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The Symphony: A Golden Spike Moment

Sunday, October 20th, 2019

In May 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, working from both ends simultaneously, with a golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah. This morning, I had my own Golden Spike Moment as I completed the first rough draft of the first movement of my first symphony.

I decided to write a symphony earlier this year, from an inspiration I had several years ago. The hymn “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,” which our church sings to the tune Old Hundredth nearly every Sunday as the Doxology, struck me one Sunday as an interesting possibility, and each Sunday, as we sang it again, I was pulled closer to it, thinking about what an extended meditation on that hymn might be like. While it isn’t perfectly ecumenical, it is a broad acknowledgement of a Creator God who loves us and wants us to be happy.

Earlier this year, I was in a difficult place creatively. My mid-winter depressive tendencies seemed to strike especially hard, and must difficultly, I had only one small project with a specific deadline (a piece that I was very happy with as it turned out). Despite a promising start to 2019 in terms of performances, nothing specific loomed on the horizon either, and creatively, I felt stuck, with no specific reason to continue. I even failed to complete another piece in time for the call for scores for which I envisioned it, which turned out to be a real missed opportunity. I was wondering if I had a future as a composer. This doldrum lasted well into the summer, and a fanfare commission which should have been done in a matter of weeks dragged on, actually interfering with the symphony project. Part of me was wondering if I had a future as a composer at all.

For several years, I have been telling myself that I would write a symphony for 2021, the year I turn 45: my last attempt was a false start when I was composing my doctoral graduation piece at age 30–that piece ended up being Five Rhythmic Etudes, and the tale is cautionary, because despite a strong premiere of the outer movements, I have never heard the complete piece. Would a full-scale symphony find a place on anyone’s program? As the director of the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, I knew that if I tailored the work to their strengths, we could perform it.

In May of this year, I cast the die: doubling down on my uncertainty, I wrote a commissioning agreement, as I usually do for my compositions, only this time, I commissioned myself, for a forty-minute symphony based on Old Hundredth to be delivered in time for a November 2021 performance. The goal seemed far enough away to be possible, and I didn’t tell anyone at first. If this is my final work as a composer, then I have accomplished most of what I hoped I would do when I started writing music: I have dreamed of composing a symphony for about 30 years now.

The next step was to take the large goal and set smaller ones:

Date Goal
September 1, 2019 Planning and Sketching Completed
November 1, 2019 1st Movement Short Score
January 1, 2020 2nd Movement Short Score
April 1, 2020 3rd Movement Short Score
July 1, 2020 4th Movement Short Score
September 1, 2020 1st Movement Orchestrated
November 1, 2020 2nd Movement Orchestrated
January 1, 2021 3rd Movement Orchestrated
March 1, 2021 4th Movement Orchestrated
June 1, 2021 Full Score Finalized
August 1, 2021 Parts to Orchestra
o/a November 7, 2021 Premiere Performance

This in hand, I relaxed, and here was a mistake. My depression continued into the summer, in part because a course I had planned to teach was cancelled for low enrollment, and I just wasn’t putting the time in. I was staying up late at night and sleeping through my early-morning composing sessions, finding it difficult to get back on track. A week turned into a month, and by August 15, I had nothing sketched. I also had a fanfare for the Lakeland Civic Band that was still undone. With the start of classes at Lakeland, however, I had an incentive to reset my sleep schedule, and I got back to work. By early September, the fanfare, Mysterious Marvels, was completed, and I turned my attention to the symphony.

I began with the chorale, thinking that each phrase could be expanded into one of the four movements of the standard form. I examined the harmonizations from several hymnals, and settled on the one in use in my current church, No. 95 in the United Methodist Hymnal. In mid-September, I made a few sketches, and then created this overall plan:

The one-page outline of the first movement of my symphony.

The one-page outline of the first movement of my symphony.

The date, September 19, is somewhat later than I had hoped, but I was on my way. On the back of this page, I wrote:

What makes music “symphonic?”

  • “combining of tones”–whole is greater than sum of parts
  • development–motivic, thematic
  • explanation of a musical thesis
  • timbral variety and contrast
  • block scoring
  • weight and depth of emotional impact
  • breadth of expression and variety of means of expression
  • public, community-oriented statement meant for a broad audience

What do I want from this symphony?

  • summation of my work thus far (but do I break new ground here?)
  • statement about who I am now
  • cohesive, unified design (Panufnik, Lutoslawski)
  • playable, enjoyable for musician and listener
  • praise to God: four movements based on Old Hundredth, but is that
    • structural
    • motivic
    • more explicit?
  • but also ecumenical–invitation to praise and community, but faith is private

I began sketching on paper–a technique I have started to rely on increasingly over the last couple of years, and with the sketches I had created ahead of the one-page outline, I began to develop a plan that expressed the outline. It was only a single line of music in places, but by the end of September, it was continuous music from beginning to end of the movement. I then began to put ideas into the computer–still using Sibelius 6–and flesh them out as I described my process: a short score, with one staff for every instrument. As it happened, I started scoring the end of the movement first, from “D1” in my outline, and when I reached the end, I went back to the beginning, and so today, I reached D1 again, and drove the Golden Spike with a staccato D for low strings, oboe, and bassoon. A gentle hammer blow, since gold is soft.

This project has invigorated me: I have my usual fall energy for it, and the music has flowed easily. My years of composing have led to a workflow that I feel I can rely on: I don’t wait on the muse for inspiration–I sit down and write when it is time, and it is now time. With a movement under my belt, I am confident that two years from now, we will be rehearsing for a premiere.

And so today, I listened to my entire draft of the first movement, about 11 minutes of music. I will tweak it a little, and then lay it aside while I compose the rest of the symphony. Last week, my wife asked if she could hear it, and I had to respond that it was not yet ready–when she wakes up, I’ll tell her that it is today, because I have driven the golden spike.

 

 

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A Week of Music

Friday, October 18th, 2019

A quick post so that I can get back to the major project in which I have been immersed.

It has been a busy week for my music and for my experience of music.

A week ago, I awoke in Mattoon, Illinois so that I could drive up the road to Eastern Illinois University for my first Society of Composers conference in five years. I haven’t deliberately stayed away, but timing and location have conspired against me. I was able to enjoy five of the eight concerts, including performances of Daniel Perttu’s preludes for piano, my own Maximum Impact for jazz ensemble, and Kevin Wilson’s cello sonata. My personal highlight of the conference was James Romig’s Still. This hour-long solo piano work, with a very low density of notes, might have lulled me to sleep after a long weekend of driving and conferencing, but quite the opposite–I found the work intriguing and invigorating. The other highlight was getting to spend time with Becky, especially on Friday evening, when we reconnected with Dan Perttu and Magie Smith, who is professor of clarinet at EIU. It was practically a grad school reunion.

We left the conference early so that we could drive back on Saturday because on Sunday, I needed to attend the first Cleveland Composers Guild concert of the season at Cleveland State University. I can’t remember a stronger program, in no small part because of the performers, including Peter Otto and Randy Fusco playing Margi Griebling-Haigh’s Rhapsody and the Cavani Quartet playing Sebastian Birch’s Life in a Day. But of all eight pieces, there were really no duds. The premiere of my song And I Live With the Fiction that I Never Get Mad by Loren Reash-Henz and Ben Malkevitch went off very well, and the lyricist, Janice Reash, was in the audience and quite impressed. I wasn’t quite sure that I liked the piece until I was able to hear a performance of it, and I believe that I will keep it in my catalog, because it really does work well.

An embarrassment of riches, this week, really. Last night I went to hear the Cleveland Orchestra for the second time this season. The “build your own” subscription allowed me to pick exactly the music that I wanted to hear, and I was excited to hear Louis Andriessen’s newish work Agamemnon. Life intervened: conductor Jaap van Zweden was called to his family, and the replacement conductor, Klaus Mäkelä, was presumably unfamiliar with a work premiered by van Zweden. This was disappointing, but I determined that whatever music the orchestra would play would be excellent, and decided to not feel short-changed.

I was not wrong. A lesser orchestra would have thrown a familiar piece onto the program: a Brahms overture or the like, but we were given instead a reasonable replacement: Olivier Messiaen’s little-heard Les Offrandes oubliées. This early work was a revelation–especially the ending, which was reminiscent of Holst’s Neptune. Violinist Augustin Hadelich played Prokovief’s second violin concerto beautifully, although that work is not one of my favorites–there remain only a few violin concerti that really connect with me after all these years. After intermission, Mäkelä’s rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh was splendid: full of the life and vigor central to that work. I hope that he will be engaged again.

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Extracting Parts: Not the Worst

Saturday, September 14th, 2019

I don’t know what the worst part about being a composer is (probably the rejection), but many of my colleagues feel that making parts out of a large-ensemble score is just about the worst. I disagree: with a change in attitude and correct workflow in your notation software, extracting parts doesn’t have to extract its pound of flesh, and it can even be joyful.

Joyful? you say. How can something that is just mechanical drudgery, a chore to be completed after the long slog of creating a score that looks halfway decent–essentially the creation of twenty to forty more little scores–how can that be joyful?

My answer lies in outlook: what is it that we are really doing when we create parts?

For me, the music I create is for people: for the people who will perform it, and for the people who will hear it. I don’t write it so that I can print a beautiful score, sit it on the shelf, and put the MIDI playback on while I sip a beverage. The music needs to go out there, mingle with performers and audiences, and in so doing allow all of us to have a conversation about something. Perhaps, as Libby Larsen says, about what it means to be alive (if I have done my job).

It can’t get out there without the parts. A score is great for the conductor, but we can’t hear it without the parts. Theorists and musicologists and other composers need the score, but for a performance to happen, we need parts (unless there is going to be a page turner for every musicianon stage).

When you are making parts, you are creating the material that will allow your music to come to life. You are creating the thing that will ultimately allow someone to bring your music to life. This isn’t a chore: this is the final link in the chain, and the musicians in the ensemble are honoring you by spending time with the parts you create. You need to honor their time and effort by giving them material that is clear and easy to work with. There is no music without the parts that you are about to create.

That’s the philosophy. Now, how do we manage workflow to make part extraction less painful? (I use Sibelius v. 6, so ymmv).

The approach I’ve found is that you actually do what composers started out doing at the dawn of polyphonic music: you start out by writing the parts. This doesn’t mean some Percy Grainger setup where you write thirty parts on thirty different pieces of paper, but it really isn’t far off.

I start with a short score (a debatable practice as I discovered recently on Twitter) as my first computerized step (these days, I do a fair amount of sketching at the piano with pencil and paper first). If I’m writing a band score, one staff for each instrument or even family: there will be three b-flat clarinet parts eventually, for example, but for right now they all go on one staff, if I’m writing a band piece. If it gets very polyphonic within the section, I may jump over another staff and make a note to myself. It’s still a sketch, after all.

The next step is crucial, and it’s something that honestly took me far too long to figure out. For many years, I left dynamics and articulations to the end phase of the process, but as I’m more comfortable and mature as a composer, I am more confident  deciding on these factors earlier on. The result is this: there is quite a bit of copy-and-paste in the next couple steps, so why not copy and paste all of those dynamics and articulations right along with the notes?

Having fleshed in the short score to the degree possible, and decided that I have essentially written the piece, it is time to create the parts. In Sibelius, I create a new instrument for every part I intend to have in the final version. Each instrument gets its own staff. This is crucial. Then, I copy and paste from my short score staves into the new instruments. The result is what I call my “ultrafull” score, but it really is all the parts, with one exception: every percussion instrument gets its own staff at this point.

I will admit to being less than confident as a percussion writer. You would think, that a few decades as a trombonist sitting in front of the percussion section, or as a conductor dealing with all manner of scores and solutions to printing parts for the percussion section, I would have a little better idea. The truth is that for some reason, I am intimidated by writing for percussion the same way that I am for guitar, or organ, or accordion. Other composers may be able to think of percussion much more integrally then I do, but it seems like I always get to the end of the sketching phase, and discover that I have bars and bars of rest for the percussion section, when they should be playing a much more active role.

The ultrafull score then, is the place where I rectify my percussion writing with reality. I hope that I have by this point determined just how many percussionists are available to me, and what instruments the commissioning group has in their closet. If not, it’s time for that conversation. On my most recent band composition, I had to spend some time whittling 6 percussion parts down to 5 after the director had a slight shortfall in the back row. Once I have exploded my short score to ultrafull, I have all the parts, since the next step is to render all the individual percussion instruments into the appropriate number of parts, playable by one musician each. I strongly recommend making a chart with color coding for each percussionist so that you can think about how long it takes to change instruments, and just how much work everyone in the section will have.

The next step, once I have my “score of parts” is to reduce parts onto the staves that I want to appear in the score. In Sibelius, I am going to keep all of my single instrument staves. Some of them will appear in the score, for example, there is usually only one piccolo part. If there are the typical two flute parts however, I will create a new flute instrument that will show both parts and will end up in the conductor’s score. I have to be pretty sure that I don’t want to make many changes at this point, and if I do, I need to make sure that I change both the single player staves and the full section staff, but Sibelius’ Arrange function makes it fairly quick to get more than one part on a staff. By paying close attention to where there are unisons, rhythmic unisons, or multi-rhythmic moments, I can work through the part fairly quickly, with a minimum of error. As the Arrange dialog box always suggests, it’s best not to try more than a few measures at a time. This is also the moment, when I add a2, divisi, or similar markings.

I will typically mute these combined scores in the Mixer window, so that my single instrument staves are the ones I hear on playback. This eliminates some of the clunkiness that happens when too many instruments are on the same note. Truth be told, I am still using Sibelius Sounds as it came out of the box, partly because I am a cheapskate and all of my equipment is old, and partly because of my maxim that if you can make it sound passably good in MIDI, there is an outside chance that it might sound good with human players. If I were better at audio, I might have a different approach here.

With the score staves muted, then, the next step is somewhat ironic. To make my full score, I now hide all the staves  that are actually playing back, i.e., the staves that will be my parts. (I typically do this using Focus on Staves in Sibelius.) The staves you hear are not the ones you see, and the staves you see are not the ones you hear! This means, that if say, 1st and 2nd clarinets are playing the same music, you hear two clarinets in the playback. Again, I don’t put a lot of stock in MIDI playback, but it’s an old habit that dies hard.

With the score finalized, that is, with the score staves visible and the part staves hidden, it is time to turn to the parts. I found an old score recently that I had created in Sibelius v2, and my score was in a folder with a bunch of other scores that represented the extracted parts. I know that I am not the only person whose workflow was revolutionized by the Dynamic Parts function of Sibelius, and to this day it is one of my favorite features of the program. It means that when it is time to create parts, all of my parts are right there with dynamics, with articulations, and basically ready to go. Remembering to set as many things in the Parts menu that will apply to everything as possible, it is just a matter of opening the part, checking the layout, making sure that page turns are sensible, finding those collisions that always sneak in, and creating a PDF.

I don’t want this post to sound too much like an advertisement for Sibelius, and I can’t really speak to Finale, which I haven’t used in 15 years, or Dorico, which I have never used. I have dabbled with Lilypond, and it seems like a similar process might be possible in that program. I consider myself to be a highly proficient user of Sibelius v6, but there are lots of nooks and crannies in that program that I have yet to explore. What I can say, is that I started with an ultrafull score this morning at about 7 a.m., made a few final corrections to it, and then started extracting parts. By 10:30a.m., I had 35 parts saved as PDF files for a 4-minute concert band piece. Tomorrow, I will give them a final proofread, and then send them off. Making them was a little bit tedious, and I was glad to take a break to make breakfast for myself and my kids, but it all went very smoothly in the end. Within a month, the commissioning band will be reading from the parts I created this morning, and my goal of bringing a new piece of music to a fantastic group of people, some whom I have known for years, and some who will be playing my music for the first time, will have again been accomplished.

 

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Catching Up

Friday, April 12th, 2019

It’s been a while… still no posts in 2019? Well, this isn’t exactly true. I’ve been working on a series of posts about my first year as a public school teacher, which was 20 years ago this school year. It’s been taking up my time.

Some things that happened:

1. Four world premieres in a month

Between January 10 and February 10, I enjoyed the premieres of no fewer than four compositions:

  • Duo Capriccio by Tammy Evans Yonce in Brookings, South Dakota on January 14
  • Channels by the Blue Streak Ensemble here in Cleveland on January 17
  • Alexandrite by Trent Glass in Willoughby on February 8
  • My Uncle Was In Derry by the Chamber Music Society of Ohio in Cleveland Heights on February 10 (repeated on February 17 in Akron)

Makes one feel like a composer!

2. The Lakeland Jazz Festival, March 15-17.

Always a set of great performances, but a really nice headline act in the form of the Ralph Moore Quartet playing the music of John Coltrane.

3. College Music Society Great Lakes Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, April 5-6.

Becky and I made a nice trip out of it, thanks to my mom, who came to be with the kids for five days. I gave a paper on the Cincinnati Symphony Centennial Fanfare Commissions, a set of pieces from 1994-95 that I remember from my first year in college at CCM. I’ve only begun this scholarship, and I’d love to see someone else pick it up–there is probably a good thesis or DMA document in it. Olivia Kieffer and Zach McCoy gave a great performance of the clarinet version of Lady Glides on the Moon, and I had an excellent time talking about the sax version with Aaron Durst, who is in the process of recording it.

Becky and I spent a couple of extra days as well–it is a long drive to Menomonie! On our free day, we drove to the Twin Cities to see the Mall of America. Becky loves shopping, and I have a fascination with malls–so strange to see one that isn’t half-empty these days. I’m starting to think that I’m inspired to write a piece about malls. I have very mixed and complicated ideas about them, having seen them in their heyday of the 1980s and watched them fall into disuse.

Coming up: the premiere of First Chapter, a violin and piano piece for the Cleveland Composers Guild’s Creativity: Learning through Experience program, my fifth contribution in this vein. These are always exciting, and I’m looking forward to meeting with the violinist next week.

Work has been busy–this has been a rough year with a new dean, a new class to teach, and a search committee, all of which have been quite educational.

Becky has also gone to work–a big change in our lives at home, but one that has been good for her.

So composing has been a little on the back burner–other than the violin piece, I haven’t finished anything in 2019. I got most of the way through a setting of a short Yeats poem for choir, but didn’t get there before the deadline for the upcoming collaboration between the Guild and the Cleveland Chamber Choir, which I’ve been kicking myself for. I’ve had some encouraging experiences the last few weeks, though, so I’m getting ready to get back in the saddle.

 

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Returning to the Cleveland Orchestra

Saturday, December 1st, 2018

It hasn’t been so many months since I wrote about why I didn’t subscribe to the Cleveland Orchestra this year. With the dismissal of concertmaster William Preucil and principal trombonist Massimo LaRosa, I felt as though I could at least attend a concert with a clearer conscience, however. Hopefully, this is the first step to a more enlightened approach. I look forward to seeing if programming follows personnel in this case. I chose a concert that I would have been sure to pick as a subscriber: composer John Adams conducting his own work and that of Aaron Copland. As I said to my wife when I got home, every piece on the program was a banger, and there was no sense that I was waiting out part of the program to hear what I really wanted to see: an American orchestra performing American music, some of it from the 21st century.

One of my reasons for not subscribing was the customer service experience, and I was somewhat hesitant to buy a ticket given the iffy weather last week–I did not want a repeat of last winter’s having to forego Mahler’s Ninth symphony despite having the ticket in hand. So I put off buying until the day before the concert. The Friday night performance, unlike some Fridays, included the entire program, except for the pre-concert talk, which was not made clear on the website. I also had trouble using the website to purchase my ticket–I could not remember my password, and wasn’t able to reset the password once I had been emailed the code. I am very much in the database there–I actually received four copies of the email promoting this concert. A phone call to the box office solved the problem, however.

So–thinking I would hear the talk, I arrived an hour early, and once I found out there wasn’t to be one, I resigned myself to killing an hour until I ran into Mike Leone, who I know from my time at Ohio State, and who played trombone in the Lakeland Civic Orchestra for a time. We reconnected, and it was time well spent in the end.

The concert itself, then.  Buying my ticket late, I did not have my pick of seating locations, but I was able to find a seat that was very well-priced, and actually well-situated.  In particular, while I wasn’t any closer than I often have been, I feel like I could see and, more importantly, hear very well, and I will be looking for seats in this location in the future.

A side note: this is not my first time at Severance Hall this fall.  On October 30, I took my family to see the United States Marine Corps Band, another world-class ensemble. It was, of course, fantastic. As seating was first-come, first-served, we found seats in the Dress Circle, and the experience was very good.

The concert opened with John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine. Of Adams’ works, this is likely the most familiar, and with good reason. In fact, it is one of the pieces I emphasize in my music appreciation classes. The playing was exactly what the piece requires–precise, forceful, and on top of the beat in a way that I don’t always hear from the Cleveland Orchestra. Adams’ conducting is perhaps more suited to band than orchestra: mostly small beat patterns and a very literal approach to the stick. For Short Ride, it is appropriate, however, and it got what was needed from the musicians. Interestingly enough, after 30 years, Adams still conducts from the score for this piece (and all the others on the program). It gives this conductor-turned-composer-turned-conductor some hope. While I came to see Appalachian Spring and Leila Josefowicz, the curtain-raiser sticks firmly in my mind from last night’s program as the standout moment, perhaps because I knew immediately that I had returned on the right night.

Then to the music of Aaron Copland, and an incredible performance of Quiet City. This may be the Copland piece best suited to the Cleveland Orchestra, as it showcases this group’s incomparable string section and two of its strongest wind players–principal trumpet Michael Sachs and English hornist Robert Walters. The performance was impeccable, and, unsurprisingly, the strings seem to have adapted to the reality of acting concertmaster Peter Otto, who leads the section with confidence.

Appalachian Spring has long been one of my favorite pieces of music. For a time when I was young, it seemed like every group I was in performed the Variations on a Shaker Melody in either its band or orchestra version, but when I played the full 1945 suite in youth orchestra, it was a revelation. I normally study scores in advance of attending a Cleveland Orchestra concert, and I have the score to Appalachian Spring on my shelf, but it wasn’t really necessary in this case, although there are some things I am going to go back and look at when I get the chance.

One of my favorite Cleveland Orchestra concerts of the last few years was Marin Alsop’s rendition of Copland’s Third Symphony, so I knew that the orchestra was more than capable of presenting an inspiring performance of middle-period Copland (that said–wouldn’t it be great to hear Connotations or Dybbuk Severance? Just a thought…). This is a much tougher piece to lead than either of the two previous pieces, and Adams seemed somewhat less comfortable with it–I would be, too. He conducts mostly from the wrist and elbow, letting the stick do the bulk of the work, and saving the shoulder for bigger moments, which is similar to my approach, but this may limit his expression. I also saw more knee-work from him than I am comfortable with–since musicians can’t see your knees, for the most part, bending them isn’t particularly helpful, and can actually obscure what is happening with your upper body as you bob around in their peripheral vision.

The Orchestra, of course, takes all of this in stride, having played the piece many times. There was a tiny flub in the trumpet section, a rarity at Severance, and it was fascinating to see that lead the orchestra to sit up and take notice–tighten up in the way that the best musicians do in such situations. Overall, Adams’ interpretation was fairly strong, if not really ever unorthodox, and the musicians bought into it. While I have played Appalachian Spring and the Variations, I believe this is my first time hearing it from the audience, and it does not disappoint. I realize, now, how it truly is a suite of the ballet–it is very modular in its construction, shifting from one episode to another relatively quickly. As luck would have it, I am just completing the first draft of a piece, Channels, for the Blue Streak Ensemble, that is constructed more or less the same way, and I have been worried about whether it will convey a sense of unity. Copland here demonstrates that unity can arise from the sorts of rhythmic and melodic and stylistic variety that one finds in Appalachian Spring, and it is a balm to this composer with a looming deadline!

After the break came Adams’ own work again, his latest violin concerto Scheherazade.2, performed by its dedicatee Leila Josefowicz. I first saw Ms. Josefowicz perform when we were both teenagers–I in the audience and she onstage with the Columbus Symphony playing the Tchaikovsky. That vogue for very young violinists seems to have passed–and that whole generation (Josefowicz, Sarah Chang, Joshua Bell) has gone on to show that our excitement over them was not unfounded.  Josefowicz did not disappoint in the slightest, although Adams’ orchestration at times threatened to overpower her–this is suprising after reading his thoughts on his experience with his first Violin Concerto in the late 1980s in his memoir Hallelujah Junction. In his remarks from the podium, Adams admitted that his first experience with Scheherazade is Rimsky-Korsakov’s tone poem of the same name which, ironically, would have demonstrated a more careful approach to balance between solo violin and a large orchestra.

This is an interesting piece at this moment, and Adams admitted to this as well. I consider myself an ally to feminism, and it is clear that Adams does, too. Yet, is he the one who should be writing this piece? Aren’t there enough examples of men telling women’s stories? The other component of this work is its attempt to deal with male violence against women, and this is certainly a poignant moment for the Cleveland Orchestra to present such a piece, coming less than a month after the ouster of two misogynist members. In the notes, Adams states that the work is a “true collaboration” between himself and Josefowicz, and I would be curious to see how that collaboration unfolded. (Copland, of course, worked very closely with choreographer Martha Graham in creating Appalachian Spring, with Graham going so far as to suggest specific rhythmic ideas as well as the scenario–perhaps this is the reason Adams programmed the pieces together).

That said, I will be giving Scheherazade.2 more listening and score study. It is a kaleidoscope of orchestral effects and in juxtaposition with Short Ride in a Fast Machine, one sees just how far Adams’ style has progressed over the three decades since he came to prominence. One misses, at times, the organic, unified approach to a composition that his more minimalist-inflected work brought, but this is truly a different language, and Adams has long insisted that he never meant to be a minimalist. The cimbalom adds an interesting tonal element to the work as well, providing a link between the harp and the rack of tuned gongs in the percussion section. What I heard was good, but as the only work on this concert that was unfamiliar to me, I will have to return to it.  With Josefowicz having performed the piece 50 times in three years, it hopefully is finding a permanent place in the repertoire.

And so I returned to the Cleveland Orchestra, as was inevitable. It felt right, and I felt the joy I always hope to feel when I go, that I should always feel when I go. I felt both comforted and challenged, and I felt like the musicians had something important to say about the music they were making.  In all, it was time and money well-spent, and if it is professional development, I feel that I grew as a musician last night.

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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.

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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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Summer?

Thursday, August 24th, 2017

All summer, I kept meaning to post something–I was somewhat lazy, but a few things happened, so here is an update.

I’ve started and finished two pieces since May.  My new work for Galo Arboledo is On a Clear Night You Can See Forever for violin and piano, and is an ode to the Shafran Planetarium at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.  We are hoping to premiere the piece in the Museum on a Cleveland Composers Guild concert on November 26, but we’re still awaiting the decision of the program committee on that.  The piece is a fantasy that explores the wonders of the Universe, starting close to home with the aurora, and zooming out to the ultimate panorama.  More updates on this piece in the near future!

I’m also ready to send copies of my first big band piece to Ed Michaels, who will premiere it with Lakeland Jazz Impact this year.  Appropriately, the title is Maximum Impact.  I’m always pleased when my work can intersect with my job in some way.  Jazz Impact has a storied history, and is the only high school honors jazz band in Northeast Ohio.

A big first for me was conducting the Resonanz production of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortileges.  I can now call myself an opera conductor.  Even just conducting a piano-vocal arrangement was an amazing challenge, and while I felt some trepidation, I’m glad that I took it on.  I’m also pleased to be working with a group that is bringing serious music to Lake County, where, outside the schools, there isn’t enough.

The Lakeland Civic Orchestra will start up on Monday.  I’m excited to see our group again, and it looks like a good season ahead.  We are starting our season with a concert on November 5 that includes Massenet’s Ballet Music from Le Cid, Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, and Alice Mary Smith’s The Masque of Pandora.  It is always hard to choose music for the orchestra–nothing too easy, nothing too hard, and always the knowledge that whatever I pick we have to live with for a few months while we prepare it.  Sam Rotburg, violin faculty at Baldwin Wallace University, approached me with the idea of the Beethoven Triple a couple of years ago, and that is now coming to fruition.  His wife and colleague Sungyeun Kim will play piano, and Chauncey Arecet will play cello.  The Massenet is a piece I first encountered in college in a band transcription, and when I was playing the CD in the car recently, Noah reminded me that he had heard it in a cartoon, as well.  The odd duck, then, is the Smith.  A composer who deserves to be better known, certainly.  I resolved this season to begin to make more of an effort to include music by under-represented voices in our concerts, after I realized that Jennifer Jolley’s Ferry Crossing was the first piece by a female composer that we had played in the five years that I have conducted the group.  The challenge, then, is that we are not a new music ensemble, so I need to educate myself and find repertoire by female composers and composers of color of the past.  Hence, Alice Mary Smith.  Since her style is close to Mendelssohn, she will fit nicely into what we do, and I’m excited to give the local premiere of this piece.  If the Cleveland Orchestra won’t do any better than it has in programming diversely, the Lakeland Civic Orchestra can lead the way.

We had a wonderful trip in June to Dearborn, Michigan to see the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village.  It was great family time, as we stayed at “the pink hotel” and absorbed some of the history of our nation.  The Henry Ford is really a Smithsonian West in many ways, and Noah was especially excited about seeing the chair Abraham Lincoln was sitting in when he was assassinated.  I’m moved that my kids were able to sit in the same bus that Rosa Parks was arrested in, and a little stunned that the exhibit on consumer technology now includes things I had in my house as a high schooler.  We also lived more history at Hale Farm and Village here in Cleveland, when we attended their Civil War reenactment earlier this month.  Noah has developed in interest in this, and he was fascinated by it, of course.  My first orchestra conducting gig was conducting artillery reenactors for the 1812 Overture, but I had never been to an encampment like this.  The tough part of it all, is trying to explain why people do this–not only to my son, but also to my sister-in-law Connie and her two nieces, who were visiting from Germany.

I also took Becky to see Billy Joel perform at Progressive Field in July.  I’m glad we went, but the musician in me found it too loud.  I can’t imagine a concert by a group meant to be loud.  He only sings hits now, of course, since he hasn’t had a new album in 15 years.  He threw in a couple of deep cuts, but mostly, everyone got to hear what they came to hear.  One of my favorite sights of the evening was a man wearing a Fantasies and Delusions t-shirt.  That is a true Billy Joel fan, and having had my music on the same program as some of those pieces (thanks, Avguste Antonov), it’s fun to know that I’m artistically connected to such a big name.  I’ve always loved his music, even before I realized it was his music, and I’m glad I had a chance to see him while he is still performing.  Not bad for my first stadium concert.

Now fall semester looms.  Noah is back in school, everyone who has visited has visited, and it’s time to open the folder called Compositions Fall 2017.  Ahead of me are a trio for piano, violin, and trumpet for Troika Melange; a piece for soprano and jazz trio for Carrie Hennessey; and possibly some songs for a connection from Resonanz.  Dianna Anderson has agreed to premiere Sisters in Stone, but we haven’t figured out when; I would like to do it at the High Museum of Art, since the statues that inspired it come from there.  I would like to get Twenty Views of the Trombone out there as well.  I hope to present it at Lakeland and in some other college venues this year.  I’m also hoping to return to the CMS circuit, since their Great Lakes Regional conference is in Columbus, and I wouldn’t have to spend my entire travel budget on one trip.  I had a great opportunity to reconnect with Nancy Joy, who commissioned South Africa, my horn and marimba piece which is just about my greatest hit.  She is planning to record the work sometime this year, which will be another boost for that surprise success.

Where did the summer go?

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On the Horizon

Monday, May 1st, 2017

I managed to get nothing up here in the month of April, but it has been a busy time.

In the past two months, I have completed one piece, A Clarion Voice is Ringing and it has been premiered at the installation of the president of the University of Dayton.  I’m very close to wrapping up Sisters in Stone, although I’m not sure that this is the final title.

Happily, new opportunities have also presented themselves, and I have three projects that will take me into next fall.

I will be writing a piece for violin and piano for Galo Arboleda, a violinist recently graduated from Kent State University who was our substitute concertmaster in the Lakeland Civic Orchestra earlier this year.  I approached Galo, and I will submit the resulting piece to a planned Cleveland Composers Guild concert at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in the fall that is looking for works inspired by science and nature.

Last month, Alan Wenger, trumpet professor at the University of Central Missouri, approached me about writing for his ensemble Troika Melange.  I will be composing a piece for trumpet, violin, and piano, which they will take on tour overseas, and record in 2018-2019.

Finally, a first for me, Ed Michaels has asked if I would write a piece for Lakeland Jazz Impact, the all-star high school jazz band.  I’ve never written for big band, although I’ve always wanted to, and I’m looking forward to trying out that language.  The premiere of that piece would take place in Spring of 2018.

It’s good to have work!

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Work in Progress–Sisters in Stone

Thursday, March 30th, 2017

I had a fantastic trip to Georgia last month, over the first part of Presidents Day weekend.  I flew to Atlanta on Wednesday, February 15, and drove straight to Blairsville, Georgia where I stayed with Leigh Miller and her wonderful family for two nights.  Leigh is the professor of clarinet at Young Harris College, a school nestled in the mountains of North Georgia.  On Thursday, I met with students and gave a masterclass, which was a discussion of my work through a series of excerpts of Twenty Views of the Trombone.

Then on Friday morning, it was off to the big show.  Olivia Kieffer, a fellow CCM alum and transplant to Atlanta, booked me for the Composers Concert series at Eyedrum, a wonderful little venue right in the heart of downtown.  I decided that this would be the premiere performance of the complete Twenty Views of the Trombone.  After a relaxing sunny afternoon, I headed over to the gig.  The crowd was small, but enthusiastic, and the music was well-received.  If you want to read more about it, check out Mark Gresham’s review for the ArtsATL blog, which tells the whole story.

I then found myself with a full day on Saturday and no commitments beyond an early-evening flight home.  Not needing to be at the airport until about 5pm, I decided to visit Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.  I found parking within a couple of blocks on the street, and began to walk.  It was a rainy day, so I was beginning to be glad to have chosen an indoor activity.  Before I got to the High Museum, though, I discovered MODA, the Museum of Design Atlanta, directly across the street and decided to check it out.  While not particularly extensive or comprehensive, their exhibit on designing for sustainable food was fascinating and thought-provoking.

The rest of the day I spent at the High Museum.  As is to be expected in a younger city like Atlanta, the strengths of their collections are in newer works, but in somewhat niche areas.  I was particularly affected by their current exhibition, Cross Country, which groups works by the part of the United States they depict.  Having visited most regions of the United States, I felt a deep connection with many of the works, but I kept coming back to Dorothea Lange’s well-known photograph Migrant Mother.  Despite having seen it reprinted countless times, seeing it up close, in large format, and in its original medium was revelatory.

It was a part of the High Museum’s permanent collection, though, that has spurred my creative imagination.  The High displays a number of life-size or near-life-size marble sculptures, many of full-length female figures.  I was drawn first to Giovanni Benzoni’s The Veiled Rebekah, displayed at the top of the ramp to the second level, and as I walked through that gallery, an idea for a piece began to take shape.  Benzoni’s Rebekah, depicting the Biblical daughter-in-law of the patriarch Abraham, captured a woman at the moment of meeting her destiny–brought from her homeland by a servant, she pulls her veil over her face just as she is about to meet her husband  for the first time.

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Benzoni’s The Veiled Rebekah

Other statues in the area seemed to be captured in similar moments.  I had been in search of a new composition project, and I found the inspiration in these four subjects.  Two on the cusp of tragedy:  William Wetmore Story’s Medea holding the knife while she contemplates her revenge;

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Story’s Medea

Chauncey Ives’ Pandora with her infamous box;

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Ives’ Pandora

and one, more peaceful, yet pensive, Hiram Powers’ La Penserosa, the thoughtful one.

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Powers’ La Penserosa

Each is a depiction of a woman on the cusp of something momentous–named or unnamed–as she considers her destiny.  Each also is a product of the interaction with and imagination of a male-dominated world, and each is sculpted by a man who interprets these moments and emotion.  And now this man composes a piece about the four of them:

Earlier this month, I began a new work for solo piano with the tentative title Sisters in Stone.  Unusually for me, I have not made plans with a specific pianist for a premiere, and I’m not writing on commission.  Borrowing a concept from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, I’m creating a musical walk through the gallery, considering each statue in turn.  The walk begins with music I call “lattice” representing the stone from which the sculptors created these images–I’m unclear about whether I will actually keep this music that currently precedes the section depicting La Penserosa, followed by Medea, The Veiled Rebekah, and Pandora.  I may return to the lattice music at the end–my intent at this point is a single-movement piece of about 12 minutes’ duration.  I hope to have it completed by the end of April, and ready for a performance (and a performer) sometime after that.

 

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A View of Twenty Views, part 4

Thursday, February 9th, 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.

Read the third post, specific comments on the eighth through the fourteenth 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 the last six pieces, in the order in which I am currently planning to play them at the premiere.

15. What They Might Think It’s Like

Another of the group of pieces written in 2016 to bring Twenty Views of the Trombone to completion.  This is the only political piece in the group, and I have generally not been a political composer.  The revelations of warrantless wire-tapping and domestic surveillance by the United States government, however, are concerning and troubling to me, and this piece imagines snips of phone conversation that might be misconstrued or misunderstood as they are picked up by massively parallel copies of speech recognition software in a government computing center.

16. What It Might Have Been Like (II)

Another of the 2016 crop of pieces–a bumper crop, if there is one, since completing the piece for the upcoming premiere required writing as many pieces as I had already composed.  In 2007, after applying to full-time college teaching jobs across the United States and in Canada, I accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Bands at Oklahoma Panhandle State University.  It was as far off as it sounds, but my wife and I learned to love the people there, if not always the place itself, and we look back on it as a wonderful adventure in our lives.  It was also where we found our family, since both of our children were born there (although, not to us–adoption is a wonderful thing).  In 2012, we moved back to Ohio, again after an intense job search on my part.

In Oklahoma, the wind never stops, and in the Panhandle, it seems particularly strong all the time.  The first really windy night, Becky and I lay in bed in our apartment wondering if the roof of the building would be torn off, but we soon came to realize that it was nothing special.  We could have stayed in the Panhandle–our chief unhappiness was the distance from our families (a two-day drive).  “What It Might Have Been Like (II)” imagines a counterfactual in which we stayed there.

17.  What It Could Be Like (III)

This piece, also from 2016, wraps up the “life after death” group of pieces, which considered first oblivion, and then Heaven.  This final piece imagines Hell.  Gary Larson’s The Far Side gave two images of musical hell:  Charlie Parker trapped in a soundproof room with easy listening music, and a conductor being led by the Devil to his room, filled with banjo players.  I truthfully find it harder to imagine Hell than it is to imagine Heaven.  I can imagine unpleasantness and pain, but to imagine them going on for eternity is another thing.  All of our metaphors likely fail.  So, perhaps this: just as the music seems to get good, it is interrupted, and the interruption, becomes the final word.

18.  What It’s Like at the End

Another piece from 2016, in fact, the last piece to be composed.  In a way, this is a slower, more reluctant answer to the assignment that inspired “What It’s Like” in the first place–a one-minute composition that describes the experience of playing trombone.  Have I answered this question completely in Twenty Views of the Trombone?  I have left something crucial out, perhaps, and that is the resting.  Trombone players are great at counting rests, which is probably why we’re called upon to do it all the time.  As I’ve been preparing to play this entire piece, it is not lost on me that playing a forty-minute composition with no long rests is a very rare experience for a trombonist–I am pleasantly relieved that my chops seem to be up to the task.  Last night (February 5) I played through the complete piece for the first time, and it is a testament to the great teachers I have had over the years that I didn’t come out particularly fatigued at the end–not ready to do it all again, perhaps, but not completely exhausted, either.  I can thank Tony Chipurn and Joseph Duchi for their guidance in this area–I’ve been fortunate to have had two great teachers with different approaches.

19.  How I Remember What It Was Like

The other piece composed in the summer of 2013 for a first performance with the Cleveland Composers Guild in September of that year.  Over the last few years, I have been writing pieces that give into a sense of nostalgia that I have felt increasingly.  Both “How I Remember What It Was Like” and my 2015 orchestra composition …into the suggestive waters…  explore this aspect of my inner life–something I outwardly denied myself for a long time. Both pieces reflect on my childhood and teenaged years growing up in Columbus, Ohio, and both are centered on a motive derived from one of the Remington Warm-Up Studies for trombone.  “How I Remember What It Was Like” recalls my experiences in high school band, when playing the trombone slowly changed from something I did to something at the center of my college and career plans.  This piece also contains quotations from my high school fight song, “Stand Up and Cheer,” (borrowed from Ohio University) and “Simple Gifts,” a tune which kept appearing through high school, first in Copland’s Variations on a Shaker Melody (in both band and orchestra versions), then in John Zdechlik’s Chorale and Shaker Dance, then, in youth orchestra my senior year, in Copland’s full Appalachian Spring.

20.  What It’s Really Like

The last piece in the cycle is from 2009, and was first performed that year on a faculty recital at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, and then formally premiered at an Oklahoma Composers Association Salon Concert in Norman, Oklahoma.  Once I realized that there was going to be a Twenty Views of the Trombone, and that it would grow and develop over a period of years, adding pieces as they were needed, I decided that the best way to tie the entire group together would be with a closing piece that echoed the opening piece, “What It’s Like.”  So, every performance since 2009 has begun with “What It’s Like,” and ended with “What It’s Really Like,” and any partial performances should do the same.  In fact, all of “What It’s Like” is contained within “What It’s Really Like,” making the first movement a synecdoche of the last movement.  Both, in their ways, are synecdoches of the entire work, and of the experience of playing trombone, and perhaps, of the experience of listening to trombone music.  “What It’s Really Like,” then, amplifies “What It’s Like” by extending phrases, by repeating some ideas, and by inserting additional developmental material.  The piece ends where it began, and the composer ends where he began–a man who loves to play the trombone, and wants everyone to know What It’s Really Like.

 

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, the third describes the eighth through fourteenth pieces, and the last will answer questions about the piece, received from facebook and Twitter.

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