Matthew Saunders’ Blog

It’s been a “moving wood” kind of composition weekend, meaning that I’ve been working, but mostly by Cut and Paste in Sibelius.  In addition to a quick arrangement of a Christmas carol, I now have a “preview” score (about six minutes out of twenty) for my Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.  I’ve posted it on my website, so all you pianist and conductor types should take a look.  Avguste Antonov will be giving the premiere performances during the 2014-2015 season, and there are still slots available for any orchestra who wants to get on board then.  If you’re a pianist, I’d be happy to talk to you about 2015-2016 and beyond!  Here’s the link to my website where you can download the PDF–it’s right on top of the page, so it will be easy to find.

Writing this piece has been a long-term goal and dream of mine.  I think I first thought about writing a piano concerto in about 1994, when I read Atlas Shrugged (I know, I know…), in which a fictitious piano concerto features prominently.  I’m not really writing anything else important or large-scale for the rest of 2013, and I’m hoping for five or more performances in 2014-2015 (at least, that’s how Avguste and I have written the commission).

It has, frankly, taken me years to feel like I am a composer who can pull this off, and even longer to decide that I should.  I’ve written here before about my policy of writing nothing without a commission, and one result of that is that when people aren’t beating down my door for new pieces, I’m forced to decide on my own what project I would like to pursue next, and then make it count.  I played the Beethoven Choral Fantasy for my music appreciation students last week, and remembered how it has been presented as the “warm-up” piece for the Ninth Symphony (I’m not so sure about that).  At any rate, several of my pieces over the last few years have been warm-ups for this concerto.

In 2008 or so, I made a conscious decision to focus on longer works that were also organic, rather than modular, in their construction.  One technique for building a longer piece is to write several shorter sections, and then piece them together, and I felt like my longer pieces up to that time followed that model too frequently.  It is relatively easy to write a 3-5 minute piece, or to write a string of 3-5 minute pieces to create a suite.  The first piece that I really felt break through in this way was my Piano Trio, from the summer of 2009, and I followed it the next year with my most recent band piece, Moriarty’s Necktie, from the Spring of 2011, which I think is wonderfully organic, although nothing like the concerto I’m working on now.

Then there was the problem of the piano.  My piano chops are somewhat limited, and building the confidence to write a concerto meant that I needed the confidence that I was a good composer of piano music.  Again, the Piano Trio contributed to this, but my collaboration with Dianna Anderson, first on the piano cycle Starry Wanderers (composed in 2008) and then on my Piano Sonata (2010, another effort at large-scale organic form), was the turning point in feeling that I could write piano music that a pianist would want to play.  It was Avguste Antonov’s subsequent performances of both of these pieces over the last two years that led me realize that I had found the right pianist for a concerto.

And of course, the concerto itself.  The first piece for more than two instruments that I ever wrote was a concerto for trombone and string orchestra that was my high school Senior Thesis, and which, thankfully, hasn’t seen the light of day since 1994.  Since then, I’ve written three more concerti (although none called such) for solo instrument with band–trombone, guitar and clarinet.  The premiere of Daytime Drama with Magie Smith and Kenneth Kohlenberg last year is only the most recent of these, and I will give a “second premiere” of Homo sapiens trombonensis in Granville, Ohio next month.

Last, I needed to think of myself as an orchestral composer again.  In the summer of 2012, I composed my Suite for String Orchestra (also a landmark in finding a project I wanted to do and making it happen) while I was still living in Oklahoma.  My string writing was somewhat tentative–it had been five years since an orchestra had played my music, and I had focused on band and piano.  Then, after arriving here in Ohio for my new job, I also found myself the conductor of the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, leading the group in music that I had taught to my students in the abstract–as studies in orchestration–but now dealing with the music from the standpoint of making it all work.  Two more orchestra pieces followed–an arrangement of a short choral piece, and the score for the silent film Le Voyage Dans La Lune.  Neither is an example of my “pure” compositional style, but both gave me invaluable experience with the orchestra and allowed me to apply what I was learning from my work as a conductor.

And so, the gestation has been long, but the piano concerto is coming.  I think it has been worth the wait.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 6th, 2013 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.