Archive for December, 2008

Op. 90

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

I’m closing in on the end of this project–one Beethoven Piano Sonata each month until they’re done.  Today I’ll put down what I think about Opus 90, Sonata No. 27 in E minor.

The opening phrase reminds me of where Romantic piano music was headed–it could be a Schubert impromptu, and there is a great deal of music in here that sounds very off-the-cuff–Mozart would have probably called this piece a fantasia, not a sonata.  However, the colors that Beethoven obtains from the instrument over the course of the piece (both movements) are quite wonderful.  I don’t recall Beethoven changing key signatures within a movement before (although, now that I think about it, the funeral march of Opus 26 goes from seven flats to four and back).  The change to C-major (at least in name… the key is actually the Neapolitan, F at that point) is interesting, and happens in both movements).  Interestingly, the end of the development section seems to hang out on the tonic instead of the dominant in the first movement. 

The second movement–a lovely sonata-rondo.  Again, the improvisatory nature seems reinforced by things like the triplets in the accompaniment at the end of the first episode, when the rest of the piece is sixteenths.  I don’t know that I have ever noticed the trick in the 2nd episode in music prior to this–Beethoven is in the key of c-minor, and needs to be in c-sharp minor to get back to the home key… in a trick beloved by every choral arranger since 1975, he substitutes a dominant on G-sharp for one on G… who knew that Beethoven could be so lazy!?  I heard the funny movement, and expecting to see some crazsy enharmonic thing out of the back of the theory book, here is the lamest, least-tonal (what would Schenker say here?) way to get to the key you want.  I was shocked!  (Is there a name for this device?)

Some writing follows that is almost as if Beethoven wished he were writing for string quartet or orchestra–the tied half-notes just cry out for winds!  I wonder how much he was thinking about the seventh and eighth symphonies at this time?

David Morneau on Kalvos & Damian

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

I’m listening to David Morneau’s extended interview with Kalvos and Damian on www.kalvos.org.  If you haven’t listened to these blissfully long conversations with composers, I suggest you head over there right now.  I find David’s music to be compelling and his approach to it to be uncompromising… so if nothing else, you get to hear his stuff.  Head on over…

An old piece revived…

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Last night, I went to Santanta High School to hear Daniel Baldwin conduct the Satanta High School Band’s performance of a piece I hadn’t heard in about seven years, my Variations on a French Carol.  I gave Daniel the score and parts when I visited him last year, knowing that he was interested in new music, but not really thinking that anything would come of it.  Daniel, however, took the ball and ran with it, and last night gave an admirable performance.

I wrote the Variations in 2001, when I was the band director at Northeastern High School in Springfield, Ohio.  It was the first piece I ever wrote for a large ensemble, and the first major piece of mine to get a performance.  Since then, I have moved on in style and in some of my ideas, but in the piece you can see that I’ve long been fascinated with rhythm–things like hemiola, asymmetrical meters and metric modulation.  In retrospect, it was a tall order for a smallish high school band, but we pulled it together admirably.

What I’ve always loved about the piece is that it isn’t “typical” Christmas music.  I’ve never been able to stomach the idea of starting Christmas music with a school group in October and playing a medley of medleys of the same tired melodies, all in (of course) B-flat major.  The Variations is a good teaching piece–each section is a study in a different style and texture.  Each instrument that was available to me gets a moment in the spotlight.  The piece was received well at its premiere in 2001, and at its “second premiere” last night.

In memoriam Ed Nickol

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

I just got an email forward from Lou Driever, band director emeritus at Northeastern High School, where I used to teach.  Lou is a fantastic human being and was a mentor to me when it was my turn to get raked over the coals at Northeastern.

The message was from Francis Laws, who just retired from teaching low brass at Wright State University.  I got to know Lou and Francis (“Buddy”) when we all played together in the Ohio Valley British Brass Band under the baton of Mr. Ed Nickol, a fixture in the world of school bands in western Ohio.   The message said that Ed left band rehearsal early  and died in the hospital last night.

People who know me know that I am a proponent of community musical ensembles.  The idea of people just getting together to play and make music is one that brings me joy.  When I played with the OVBBB, from 2000 to 2002, our musical product was of a high quality, and Ed got it out of us the old-fashioned way–by cracking the whip, and sometimes by hurting our feelings.  I imagine rehearsals with Fritz Reiner to have been slightly less intense than our Thursday night sessions at Wright State used to be.  Ed was hard to work with (or work for).  People with thinner skins and less devotion to music than he had sometimes quit the band–often in mid-rehearsal.  But even if he didn’t always remember that we were supposedly doing this for fun, Ed was someone whose band I wanted to play in.  Ed was a yeller and a screamer and an all-around passionate person of a type that doesn’t make it as a music educator these days.  People a little older than me and younger won’t sit still for the kind of martinet tactics that were a weekly feature of OVBBB rehearsals.  As much as I try to be the musician that Ed was, I almost never want to be the type of person he was on the podium.

On the other hand, he was uncompromising, relentless and authentic.  If it wasn’t worth doing right, it wasn’t worth doing for Ed.  I have a CD of some recordings–of dubious technical quality, since they are of live performances–but they capture what it was like to play in the OVBBB:  polished, taut, unashamed, and unafraid of difficult music, but always, always, music that was worthwhile.  Even some of the garbage that we played became worthwhile because Ed would seek out the good in a well-arranged version of a bad piece of music.  If it could be played well, it could be good music.

This is exactly the reason I encourage non-students to play in the band at OPSU.  Between Ed’s group on Thursday nights and another group, the Sinclair Community College Wind Symphony, on Wednesdays, the practice of community music-making brought me out of my shell, gave me someplace to go, someplace to play, and sometimes, a reason to keep going through the rest of the week during my time in Springfield.  Without those places to just make music, I might have drifted off into some other career entirely.

I also learned how to “do” marches from Ed–how to hose them out and make them into musical entities that are exciting and fun to play instead of the drudgery many think them to be.  I don’t see how someone can be a band director in America without knowing how to rehearse and conduct a march, and I didn’t learn that in college–I learned it from Ed.

Ed also encouraged me in composition, a little bit, and certainly without knowing where it would lead.  I showed him a piece called See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and he was all set to read it one Thursday night, but had mislaid the parts.  Someday, I hope that piece will get played, but the fact that he was willing to look at it gave me hope that I could write music for groups other than the ones I directed.

When I left the OVBBB to move out of town, I didn’t do a good job of keeping in touch.  A year later, when I asked Ed for a reference for graduate school, he turned me down, saying that he didn’t know me and my work well enough.  I never really made any effort after that, but I wish I had.

Somewhere–I hope in heaven, but I’m not completely sure–Ed is cracking the whip for the best band you ever heard and getting them to play better than they think they need to.  It might be “The Melody Shop” or just Mike Gallehue’s “ragged” arrangement of “Salvation is Created.”  It sounds glorious.  Play the snot out of it, Ed.