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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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A View of Twenty Views, part 3

Monday, February 6th, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. What It Will (Not) Be Like

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

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

9. What It’s Like After a Cup o’ Joe

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

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

10. What It Could Be Like (II)

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

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

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

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

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

12.  What It’s Not Quite Like

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

13.  What It Might Have Been Like (I)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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