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Playing my own music

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Over the last eight days, I’ve played my own music in three different venues in three cities here in Oklahoma.  I played my trombone-with-electronics piece Let Everything That Has Breath Praise the Lord here in Guymon at a concert at my church.  Then on Friday, I premiered part of my unaccompanied trombone piece Twenty Views of the Trombone on a faculty recital at Oklahoma Panhandle State University.  Then, last night, Becky and I went to Norman, Oklahoma so that I could play both pieces as a featured composer at a Salon Concert of the Oklahoma Composers Association.  All the performances went well, and they bring me to a topic I’ve, understandably, been thinking about lately, and that is the need for a composer to write music for him- or herself to perform, and to perform it.

A Beethoven or a Gershwin could, of course, at the drop of a hat, find a piano and regale those assembled with any number of their original works; Schubert wrote for himself, and composers like Bach and Haydn had jobs that required them to compose, rehearse and lead their newest pieces in quick succession. 

No one can be as passionate a performer of a new piece than its composer, and there’s no better way to show how a new piece should be played.   If my ideal is to write with a performer in mind, then writing for myself is the closest relationship I can have with a performer. 

From a practical standpoint, playing my own music means that I can “take the show on the road” very easily–in my case, with only my trombone and perhaps a mute or the CD of the accompaniment.

While I avoided writing for the trombone for a while–I didn’t just want to be a trombone composer, and there were other media to explore–it will always be the instrument I understand best.  I love to play the trombone, and it will, hopefully, always be my primary instrument, even if I don’t get nearly the amount of practice I would like.   It only seems natural that I would combine my compositional and performing personae.

I would urge all composers to consider this avenue–and I intend to keep exploring it myself.

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Kevin Wale’s Senior Guitar Recital

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

I wish that every music student I have ever had could have been in the audience at Centennial Theatre at OPSU tonight. Kevin Wale, a senior music major in guitar performance, gave a recital that, at least for our school, raises the bar.

My college girlfriend and I gave our senior recitals about a week apart in 1998, and my parents made it down for both. My mother, who has no formal musical training, hit the nail on the head when she said, “M. had to do a recital, but you got to do a recital.” She was right–I enjoyed every minute of it (although I’m not sure that my audience can say the same thing).

Tonight’s performance, though, is a model that all musicians can aspire to in one way or another. Kevin “got to” give a recital, and from start to finish, it was amazing.

To my current students: this is what happens when you work as hard as you should be working. I’m talking about the technique, the confidence, the joy and passion with which Kevin played, the variety of styles he tackled and the facility of execution. Kevin told me later he was nervous, but it didn’t come off that way, and I wouldn’t have expected it to. As my colleague Matt Howell was fond of saying, “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” The battle is not to the swift or to the strong, but to the well-prepared and the well-trained.

Again, to my students–you can do this. It won’t be easy, and it won’t always be fun. In fact, it mostly will not be fun. But like any discipline, practice becomes a habit, and soon you feel uncomfortable without it. You need to make practice familiar, until your instrument becomes as much under your control as a part of your body (or singers, bring your body so fully under your control that you no longer have to consciously control it).

Tonight, I saw a rock guitarist play twenty minutes of classical guitar. It wasn’t Segovia–only Segovia was Segovia–but it was well-practiced, conscientiously prepared, and played in a stylistically aware fashion. To my students–some music will take you out of your comfort zone. Indeed, you may never be comfortable with some music. A rock guitarist playing classical is like a sex change! But Kevin pulled it off, again, with confidence and aplomb, and he is now a better, more complete musician for it. College is about pushing boundaries and expanding ourselves to new and different areas of endeavor. Whether it is within music or not, you need to try things you might not otherwise try, meet people you might not otherwise meet and dare to see what’s out there. You will either reaffirm your understanding of the world or be forced to revise it, and either way, you will be a better, fuller human being for it.

Kevin could not have done tonight’s recital alone. He had a slate of collaborators of all types, but what they had in common was that they could support his work with their own. To my students–choose your coworkers wisely, and treat them with respect. You may think you are more talented than they are, or think you are giving them more than they are giving you, but in the end, we are not in this alone. “No man is an island,” in any sense of the word. But, too, don’t tolerate collaborators who are unreliable or uncommitted any more than absolutely necessary. You can’t build whatever it is you are trying to build when the people you work with are holding you down.

Something that has always impressed me about Kevin, and which was in evidence tonight, is his ability to step back and think about things in context and ponder deeply. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and the same is true about music. Not a single piece of music was out of place, and each piece fit into a 90-minute tour of the guitar with Kevin Wale as tour guide. I instruct recitalists in our department to choose music of merit, whether it be for its significance in the repertoire of the instrument, or its degree of difficulty or its ability to showcase the performer’s talent. Kevin very much took this to heart for this recital, and added on top a layer of thoughtfulness in programming that made the audience a part of the recital as well.

So, to address my students one more time–don’t just practice to learn music, but to dig deeply enough into the music to learn how to live. These are the real virtues of an education, whether musical or otherwise, and be grateful that you have been granted the time and the opporunity to pursue them. Congratulations again, Kevin.

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Bach, WTC I, Fugue in E minor

Friday, November 20th, 2009

This post is for a friend of mine, who is trying to perfect the art of wooing women using his music theory and analysis skills. In the manner of Cyrano de Bergerac, however, he needs a little assistance. But at least he doesn’t have a big nose.

My comments refer to the Kalmus edition of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, edited by Carl Czerny.  Not the best edition ever, but fairly readable, as they don’t try to cram too much onto a page like some older editions.  I trust it fairly implicitly.

This is the only two-voice fugue in either book of the WTC.  The structure is more reminiscent of a two-part invention than a fugue, but the line between these is somewhat blurry.  The subject has a strange chromatic feel to it following the rising arpeggio that forms the head motive.  It modulates–once the subject has been played, the music is not in the same key it was when the subject began–the subject always ends on v of the key in which it began.  The first entry of the subject takes the piece from E minor to B minor (note D natural, not D sharp on the downbeat of measure 3).  The answer begins immediately, as expected.  This is a real answer, with the exception of the last note–where the subject always ends with a descending whole-step, the answer always ends with a descending half-step, meaning that after the answer, we may remain in the same key.  The half-step allows the subject to end on V (of the answer) rather than some temporary i.  Measures 1-4 are the first exposition.  A final feature of note is the material beginning on beat 2 of m. 3 in the soprano voice, which represents recurring contrapuntal material and accompanies every subsequent entry of either subject or answer.

The first episode lasts from m. 5 to m. 10, and consists of a descending-fifths sequence, with Bach’s very typical alternation of material between hands, until m. 10, when the sequence breaks down in order to tonicize the next key area, G major.  Between measures 10 and 11, there is almost a cadence–we are denied the stereotypical Baroque cadential 6-4 pattern, but harmonically, most of the pieces are there.  In particular, the last beat of measure 10 is very typical of the approach to a cadence, but the next passage begins on a first inversion chord (because the subject begins on the root of the chord and enters in the soprano). 

The second exposition lasts from m. 11 to m. 14 and presents subject and answer in G major, with both accompanied by the countersubject introduced in mm. 3-4.  This is an excellent example of Bachian use of invertible counterpoint, as the countersubject “works” either above or below the subject or answer.

Measures 15-19 constitute the second episode, again, a falling-fifths sequence until m. 19, which introduces the dominant of the next key area.  Measure 19 is also notable for the use of both hands in octaves, a practice not often seen in Bach.  Bach again uses inversion in this episode–note the alternating first-inversion and root position chords.

The third exposition is in measures 20-23.  This is the first time that the subject and answer have switch places, so that the subject appears in the bass and the answer appears in the soprano.  This exposition is in the key of a minor.  Because the subject always moves to v, the answer is in e minor, ending on V (B major).

The third episode lasts from measure 24 to measure 29.  The first four of these bars are measures 5-9 in inversion, another example of invertible counterpoint.  Like the first episode, they constitute a descending-fifths sequence.  The parallel construction would seem to suggest that C major be the next key area, but this is prevented by a minor change in m. 29.  Between the second and third sixteenth-note of the run in thirds here (inversion of the run in sixths from m. 10), Bach leaps up by a fourth instead of a third, then continues a step higher to tonicize D minor instead of C major.  Like its counterpart, m. 29 is almost a cadence.

D minor is not a closely-related key to E minor, and our arrival here requires explanation; D major or C major would be more harmonically typical.  I would suggest that, given the tight construction of this piece, Bach wished to continue in this manner.  If Bach had continued to C major, as the parallel construction would suggest, he would have found himself nearing the end of the fugue in a poor situation.  To continue the parallelism from C major, would require a move to D minor (following pattern of the second and third expositions in G major and A minor, respectively).  He finds himself moving further and further from home, when it is now necessary to head back toward the tonic.  Thus, C major was not an acceptable choice for the next exposition, as it leads away from rather than back to the home key.  D major, on the other hand, would require an answer in A major, similarly leading away from the home key.  However, since the subject modulates to its own v, a subject in D minor leads to an answer in A minor, the iv chord of the piece.  Thus, by stepping out of the key, Bach brings us back to the key.  This odd entrance of the subject (m. 30) is necessitated by the modulating properties of the subject itself, and the exposition leaves us in a very good position to end the piece.

The final episode, mm. 34-38, is an inverted version of mm. 15-19, complete with the hands in octaves (m. 38).

In m. 39, Bach uses the head motive and the characteristic “bariolage” section of the subject to suggest stretto.  Since neither the subject nor the medium of two-voice fugue are really well-suited to stretto, he reverts to the format of the two-part invention and merely reminds us of the subject.  The only true cadence in the piece occurs in the last measure.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 2, 5th movement

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Well… two symphonies down, seven to go (unless I decide to add Das Lied von der Erde and the Tenth Symphony… still open for discussion).  Schedule for Symphony No. 3 will be as below:

  • First movement–November 1-15
  • Second movement–November 16-25
  • Third movement–November 25-December 5
  • Fourth movement–December 5-12
  • Fifth movement–Decmeber 12-19
  • Sixth movement–Decemeber 20-31

The Third is a larger piece still than the Second, and we’re coming up on some busy weeks, so we’ll see what actually happens.

To the question at hand, though:

It has been very difficult for me to examine the last movement of this piece objectively, because in listening to it, one is constantly overwhelmed by the grandeur and majesty of the piece.  I feel compelled to compare this movement to the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

The similarities are quite striking, beginning with the opening of each piece, in both cases a titanic explosion of sound, making full use of the instrumental forces available to the respective composers.  As is beginning to become clear, a trick Mahler uses is to bring back opening material verbatim after a fairly significant development.  This is in evidence here as well, as this material will return, albeit in a slightly different form, more on which later.

One of the salient features of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth is the catalog or audition section, in which moments from each of the preceding movements are incorporated between recitative-like material from the double basses.  Mahler does not exactly parallel this, but there is material that resembles much of what has come before.  Indeed, a chorale from the opening movement reappears in a meaningful way, and much of the material of the symphony thus far seems to be related to the “Aufersteh’n” melody that forms the spiritual and musical heart of this finale, much as Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” melody is the core of his piece.  Almost immediately after the opening statement, at m. 31, a bass line appears in the cellos and basses that cannot help but recall the scherzo’s moto perpetuo.

As sprawling as this piece is, there is also a tightness to the writing that is integral to its holding together and ability to hold the listener’s attention.  Nearly every theme begins or ends with a rising fifth or a falling fourth, or incorporates this interval significantly.  The two chorale tunes–the “Aufersteh’n” melody and the tune introduced in the first movement–have head motives that are related by inversion.

Measure 62 sees the first entrance of these two chorales in this movement.  They are not in their final form, as though they await perfection, or, perhaps, they are in a state of pre-development.  Mahler hints at this material and dances around it before a full presentation of it (mm. 62-96 are parallel to the more solidified and then more triumphant presentation of the same material beginning with the trombone chorale in m. 143).

This is another Mahler trick–transforming material through orchestration.  I continue to marvel at the masterful approach to orchestration in this piece–the doubling, the clear string writing, the use of just the right parts of a massive orchestra.  It is even as though Mahler knew that certain principal players would be tired in certain places, and allocated parts accordingly to have fresh performers available (this happens frequently in the brass).

The above-mentioned chorale at mm. 143ff is probably the first passage that pricked my ears many years ago.  Trombones, tuba and contrabassoon, and later the rest of the brass, present both chorale tunes.  The first is in Db major, and the second moves from Db major to C major, the overall key of the movement (like Beethoven’s Fifth, although the key of the piece is C minor, the last movement is in the major mode).  Instead of being blended with other ideas, the chorale tunes are finally exposed, naked, without distractions, and we are forced to consider the basic material of the movement–or even of the symphony–in isolation.  If it is true, as Russel Mikkelson has commented, that composers are bad poker players, here is Mahler’s tell, and he shows us all the cards.

The following sections relate to Beethoven’s Ninth in that they are variations on the “Aufersteh’n” chorale.  Measure 220 begins a march-like section.  A difference from Beethoven, though, is there is no hint of parody, as in the Turkish march found most of the way through the last movement of the Ninth.  This music builds to m. 310. 

Again, a reference to martial music–instead of Beethoven’s Janissary orchestra, we have essentially an offstage banda.  Mahler, the opera conductor, seems to have borrowed this from Italian opera… anyone aware of any evidence for this?  And the percussion is essentially Janissary percussion.

Measure 380 sees another theme–only appears once in the piece, but is highly memorable, and then the opening material returns, but this time in 2/2 instead of 3/8 (with some parts in 2/4).  The music quiets itself to a return of what had been a short horn solo before–now a longer, more extensive passage that alternates offstage fanfares  with birdsong material.  The music is now centered on C#/Db.  Mahler frequently seems to make this harmonic move.

At m. 472, the “Aufersteh’n” chorale makes its fourth appearance, as the full chorus enters for the first time.  For the first time, the chorale is complete–the material on the text “Unsterblich Leben” is new to the listener.  Measure 493 is a parallel passage to earlier music–a total of three times these two passages have been paired.

What follows is a cantata, a meditation on death and resurrection.  It is, as I mentioned above, difficult to put into words.  “Bereite dich zu leben!”–Prepare yourself to live.  “Sterben werd’ ich, um to leben!”–I shall die so as to live!  The sentiment is matched in beauty by the music.  A favorite moment of mine is the entrance of the organ at m. 712 (I don’t think I’m alone in this).

In the end, the music is transcendant.  I was discussing Orff’s Carmina Burana with a student a few days ago.  There is wonderful music in that piece, and its popularity is deserved, but it pales in comparison to Mahler’s work.  In a hundred years, which will survive?  I think Mahler appeals to the human need to believe that there is more than this world, that there is something better than earthly struggles.

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Progress on “Progress”

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

We’ve been in rehearsals the last month for “Progress Through Knowledge,” my new band-with-choir piece written for the Centennial of Oklahoma Panhandle State University. I’ve been increasingly gratified with how the piece is coming together, and I’m excited about the premiere on October 8. As I wrote the piece over the summer, not knowing exactly how the two groups would come together, I agonized over the scoring, particularly in its thickness. We’ve made a few changes to the piece as the result of hearing it in the hall, but only in scoring, and generally thinning out, not adding. The real test will come a week from Monday, when the two groups come together.
I never seem to tire of this process. The real payoff is seeming a piece come to life for the first time, helping the performers to realize my vision. I’ve said before that “Music is about people,” and over the last few weeks, I’ve come to see that I still believe this. How does one apply this in the more routine situations we face as musicians and as teachers? Simply, I think it means that in music theory class, we never present only facts… we must remember that a scale or a chord progression has an emotional, human impact on the listener. We must link what we want to know about music to who we are as human beings. It is not simply enough, as I tell my students, to know that a major second comprises two half-steps, but rather we must make the major second a part of our experience… not just understand it, but breathe it, live it. Getting my students to really do this has to be my job, at least in first-year theory. An appealing approach in this regard is found in the book “Harmonic Experience” by W. Mathieu… some of his conclusions are off, but his approach–rooted in Eastern tradition–can’t be denied.
Somewhat of a ramble, but there it is…

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A break from Mahler

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

A break from Mahler, just to say a few words about my own work right now.  And before I do that, I’d like to link to John Mackey’s blog entry about writing for band vs. writing for orchestra.  I don’t agree with everything, but if composition doesn’t work out for John (and it seems  to be working out nicely), he probably can fall back on humor.  At any rate, his entry “Even Tanglewood Has a Band” is wonderfully entertaining.  I’m still not sure where I land on the issue he discusses, but it was good for a laugh.

It’s been a busy few days in my composition world.  Tuesday night was the second band rehearsal for my new band-with-chorus piece, “Progress Through Knowledge.”  I haven’t rehearsed one of my band pieces from scratch in a very long time, but this one seems to be going well.  I’m happy for the opportunity to make the little changes in scoring that I knew would be necessary.  Helping this piece be born looks to be a real pleasure.  Since many of our band students are also in the choir, there will be the inevitable conversation I have to have with Joel Garber, our new choir director, about how we will share these students.  It will help greatly that our numbers are up this year in both band and choir at OPSU.  (Recession or not, we have more students and more returning students university-wide than we’ve had in twelve years.  Sweet!)

Meanwhile, while I’m taking one of my pieces very much in hand as the premiere approaches, another is getting set for a performance this weekend in a city I’ve never visited, by performers I’ve never met, for a concert I can’t attend.  This is a first experience for me.  I wrote “Passacaglia” for flute and cello on August 2 during New Music Hartford’s 60/60 Composition Contest.  My piece was selected for a premiere on Sunday, August 30 in Hartford, Connecticut.  I’m disappointed that I can’t get there, and it feels strange to have completely “let go” of one of my children.  I’ve made myself available to the performers, so if they need advice, they can call or email, but I’m not sure the piece will require that.

Last of all is the exciting collaboration I’ve started with Dr. Sara Richter, dean of liberal arts here.  She’s written a wonderful one-act play about “Black Sunday,” Palm Sunday 1935, which here in the Panhandle saw the worst dust storm of the Dust Bowl years.  I’m working on incidental music, a first for me (although I made attempts at it during my “juvenilia” era).  I’ve decided to write the piece for piano, percussion and clarinet.  More on which later, but so far it seems to be going well.  The premiere will be during Guymon’s commemoration of Black Sunday this Spring, and will be the first piece of mine to be performed outside an academic setting in Oklahoma.

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Symphony No. 1, 2nd movement

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

I’ve long felt that a hallmark of the German symphonic tradition, beginning with Haydn and Mozart, is a degree of equality between the wind and string sections of the orchestra.  I cannot imagine writing an orchestral piece of any size that doesn’t exploit this split of the orchestra into two relatively equal (in terms of power) groupings.  It isn’t that Austro-German composers never use mixed scoring, it’s just that they seem to prefer block approaches.  This is quite apparent in in Mahler’s second movement here, which fills the role of the scherzo and trio.

The first presentation of the melody (A major), after a rollicking string introduction, is in the winds accompanied by strings.  After a transition, the melody appears a second time in the strings, with the winds as accompaniment.  A second theme then, first in the dominant (E major), then in D major.  The infamous Mahler instruction, “Schalltrichter auf!” makes its appearance.  It makes the oboes and clarinets raucous, and the horns, although stopped (gestopft) more cutting. 

In m. 56 we see a two-sixteenths-eighth rhythm against triplets–again, the roughness that results is part of the charm of this movement.

Rehearsal 11, m. 108 brings the scherzo back to the original key with an interesting “winding down” effect, as though Mahler were imitating a wind-up record player, though I wonder if he had heard such a thing.  Direct repetition, with slight changes in scoring, and then we come to the Trio, in F major, by a common tone modulation (do in A becomes mi in F).

The trio theme is derived from the scherzo theme.  Again, the wonderful economy of material we heard in the first movement.  Then through G major to C major, and a second common-tone modulation to return to the home key (mi in C becomes sol in A). 

The return of the trio material demonstrates, I think, Mahler’s reason for using seven horns in this piece.  If strings and woodwinds constitute two roughly equal groupings, seven horns bring into the realm of possibility a third group, and we see it here at rehearsal 26, where the scherzo melody returns in the horns instead of the woodwinds.  This recapitulation is dominated by the massed horn sound that creates thrilling moments whenever it appears.

The heavy brass is still not used in an independent way, as a massed choir, but does provide a fourth group that could balance the other three; later composers (led by Mahler) would find that percussion could provide a fifth such group.

As is typical of the late Romantics, the return of the Scherzo is shorter than its first appearance, but more intense, mostly through scoring.

What can this movement tell us about larger forms?  It is one of the shortest in Mahler’s symphonies, and built mostly through repetition of swathes of material, not through development–on the whole, quite typical of the designs of minuets, and later scherzi, in German music.  The transition back to the tonic in the first scherzo is wonderful–we can all learn from its simplicity, its humor, its effectiveness.  Building a form not through outright repetition but by changing scoring is a useful device, one I have used.

The introduction of the horns as a “third section” is intriguing as well.  I find that I tend more toward block scoring than mixed in my own writing as well, but it seems more appropriate in the context of this dance movement than it did in the first movement, which is much more developmental in nature.  Does anyone know if Mahler is the first composer to call for massed horns in a symphony?  We see eight horns (if you include the Wagner tubas) in Wagner, of course… but in symphonic writing?

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July Fourth Thoughts

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

It looked to be a fairly slow 4th of July around here, since Becky is back in Ohio, and we aren’t even allowed to grill out at our apartment complex.  I’m not a big fan of blowing my fingers off, so that pretty much leaves out the other favorite activity here in Guymon, setting off fireworks.  That seems to happen to me a lot.  Since high school, when I would march with the band in the morning and work at the band concession stand in the evening, I’ve had to work, or had other commitments.  My last year living in Elyria, I was working eight hour days in my apartment on a freelance arranging project that ended up paying for Becky’s and my honeymoon.  I did pull a chair over to the fourth floor window and watched the local fireworks display.  This year, I can hear them, but I can’t see them.  The first time I ever heard Ives’ Variations on America  was on the way home from work at midnight on July 3/4 on the radio.  A life-changing experience.

This year, I heard that former President George W. Bush was going to be speaking in Woodward, the closest town of any size that is still in Oklahoma.  The drive is 120 miles through the Panhandle–land that was mostly once part of the Dust Bowl and still hasn’t been much developed (not that that’s a bad thing).  The road is straight as an arrow, and I’ve done the drive several times–it’s the best way to get to Oklahoma City from where we are.

At any rate, somehow, Woodward, Oklahoma was able to get Dub-ya to come speak at their July 4th festival, Let Freedom Ring.  According to NPR, they were expecting the largest crowd since he left office.  His speech was nothing spectacular.  For a while at the beginning, I thought he was just going to do “material” a la Jerry Seinfeld for forty minutes, but he did get down to business after a while with a decent message about patriotism being something we can all take on.  He seemed more relaxed, at ease and, dare I say, happier than I’ve heard him sound in the last eight years, which is to be expected.  He spoke with a “just-folks” mannerism that the “just-folks” in Woodward loved.  I really think the arena was filled with the kind of people that keep him living in Texas.  No foundation office in New York for him.  Still, If he hadn’t been a former president, the highlight would have been the 77th US Army Band from Fort Sill.  I could have stayed for country music and fireworks, but the drive home loomed ahead.

But he is a former president.  So I think that’s why I drove 240 miles today.  Because in the United States of America, you can hear a former president speak.  In a monarchy, there are no former kings, and in a dictatorship there are no former dictators.  Every four or eight years we simply hand power to another person without civil war or executions or “disappearances.”  A former president goes back to private life and does private things.  Presidents Clinton and Carter have tried to leverage their post-presidency appeal with interesting results in one case and Nobel Prize-winning results in another.  Others have simply gone into quiet retirement–Nixon, Ford, Reagan–for personal (or not so personal) reasons.  One likes to jump out of airplanes on his birthday (Bush, Sr.).

But the beauty is that, like George Washington, they leave power behind, and no one has to look over their shoulder wondering if a former president is going to try to come back using elements of the government that have remained loyal.  And no former president has to look over his shoulder for a government assassin.  And I, a person who, admittedly, doesn’t really see eye-to-eye with much about his administration, can go hear the man speak without fear of retribution (except funny looks from people who don’t understand why I would want to go hear the man speak).

So in my own (admittedly, strange) way, it was a very interesting and unique way to observe Independence Day.  There have only been six American presidents during my life, and now I’ve been able to hear two of them speak live (I’ll never get to 100% on that score, since I missed Reagan).  One (Clinton) was at a giant stadium with 50,000 or so people who just wanted him to finish so they could get their diplomas.  And today, I think most of those people were glad to see the former president.  Some of that is politics, and some of it is culture.  I would like to think that any former president would get a similar response in this part of the world.  Perhaps that is naive.  Perhaps it’s part of what makes our country a good place–not perfect, but a fair deal better than a lot of other places.

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Library Matters, Part Deux

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Summer is a great time for big projects, right?  Especially if they’re a little bit tedious and time-consuming, and therefore much easier to accomplish when there aren’t as many students around.

So I’ve been getting a vast number of scores in our band library into protective envelopes, numbering and labelling the envelopes with the needed information, etc.  I’m now out of envelopes, after filling 809 of them (yes, if you order 800 envelopes, you might get 809 envelopes… how about that?).  I need about 1000 more to finish the job, but we were short on funds last spring when I made the order (but–the new fiscal year starts July 1, and I know what one of my first P.O.s will be…).  The pause gives me time to reflect, and to update the catalog we have on the computer.

If I were a librarian, I would have just done the deed, but since I’m the conductor who will be choosing repertoire from this library, it was only natural to make an assessment of each piece’s Wertung, as they say.  Overall, the Wertung was pretty low.  The story is that one of my predecessors bought out a music store that was going out of business, so there is a lot of, well, junk in there.  I’m a pack rat, like my father before me, so nothing’s getting thrown out, but if I were sifting and not just cataloging, the library would end up a lot smaller.

Don’t get me wrong–there is also a fair amount of usable music, and a good selection of great music, including several winners of the ABA/Ostwald Award, original band music and transcriptions of orchestra music by some great composers and even some very interesting looking pieces by completely obscure composers who may deserve to be better known, but got lost in the process of building the canon.

But the amount of schlock (from the German schlag, for mine-tailings, according to Neal Stephenson’s excellent book Quicksilver) is just amazing.  A medley of songs by New Kids on the Block.  Arrangement after arrangement of Christmas music (all you really need is Leroy Anderson).  How many versions of “Ode to Joy” do there need to be?  Cookie-cutter Grade 2 and 3 band pieces that are clearly written with no purpose in mind other than to provide something that will score well at contest.

I can’t even begin to fathom why some of the things I’ve seen were even published.  Calling your medley Great Sounds from Today’s Movies is just asking for irrelevance within a decade (this is of mid-1970s vintage).  And what is with medleys anyway?  Why aren’t arrangers creative enough to come up with at least a variation on a pop tune or (heaven forbid) a development section?  Music of the Special Olympics?  Really?  I mean, I have no problem with the Special Olympics–it’s wonderful.  But really?

And marches–the marches!  Composers–there are enough marches now.  The shortage is past.  We don’t need to write anymore marches in the traditional style.  We don’t need to go dig up anymore marches from 100 years ago and give them new “editions.”  It’s done.  Write something else.  Again, don’t get me wrong–the march style is one of the major heritages of the band world, and I program a march on every band concert.  But seriously… stop writing them!

The era of historical development in this chunk of the library spans (from what I can tell) about 40 years, from around 1950 to around 1990.  In that time, there seem to have been two major eras.  The 1950s and 1960s were the glory years for bands, but composition hadn’t caught up, so publishers were just putting out everything they could get their hands on.  Lots of marches, lots of orchestral transcriptions, and some absolutely fantastic original pieces for band.  Plenty of garbage, as well.  This is the raw material of the canon that we don’t see when we look at the Classical and Romantic periods.  The sort has been completed.  I would say that even up to about 1945 or so, in that band world, we have a fairly well-established canon or original works for band.

The second era is the real problem here.  In the 1970s and 1980s, we start to see the beginnings of the “synergy” model.  Most blatant, I think, are the very large media companies of this era such as Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures (owned by Coca-Cola at that time).  It is here that we begin to see piles and piles of pop song arrangements, movie tie-ins and TV show themes.  Adorno’s Culture Industry at work.  The result–original band composition largely stagnates (yes, there are still composers like Michael Colgrass and Joseph Schwantner doing incredible work in this era–more on that below).  As middle schools and high schools give their students a steady diet of tie-in music, serious composition shifts to the Grade 6 level, aimed at college wind ensembles (and the occasional amazing high school band).  Where is the Michael Colgrass or Joseph Schwantner of Grade 3?  (Truthfully, they are out there… it just takes some digging).

If I see one more piece that begins with trumpets playing an open fifth…

It’s early to make a verdict on the 2000s, but it seems like it has been another sort of mediocre decade for bands.  Lots of good pieces; nearly infinite bad pieces; but where is the 21st-century equivalent of Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy, Husa’s Music for Prague 1968, Colgrass’s Winds of Nagual?  Where is the music that not only is wonderful to listen to but also makes musicians think?  In the end, it probably doesn’t matter whether my students can play.  It really doesn’t matter what score a band gets at contest.  Have we used music to make musicians and audiences think?

I’ll leave you with a sobering link–C.L. Barnhouse is a major publisher of music for band, one of the three or four largest in the country.  They publish band music almost exclusively, and should be a leader in the field.  They also have a large recording arm, Walking Frog Records.  These are their Editorial/Submissions Policies.  I will be having nightmares about this for years.

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Library Matters

Monday, June 15th, 2009

One of my summer projects is getting the band library here at OPSU into a little better shape.  At  some point in the past (so I’m told), a band director here more or less bought out a sheet music store that was going out of business.  As far as I can tell, this happened about 1993 or so, judging by the vintage of much of the music involved.  This music has been shelved alphabetically and cataloged, but it doesn’t have nice storage envelopes like the older parts of the library.  So, last spring, I bought 1000 envelopes and now, summertime, I’m numbering and re-enveloping much of this stuff for the first time.

I’ve completed about 200 titles, and I can tell that the number of envelopes I was able to afford won’t be enough… this may turn out to be a multi-year project.  But I’ve discovered some things:

  • It turns out that Ohio, my home state, was at one time a hotbed of band commissions from both colleges and public schools.  Capital University, Walnut Hills High School, Oberlin High School, Carrolton High School, various honor bands.  It’s kind of cool.
  • In addition, I’m amazed at how many works I’m coming across by certain composers and arrangers:  John Tatgenhorst (another composer with Ohio connections), John Cacavas, Leland Forsblad, Warren Barker.  A funny story about Warren Barker, a very, very prolific composer and arranger who somehow never registered on my radar screen in middle school, high school, undergrad or my first few years of teaching.  Then, in about 2001, I noticed that my dad’s folder from the Greater Columbus Concert Band was just stuffed with arrangements by Warren Barker.  Then, like a new word, I started seeing Warren Barker everywhere.  For the longest time, I only saw his name on arrangements, especially of pop tunes and movie music.  I concluded that there was no Warren Barker–the type of arrangement involved suggested to me that he was just a house name, and that maybe new arrangers had their first few arrangements assigned to “Warren Barker.”  Then, I hit on the idea of searching for him on the internet.  Turns out, he’s done all kinds of Hollywood stuff–remember the xylophone thing in Bewitched?  That was his.
  • One of my predecessors here thought it was alright to take all the scores but leave the parts.  Darn it!
  • I found a piece by a man, James Jurrens, who was the director of bands at Southwestern Oklahoma State Universty–not the next closest state school, but the one after that.  The piece was actually published in Weatherford, Oklahoma, by a company which I am sure is defunct.  I need to find a concert to program this piece on, or perhaps push it toward the Oklahoma Intercollegiate Honor Band.

At any rate, that’s after four-and-a-half shelves (and I’m now through the Christmas music!).  Can’t wait to see what else is there.

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