like to share it with my students, thinking she could just email me the file. Instead, a few days later, an envelope arrived with a hard copy, printed in early-90s Macintosh type. I was immediately transported back to her classroom in the south wing of my high school. It is stapled to my bulletin board in my office as I type these words.

I still think Habits of Mind is a pretty good list of the things a college-educated person should do. I often tell my students that their goal should be to get an education, not just a degree, and to me, an education means this set of behaviors: thoughtfulness, curiosity, self-discipline are the virtues that are behind this list, but the list itself is a set of tools that a person will need to navigate whatever future might be ahead. After a certain number of years, the facts we learn and teach in a course will be out of date: practices change, skills become obsolete, technology moves forward, and older research is supplanted by new. But these two dozen habits are timeless, and making them habits makes us permanently interesting and forever prepared to make our contribution.

Ms. Miller certainly made hers.

 

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Writing for Blue Streak (2)

Friday, October 19th, 2018

I’ve been digging further into the Cuyahoga River and the 1969 fire that spurred the nascent environmental movement in preparation for my new piece for the Blue Streak Ensemble. Part of the difficulty is separating myth from reality, Randy Newman songs and Mark Weingartner novels aside.

I’ve become fascinated, or remain fascinated, with the way that the river has been changed into a man-made object rather than a natural feature, at least for its last six miles. An amazing app of Cleveland Historic Maps has helped with this, as I have pinpointed the location of the fire, mapped it onto my own experience of the river over the last six-and-a-half years living near it, and begun to consider a shape for this piece. I’m amazed at how much industrial plant that was present in 1951, the year of a USGS aerial survey, is simply gone, leaving either scars or having been redeveloped. I’ve have read and heard about the decline of heavy industry in Cleveland, but to look at how it was crammed into the river valley in the 1920s and see the shape of the same places nearly a century later drives it home.

The scale of the places is just as  daunting–plants that employed tens of thousands of workers at their peak could surely ruin a river, and a lake. Little wonder that such places symbolized optimism and progress for the mid-century mind in the ways that they dwarfed their inhabitants.

I’ve also taken a page from Nico Muhly, who describes in a recent article his compositional approach. While my experience of being a composer is lived quite differently than his (I have no doubt that he won’t ever be looking to my writing or music for inspiration), I’m taking his idea of a one phrase synopsis and a one-page birds-eye view map of the piece quite seriously. My map is going to be based on a tracing of the shipping channel of the river–the lowest six miles that pass through Cleveland and that have be reshaped for the economic purposes of our species.

20181019_211736

Little wonder that by 1969 the river was lifeless, a murky, roiling soup of human and industrial waste–it was not allowed to be itself, from the 1820s when its mouth was recut to eliminate its final bend before draining into the lake, to the addition of steel-walls to fix the location of its banks, and straighten its meanders.

How to express all this musically? This is the problem.  I created a little sketch the other day–a mixed-meter passage that I could imagine opening the work, but I wasn’t satisfied with it, and I realized I wasn’t ready to put down notes yet, but I will need to be ready one day soon.  I still want to see the valley, the mounds of slag and ore and limestone; the enormous plants; the scene of the crime of this fire. I was hoping for a river cruise, but I have missed that window for 2018–the tourist boats have finished for the season, and it is this moment when one needs Friends With Boats, I suppose.  I spent some time on the river vicariously this morning watching video taken from lakers going to or from Lake Erie up the river to ArcelorMittal Steel, the path I would like to take, and that may have to do for now. Tomorrow, however, I will be taking Noah and Melia either to the zoo (if the weather is fair) or the natural history museum (if not). We make take some time to attempt to drive some of these areas as well, and soon, very soon, it must be notes.

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Writing for Blue Streak (1)

Monday, October 1st, 2018

I’m going to be spending most of the rest of 2018 on a commission from Blue Streak Ensemble, a new music ensemble based in Cleveland and directed by composer Margaret Brouwer, who I’m proud to claim as my colleague and collaborator.

Margaret asked me to compose a piece for a concert coming in January 2019, and asked that it specifically be about the Cuyahoga River fire in June 1969 that, although actually quite minor and short-lived (so short that there are no known pictures of it), catapulted the nascent environmental movement into further prominence. The work will be about 10 minutes long, and for Pierrot-plus-percussion, and I’m quite excited to get to work with Blue Streak. Since I moved to Cleveland, I’ve wanted to become as much a “Northeast Ohio” composer as possible, and this is the kind of piece that will develop that connection.

I immediately contacted two of my colleagues at Lakeland, and both were helpful.  Dr. Matthew Hiner, in our history department, sent a batch of articles, and suggested that I canoe the Cuyahoga if possible (I haven’t been in a canoe since the early 1990s, so it may or may not be possible…). Dr. David Pierce, a geologist at Lakeland, gave me more homework, including the excellent, locally-produced documentary Return of the Cuyahoga, which I made Becky watch with me last night. It has provided excellent background, but there is nothing like seeing the place to really inspire a composer.

So yesterday, I took Noah and our bicycles and we headed for the Towpath Trail of the Ohio and Erie Canalway. Noah was just along for the bikeride, although he got a fair amount of history lesson from me at the same time with some riding commentary. We started behind Steelyard Commons, a large retail development just off I-71 and near the Tremont neighborhood. To one side was the retail area, where we parked the minivan, and on the other side was the railyard for the Cuyahoga Valley Railroad, which served the steel mills. Across the rails was the plant for LTV Steel, now Arcelor Mittal. Riding past this on bikes really gave a sense of the scale of the place.  Steelyard Commons was actually the site of even more of LTV’s plant, and it is fascinating to me how the land is continually reshaped and repurposed to fit the needs of its era.

The Steelyard Commons loop of the Towpath Trail is a little more than a mile long, although there is more trail under construction now at both ends of the loop, which is exciting to see (what a ride it would be from the Flats all the way to Bolivar and the end of the Canalway!). We hopped back in the car and headed for the Canalway Nature Center at the Ohio & Erie Canal Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks. The Nature Center is wonderful, and I have plans to return. Noah was enthralled by an exhibit of spiders, including the largest spider I’ve ever seen, a Goliath birdeater tarantula. We were here to ride, though. If at the Steelyard we were able to see neither canal nor river, both were in abundance in the Metropark, and in some places, the towpath runs with the canal on one side and the river on the other. We were able to see one lock up close, and to get a good look at the shape of the river in this area. As we headed south from the Nature Center, we crossed under multiple railroad bridges, and passed more of the enormous heaps of slag and ash, even in this park-like setting (which the Steelyard most certainly was not). After crossing under I-77, we came to the Southerly Waste Treatment plant, representing the biggest threat to the Cuyahoga River today: combined sewer overflow. Like many American cities, Cleveland’s sewers are designed in such a way that storm, sanitary and industrial sewers share a common pipe. When heavy rain overwhelms the system, the outflow of all three mix together and flows directly into the waterway, untreated. The result is bacteria-laden water that makes the river unsafe for swimming, and can result in beaches in Lake Erie being closed as well.

The juxtaposition of the canal–probably one of the core reasons for Cleveland’s early success as a city–the natural environment, and heavy industry and infrastructure is striking. It is as though the whole history of the area is laid out there.  I hope in the next few weeks to spend some time in the Flats as I embark on this project.  Musically, I don’t really know where it’s taking me yet, but I’m excited to drill down into the subject matter at least.

 

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A View of Twenty Views, part 3

Monday, February 6th, 2017

In February, I will be travelling to Atlanta, where I will give the premiere performance of the complete Twenty Views of the Trombone at Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery, at the invitation of Olivia Kieffer.  This is the third in a series of posts about that piece and how it has come to be what it is.

Read the first post, on the history of this piece’s composition so far, here.

Read the second post, specific comments on the first seven movements, here.

I performed Twenty Views of the Trombone in October 2013 on a concert of the Cleveland Composers Guild.  At that time, it was still a work in progress, with only eight or nine pieces complete, but you can listen to that performance here.

The premiere performance will be Friday, February 17 at 8pm at Eyedrum.  Admission is $7 at the door.

I will be tweeting using the handle @MattSComposer before, during, and after this process.  Join the conversation with #twentyviews–the final post in this series will be a Q&A, so send me your questions about the piece, or composing, or life in general, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Twenty short pieces is a lot to keep track of, even for the person who is writing and performing them.  I’m not completely sure how to keep the audience on track–perhaps they should open their phones to this blog during the performance!

At any rate, here are my thoughts on seven more pieces, in the order in which I am currently planning to play them at the premiere.

8. What It Will (Not) Be Like

Here’s a movement in imitation of the strict serial style of Arnold Schoenberg, who claimed that he had invented a musical language for the next millennium.  It didn’t work out quite that way.  From time to time, I have included twelve-tone rows in my work (in the final section of Martian Dances, for example, but this “What It Will (Not) Be Like” is my only purely dodecaphonic composition to date.  Also following Schoenberg, it follows a traditional model–Baroque binary form, with the 3/8 time signature suggesting a siciliano or slow gigue.  I have found this sort of approach useful from time to time, particularly when I was starting to compose and struggling with melody.  I’m less conscious of my anxiety about melody these days–I understand melody as an outgrowth of rhythmic expression, and I have also learned to be patient with my material and trust that the first note I try is not necessarily the right note.  I will never be an essentially melodic composer, but as someone writing a 40-minute piece for unaccompanied trombone would have to be, I have made my peace with melody (by making pieces with melody… ha!).

This was one of two movements that were composed for and first performed at the 2011 Aspen Composers Conference, an annual event organized by Natalie Synhaivsky adjacent to the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, but not affiliated with it.  I drove from Guymon, Oklahoma to Aspen, and the trip from the High Plains, over the Continental Divide was incredible.  In the summer, I highly recommend the “back” route into town, avoiding Denver.  My hotel was wonderful (and cheap in the off-season), and I met some intriguing people.  It was one of my favorite trips to date as a musician.  The conference featured both paper presentations (more on mine later) and a recital, so the ability to play my own piece without assistance paid off again.

9. What It’s Like After a Cup o’ Joe

This movement is one of my favorites.  It was written and first performed in late 2012 for a John Cage Musicircus held at MOCA Cleveland in December of that year.  It was also one of the first pieces I wrote after I moved back to Ohio from Oklahoma, and one of the last pieces, along with Lady Glides on the Moon, and La Voyage Dans La Lune, that I wrote prior to moving to our house in Willowick.  It stands at the end of one era and the beginning of the next.  It’s the first piece to be solidly technical in nature–something that a better trombonist might find missing from Twenty Views of the Trombone as a whole, but I find that it lies well on the instrument while being sufficiently jittery, as befits the title.

The title has two meanings: first, the effects of a cup of coffee (a drink I do not particularly like, but imbibe on occasion); second, a more personal, autobiographical meaning.  When I returned to Ohio in 1999, newly single, I did a fair amount of online dating.  My preferred place to meet a woman for the first time was a coffee shop near the Ohio State campus called Cup o’ Joe.  After one of these meetings, my adrenaline would be high, and even though I didn’t usually order coffee (they had a great cider drink called Hot Apple Pie), I would be on the same kind of comedown.  None of those meetings worked out, thankfully: the first time I met Becky, we ate Mexican food, which is a thousand times better than a lousy cup of coffee.

10. What It Could Be Like (II)

This movement was composed in 2015 and first performed at the Manchester New Music Festival at Manchester University in Indiana in March 2015.  This is the second movement that considers what might happen after death–in this case, a minimalist depiction of the eternal worship and praise that take place in Heaven.  My limited mind, of course, chafes at this more than a little–it may be the many distractions of this life, or it may be my sinful nature, but I have trouble focusing on worship for an hour or so each week.  Unending worship for eternity?  To my busy, ever-spinning mind, that doesn’t sound like Paradise, although I hope to find that it is, in some way that I just can’t understand.  I rather like this description, which seems to be based in Scripture.  “The best music you’ve ever heard will pale compared to the music of heaven. The most awesome worship you’ve experienced on earth is but a dim reflection of the praise we will render around the throne of God.”  Of course, he earlier describes Heaven as “more fun than the best party you ever attended,” which, frankly, is a relatively low bar for me, since I’m not much of a party-lover, notwithstanding a few very memorable parties I’ve attended.

11.  What My Greatest Hits Are Like (Synecdoche South Africa and Elementary, My Dear Noah)

If there are two pieces so far that seem to be making an impact, they are my 2009 piece for horn and marimba, South Africa, and the music I wrote for an educational YouTube video about the elements of music, Elementary, My Dear Noah.  South Africa was commissioned by Nancy Joy of New Mexico State University after we met on a flight from Columbus to Albuquerque (thanks to my wife, who started talking to Nancy when she saw her horn case).  It was premiered in 2010 at the International Horn Symposium by Nancy and marimbist Fred Bugbee, and has caught on a little bit.  It is by far my best-selling composition as of this writing, and is one of my most-performed (my most-performed music is three pieces from my piano cycle Starry Wanderers that Avguste Antonov has had in his repertoire for several years now; South Africa has been performed by a greater number of players).  I harbor hopes that South Africa will one day appear on repertoire lists.

Elementary, My Dear Noah, is a surprise hit.  I wanted a short YouTube video that would introduce my students to the seven elements of music.  I have taught the same list of seven elements for twenty years now–melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, timbre, dynamics, and form.  It works for middle school and it works for college.  My current music appreciation textbook, Take Note by Robin Wallace, substitutes meter and texture for tempo and dynamics, but ametrical music is quite common, and texture is an outgrowth of rhythm and timbre, so, I have my reasons for holding on to my list, which was taught to us at CCM in Elementary General Methods by Dr. Rene Boyer-White.  At any rate, in June 2013, I decided to make the video and try it out on my Popular Music class at Lakeland.  It took an afternoon to create, from start to finish, using the sound library included with Sibelius 6, along with some vocals by my family.  I began incorporating it in my classes regularly, but made the video public on YouTube, thinking others might find it useful, and at some point, it seems to have become a resource for music students around the US and around the world.  As of this writing, it has amassed over 33,000 views, far surpassing all my other videos combined, and giving it the largest audience of any of my compositions.  The average view time is about half the length of the video, so at least some people seem to be watching most of it, leading me to think that it is helping someone.  Viewing also seems to spike at the beginning of fall, spring, and summer semesters, just when a class like mine is covering the topic of the video.  I’m no YouTube star, but it’s fun to watch the counter tick upward.

“What My Greatest Hits Are Like” is a mashup for trombone of material from South Africa and Elementary, My Dear Noah.  It also constitutes a synecdoche of both pieces, and of my compositional output as a whole.  It was composed in 2016, and will  be premiered at Eyedrum this month.

12.  What It’s Not Quite Like

Along with “What It Will (Not) Be Like,” “What It’s Not Quite Like” was composed in the summer of 2011 for a premiere at the Aspen Composers Conference in August 2011.  It partnered with my presentation there, “Quintuplous Meter: Notations and Applications.”  I spent several years considering the best way to notate five-to-a-beat music, and incorporating it into my compositions.  It appears in my clarinet concerto Daytime Drama, my Piano Sonata and Piano Concerto, and in this short piece, which is a demonstration, as much as anything else, of what I still think is an untapped rhythmic resource.  As unlikely as it seems to catch on, it is fun to have a notational quirk to pull out from time to time, and I’m thinking that I haven’t used it in a while, so maybe it’s time to write something with it again.  From 2010 to 2012, I presented on quintuplous meter in several venues, where it was generally well received by colleagues in music theory and composition.  Most fun was presenting it as a poster session at the 2010 College Music Society National Conference.  My poster was in the front of the poster area, near a set of elevators, and I got to talk to nearly everyone who came by.  I also met Nolan Stolz, who I had known only through the Internet before, and Rachel Ware Carlton, with whom I would end up collaborating on a piece (that we still hope to be able to premiere!).  Here’s the PDF of my poster.

13.  What It Might Have Been Like (I)

The tracks of our lives all have places where they fork irrevocably.  It’s ironic that the first complete performance Twenty Views for the Trombone will take place in Georgia, a state where I once assumed that I was going to spend a substantial chuck of my life.  I lived in Macon for one frustrating, life-changing year, and in a different universe, I would have stayed much longer and become a person who I would be hard-pressed to recognize, I think.  “What It Might Have Been Like (I)” imagines how that might have turned out, a counterfactual, as it were.

This movement was composed in late 2016, and will be premiered at Eyedrum this month.  I knew that I wanted to learn the technique of multiphonics, and incorporate it into some of the movements I had yet to write, and this piece includes both that and some tongue clicking.  It sounds nothing like the rest of my music, as that life unlived in Macon would have been nothing like my life has been since then.

14.  What It Once Was Like (II) (Synecdoche Homo sapiens trombonensis)

In 2005, I was finishing my master’s degree at Ohio State, and my advisor, the late Donald Harris, wanted me to write a composition as my thesis.  He suggested a trombone concerto with winds, a piece that would certainly play to my strengths.  The result was Homo sapiens trombonensis, and when I showed it to Russel Mikkelson, he immediately agreed to program it the following spring, so in March 2006, I appeared as the soloist in my own concerto with the Ohio State University Wind Symphony, under Dr. Mikkelson’s baton.  It was one of the highlights of my career as a musician so far.  In 2013, Mark Wade invited me to play the piece again with his band at Denison University, and I began to relearn it, as it had been quite some time.  At the same time, I was preparing for a performance of Twenty Views of the Trombone for the Cleveland Composers Guild.  It made sense to kill two birds with one stone, so I created a “highlight” reel of the concerto to premiere that October, with the concerto performance following in November, the last performance of my music before the birth of our daughter Melia.

The time I spend with the trombone has dropped significantly since I returned to Ohio to take my current position at Lakeland Community College, although I am hoping to change that.  I did not immediately start looking for gigs, and the demands of family life limit the time I can spend honing my skills as a trombonist.  Thus, “What It Once Was Like (II)” is a snapshot of a time when I was still growing as a performer instead of (I’ll kid myself) holding the line.

And at this point, I begin to wonder–is there something valedictory about this piece and this premiere?  It seems unlikely that the trombone will ever be as important in my life as it once was.  Am I in a way getting ready to say goodbye?  My hope is that the answer is “no,” and I’ve recently started teaching trombone again, and perhaps as my children get older there will be more chances to play.  Since 1986, the trombone has been a part of my life, and ready to take whatever time I chose to give to it.  As a fifth-grade band student at Windermere Elementary School, I had no idea that I would still be worried about the trombone as a grown-up.  In those days, I wanted to be an astronaut.

This is the third of a short series of posts about Twenty Views of the Trombone.  The first post gave an overview of the history of the composition of the piece.  The second post describes the first seven movements in detail, and the fourth will describe the remainder of the piece.

Bonus: Here is the coffee shop Cup O’ Joe in Columbus, Ohio that inspired What It’s Like After a Cup O’ Joe:

IMG_20170408_161513

 

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Grandmotherology

Wednesday, November 30th, 2016

In the 19th century, when Columbia University was getting ready to appoint its first faculty member in musicology, a board member scoffed at the notion of musicology, saying that there might as well be a professorship in “grandmotherology.”

Yesterday, my family lost my grandmother, Doris Farber, at the age of 89.  She was the only person I knew reasonably well who knew people who remembered the 19th century.  Her mother, my great-grandmother Edna Baum, was born in 1898, and I knew her as well.  My grandmother’s father, Elijah, fought in World War I, and four of her brothers fought in World War II.  My grandmother was a “Rosie the Riveter” during the war at a ceramic plant up the road from the town where she was born, lived the bulk of her life, and suffered the stroke that led to her death.

She was a woman of her time and place.  Raised in and faithful to the Lutheran Church, she rarely missed a Sunday, even as the congregation dwindled around her to the point of an eventual merger.  I don’t know the circumstances of her birth–I’m hoping to learn more at the memorial this weekend.  Once my then-girlfriend, now my wife Becky, and I asked her about Christmas in her childhood–during the Great Depression.  She replied that since her family owned a farm, there was always plenty of food, but never much in the way of Christmas.  After all, she was one of twelve siblings.  She came to adulthood at the end of the war, and married my grandfather, Thom William Farber.  They began to have children–my mom and my uncle close together, and then my aunt a few years later.  A lifelong fan of the Cleveland Indians (they had been playing for only eighteen seasons when she was born), she listened to their last World Series win on the radio while she was pregnant with my mother.  My grandfather was not well, however.  He had a weakened heart as the result of a childhood case of scarlet fever–a disease that subsequent generations don’t have to worry about, and a condition that would be readily repairable today, but their generation was born into a world with few vaccines, and no antibiotics or open-heart surgery.  He died in the mid-1950s, leaving my grandmother a widow and single mother of three.  He was buried in the town cemetery, across from the Lutheran church, in a plot that had room for my grandmother.  He waited sixty years for her there.

Grandma didn’t know how to drive a car when Grandpa died.  She had a large family who helped, but she didn’t rely on them, remained in the house that she and her husband had bought.  The social safety net in those pre-Great Society days was of limited help as well, and I’m sure there were my grandfather’s medical bills as well.  So she took her ninth-grade education and went to work.  Some of it was the backbreaking work that she would have been familiar with from the farm–my mother describes being taken to a farmer’s field with her mother and brother to weed the corn by hand.  I know that she also cooked in a restaurant, and did factory work.  I will always remember her, though, as the cashier at Crossroads Supermarket, at the intersection of Ohio State Routes 800 and 183–the origin of her Universe in so many ways.  When we lived nearby and shopped there, before we moved out of town when I was eight, she rang up our food, and sometime after we left, made the transition to barcode scanners.  Like so many things, that store, which seemed enormous to me as a child, is actually a relatively small supermarket, for a small community.  But Grandma worked there for decades, until she finally retired in her late 70s.

There is much of the pre-history of my life in my family, of course.  Grandma was 50 when I was born, and sometime during the 1970s, she was remarried and divorced to a man named Chuck, who I’ve never heard her speak of, and whose name is usually accompanied by the word “jerk” when my parents mention him.  She moved with him to South Carolina, bringing my teenaged aunt along, but quickly returned–less than a year, from what I understand.  It was the time when my mother and my uncle had found their spouses, and my parents had moved to Texas.  Perhaps Grandma worried about being left alone.

Ironically, that would never happen.  My uncle, a carpenter, added a large living room to her home, the first of several renovations and additions.  During the energy crises of the 70s, this room would be closed off during the winter months, but I remember it mostly for the way that it was always filled with guests.  Grandma lived in the kind of place where people just dropped by, and if she wasn’t at work, she was usually at home.  There were comfortable chairs for the grownups and always a stash of toys for any kids who came along.  My son and daughter played with some of the same toys in Grandma’s living room that I did, some of which belonged to my mom and my uncle.  My great-grandmother was also around–I always remember her living in a mobile home behind Grandma’s house.  I knew Doris as “Grandma Farber,” and Edna as “Grandma Baum.”  There was also a “Grandma Kellogg” who lived on the West Coast, and who sent me a jar of volcanic ash spewed out of Mt. St. Helens in its eruptions in 1980.  In the 80s, by aunt moved back in with Grandma, bringing her daughter, my cousin Pam, for whom Grandma was a second parent in may ways.

Grandma was a fastidious housekeeper–I always knew that if I came over and you couldn’t eat off the floor, that something would have gone wrong.  She lived in her home, in her town, until last Friday, when my uncle found her on the floor of her bedroom, having suffered the stroke that would end her life.  She would not have wanted to have her life prolonged by life support–she had made this clear to her family–and she would have hated the idea of spending any time in a nursing home.  On Saturday, I’ll see her home one more time–soon it will still be there, but it won’t be hers anymore.  It was the center of her long, eventful life, and where I remember Christmas, and sleeping over, and visiting, and showing off my children to the family.  I now begin the part of my life without her, and we are the poorer for it.  I love you, Grandma, and you will be in our thoughts every day, as you have always been.

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On Memorial Day

Monday, May 30th, 2016

I’m struck by Memorial Day this year, partly by seeing social media posts reminding us of the differences between Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Armed Forces Day, and then seeing so many people confused by the meanings of the three.

This year, I have a profound sense of gratitude.  In Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, we were always involved with Memorial Day–placing flags on the graves of veterans in cemeteries many years, but I particularly remember the observances in Upper Arlington in the late 1980s.  The VFW or American Legion (I don’t remember which) organized the ceremony, and this year, I particularly recall the presence of two “gold star” mothers–women whose sons didn’t return from World War II.  They would have been in their eighties then, and are surely gone now–it was my great-grandparents’ generation who bore the children who fought that war–and they were accorded places of honor, and escorted by the veterans while we all stood at attention.

The sacrifice that so many made in the bloody conflicts of the past does not go unnoticed.  My mother won’t be a gold star mother, in all likelihood, and the men I graduated high school with have lived in peace.  Some of them joined the military, including my close friend Brad Klemesrud, but none did so against their will, or in the face of an existential threat to our nation.  There has been war during my lifetime, and there have been combat deaths, and there have been the specters of nuclear holocaust and terrorism, but my life has been the result of a long peace purchased at high cost, and maintained at a high cost.

Founding father John Adams wrote, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

I am privileged to live in Adams’ third generation, and I am intensely grateful to those who made the sacrifices that our nation observes today.

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January Thoughts

Saturday, January 31st, 2015

I’very never tried to write a post from my phone before. I guess there’s a first for everything.

This term I am teaching a section of my popular music class online. I have avoided this since coming to Lakeland, but there is no doubt that online coursework is here to stay. Our online sections regularly fill, and at the least I need to understand the online environment. It was not easy getting the course started but now, three weeks in, I am seeing some positive components.

I’m also having to replace an ensemble director for the first time at Lakeland. Chris Robinson directed the chorus for a dozen years and turned in his resignation three weeks ago. I hired an interim, Joan Bendix, who began rehearsals this week. I think she will hold things together while we search for a permanent replacement.

I’m also writing my first piece for chamber orchestra, and for the first time in a while, the work isn’t going quickly. I’ve only been at it for a week, so perhaps it just needs time. Time is limited: I get four forty-minute sessions a week before class, which is enough to get started and not much else. The piece is due in May, so there is time still. I’m envisioning a very emotional piece, rooted in nostalgia, so there is much pondering to be done.

Some thoughts, anyway.

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Being Here, Not Being There

Saturday, October 18th, 2014

Last Sunday, October 12, was a big day for my music.  Here in Cleveland, Liliana Garlisi gave the first performance in Ohio of the complete Starry Wanderers on a concert of the Cleveland Composers Guild.  And, in St. Louis, Avguste Antonov was the soloist in the world premiere of my piano concerto, with the University City Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Leon Burke.  Both concerts happened more or less simultaneously, and while I was glad to be here in Cleveland for Liliana’s fantastic performance, missing the concert in St. Louis stung a bit.

The good news first.  Liliana gave an amazing reading, from memory, of Starry Wanderers.  As a composer, the feeling of having someone take a piece that seriously is second-to-none.  Dianna Anderson, who gave the premiere of Starry Wanderers and my piano sonata, has treated my work in the same way, as though she were playing Beethoven or Scriabin rather than the work of a relatively obscure Midwesterner.  I now consider myself fortunate to have collaborated with three pianists who bring that kind of musicianship to the table.

During Lilian’s performance, a child who had been brought to the concert began to fuss, and let’s just say that it won’t be a pristine recording.  A colleague at the concert expressed her dismay in an email later this week, and while I appreciate her sentiment on behalf of Liliana and myself, I personally think that it’s wrong.

I teach students every day who don’t buy into the “pristine concert hall” experience.  In fact, it is one of the factors they find most intimidating when they attend concerts as required.  In our kid-friendly world, how can we expect that people won’t bring their children to something that children have every right to experience?  I was fortunate to grow up in a time and place where schoolchildren were regularly exposed to such things–the Columbus Symphony Orchestra gave a concert at my high school twice while I was there–but with budgets and grants increasingly less available, this just doesn’t happen as often.

If someone wants to come to a concert on which my piece is being played, and the only way that they can do so is to bring their young child, then let them come.  The point of a concert is not to make the perfect recording — if that is what is required, then the dress rehearsal should be recorded, or a studio session scheduled.  I put my music before the public so as many people as possible can experience it in the way it was intended to be heard–played by a living person in front of a living audience.  I would no more ask my audience not to breathe.  I would love to know that my music elicits audible responses from time to time–laughs, gasps, sighs, cries, whatever.  And if that recording is so important, than whoever listens to it will have affirmation that it is, in fact, a live recording rather than a studio recording with applause edited in at the end.

The St. Louis performance went well, so I’m told.  It was frustrating that a piece I had been thinking about for twenty years, and spent most of 2013 writing, was premiered without my being present.  I talked with Leon Burke over the phone, and he also tried to have me listen in on a rehearsal over his cell phone.  This was frustrating, because as I followed the score, I could almost hear my piece through the distortion, if I really squinted my ears.  I held on until the end of the run-through, so that I could take a moment to thank the players, but there wasn’t really much that I could tell them.  I’ve seen pictures of the performance on the Internet, and the concert was recorded and videoed, so hopefully I will have those artifacts–again, the recording is crucial, but is not the piece itself.  I wasn’t there because the funding was there from the orchestra to bring me out, and the composition business has done well this year, but there was no money for a plane ticket.  As a younger, single man, I would have hopped in the car and driven the eight hours, and probably driven back immediately after the concert so that I wouldn’t miss class on Monday morning, but I have responsibilities now.  I had been hoping for a second performance in Pennsylvania this year, but that doesn’t seem like it will materialize, so at this point, there is a major work of mine that has been premiered, but that I haven’t heard, except as a ghost of itself through a cell phone.  Avguste, having taken the time to learn the piece, is now behind it, and hopes to play it again in 2015-2016, but nothing firm has been committed.  The irony is that usually I take a performance that goes on without me as a sign that I’m making progress as a composer, but it has happened only rarely for a premiere.  The last time a piece was premiered without me, though, was in 2009, when my flight to North Dakota was cancelled, and I missed Dianna Anderson’s premiere of Starry Wanderers, which has gone on to be a relatively important piece, and was the start of a significant collaboration with my former teacher.  Perhaps, then, there are more and better things in store for this concerto.

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