Social Media Thoughts

December 15th, 2022

Now that I have a working blog again, I might as well contribute to it.

Really, I’m surprised I haven’t been here more, since I’ve fallen away from social media almost completely. I mostly gave up the Time-Zuck (you know, Zuckerbook) several years ago because I got more interested in the Bird Site, and from about 2016 to 2021, it became a raging habit, even if I didn’t have a blue checkmark. At New Years 2021, the Bean Dad thing went down, and that really bothered me: I was a fan of one of that guy’s podcasts with a certain gameshow host. It reminded me of the old Car Talk show on NPR in a lot of good ways: just friendly, good-natured guys talking about interesting stuff. I was picking up lunch for my family at the drive-through, and scrolling through the sudden vitriol pointed at the guy, just agape. I haven’t listened to that podcast since, but I also decided to take a break from the Bird. That break lasted about five months, when, still pretty COVID-isolated, I got into it again for the rest of 2021. I felt duped, so I decided to go on Bird hiatus again around Christmas 2021, and this time it has more or less stuck, with a check-in or two. The last time I checked in was just as a certain billionaire was purchasing the site, and the panic among my contacts there sort of led me to believe that being off was probably for the best, so: app deleted. My first follow and follower there, and former teacher and now colleague, Wes Flinn, said he was thinking about getting his blog life going again (go check out his blog), and that may indeed be a good idea. At the very least, more intentional than everyone’s formerly favorite microblogging site.

And to both of the tech billionaires to whose sites I have given massive amounts of time, effort, and probably my soul to, I say, “I want my 2010s back.”

I don’t know what my life would have looked like since 2007 without social media: when it exploded in the late ’00s, I was teaching in rural Oklahoma without access to much of a classical music scene, to say nothing of a new music scene. Late in my graduate work, my advisor Don Harris told me that he was fairly sure I would keep composing, unlike some of his former students, but I’m not so sure how that would have gone without the connections I remade on Zuckerbook between 2008 and 2010. I got back in touch with a lot of people from my stints at Ohio State and Cincinnati. In some cases, they were people I hadn’t talked to in over a decade. A few of them commissioned me, a couple of others performed my music, and one, Dianna Anderson, did both. That site connected me to the outside world in a way that email and surfing the Net wouldn’t have, I think. I’ve often said that I have a composition career because of Zuckerbook, and I don’t really think that’s untrue. I’m lousy at keeping in touch.

I wasn’t able to replicate that on the Bird site. I would follow people, they would follow me. One musician reached out to me, and a piece resulted, but my DMs pointed in the opposite direction never really bore fruit. I don’t know if everyone was too busy talking past each other, or what. But, honestly, in my conductor persona, I can rarely do much for a composer who contacts me, whether they have a piece in hand or not: it usually isn’t a matter of whether I like their music or would want to work with them, but rather a case of just only having so many slots for new music in the season.

Speaking of keeping in touch, I’ve definitely been in touch with my relatives more, although not my parents, who saw social media for the steaming load of nothing that it is from the very beginning: I still have to call my parents. A few of them I discovered that I really wish I was able to have a deeper relationship with in person.

But a thing that was fun quickly became a thing I felt obligated to look at, and then it became something I just did without thinking about. We got smartphones in 2015 or so, and then I could sit on the couch with Becky in the evenings as we do and scroll through the social feed. I added the Bird site in 2016 when Noah’s first grade teacher said she’d be using it (spoiler: she had moved on to another app and didn’t use it once the whole year). But I was there through the 2016 election and everything that resulted from that, and the cool thing about the Bird site was that I was sort of in the bubble of musicologists, music theorists, and academic composers, for what it was worth, all trading pithy little lines and feeling more collective outrage than I can ever remember experiencing, all without the noise of the perpetual high school reunion of Zuckerbook.

And I told them so much… stuff just put out there for the public to see. My kids’ early lives are largely documented on Becky’s Zuckerbook account, and I don’t know how I feel about that. Most of my 30s and early 40s are on Zuckerbook and the Bird. I became middle-aged on social media (disclosure: my mother says I’ve been middle-aged since preschool). I don’t know if my history is a motherlode for some data mining bot, but it’s there, ready to be used to shape my consumer preferences or to try to influence my vote, or train facial-recognition AI. I don’t know why someone as paranoid as I am about being watched even got pulled into it as fully as I did (I joined Zuckerbook in 2007 because a commissioning ensemble wanted to be able to connect me to their members during the composing process). It was all fun and cool and interesting and titillating… until it wasn’t.

We’ve all been there, probably. I remember the moment I really started to think that TV wasn’t worth my time anymore. I was cleaning up at the end of art class in eighth grade, in 1989 or 1990, and I wound up standing at the sink next to a girl I had a crush on. I asked her if she had seen Friday’s episode of Family Matters, and she sneered and replied, “Why would I watch that crap?” I didn’t quit watching TV, but I started to feel a little more jealous of the time I was spending with it, just in time for high school, when more interesting things were starting to make demands of me anyway. For a few years as an adult, I lived alone and didn’t have a TV. On a rare visit, my brother noticed and said, “Oh, you must get a lot done.”

I loved email when I first got online. I didn’t really know that there was much more to the internet than that when I got started. The time my friends and I spent writing serial epic adventure stories parodying everyone we knew was precious, and we still talk about it when we get together: but it was also time I could have been in the practice room, or socializing in real life, or exploring the city. At one point, I got onto Trombone-L, a listserv, and would spend hours each evening engaging in the world of the trombone with–who? I have to say I can’t even remember.

So social media isn’t my first rodeo with overconsumption of screen-based stuff. And there may be something about the screen. My trombone teacher in middle school once told me that, growing up in the 1940s, he was never all that interested in radio, but that he found television’s pull extremely difficult to resist when it came along. At the very least, I’m not the only one (isn’t that what the great lesson of the Internet has been: whatever our interest or neurosis or kink or secret obsession is… we’re not the only one).

One of the social media projects that I’m proudest of was the Cleveland Composers Guild Piece of the Day. From March 2020 to March 2022, I scoured the websites and social media accounts of our members and found a different piece to post each day to the Guild feeds. I even helped some members get pieces out there that weren’t posted anywhere else. It kept the music coming from our group when we were somewhat limited in what we could do live. I’ve only gotten thank yous and positive feedback about it.

My experience of Piece of the Day was different, though. During lockdown, when I had time on my hands, it was something to do. Listening to people’s music was a way of staying connected to the world of new music. That progressed through most of 2020 and 2021, when I was primarily working from home. Eventually, I made a spreadsheet, and realized that a daily appointment to find a piece and post it wasn’t always possible, so I would work ahead. Making daily posts turned into a weekly moment to pre-load and schedule the posts. By the end of 2021, I wasn’t even taking the time to listen to the pieces I was highlighting–I just needed to stay ahead of my last post so I didn’t have to worry about breaking the chain. It was a grind, and it was a discipline. And the number of likes and comments and the rest were usually pretty small, vanishingly so. As much as it was a part of my routine, it had become just so much noise and shouting into the void. So, after talking to my fellow officers, I ended Piece of the Day. Everyone was effusive in their gratitude, but now, most of a year later, no one has really said that they miss it.

And so much of social media–especially the Bird site the last couple of years–has felt like shouting into the void (as much as this blog is, too, so there, Web 2.0!). I can’t even remember the last time I looked at Zuckerbook in any kind of serious way. Oh, once in a while I’ll follow a link there or get pulled in by an email about someone making a post, but it’s more satisfying to live my life IRL, even if it makes my world seem smaller.

Because of all that time! What could I have done with all that time I gave those two sites? How could I have been a better husband, father, Christian, composer, conductor, teacher? I’ve become fatter, tired-er, and worse at trombone. Can I really blame social media for that? I don’t know, but it didn’t help. What could I have done with all that time? What could all that mental energy and attention given to the people in the tiny glass rectangle–most of whom I’ve never met, will never meet, or haven’t talked to in twenty years–where would I be without it?

I suppose my job in the rest of the 2020s is to live out the answer to that question. I may have lost the 2010s to a couple of billionaires, but it doesn’t have to keep being that way.

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Back with Beowulf

October 9th, 2022

A few weeks back, I had an exchange with my Lakeland colleague Natalie Hopper after reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf over the summer. I immediately thought, “hey, this would make a good blog post,” after not posting anything since March. So I jumped over to the old website, and quickly discovered that there was A Problem, and I was unable to log in. Fast forward eight crazy weeks of teaching and parenting, and I was able to get things worked out with my hosting service, so now I give you my take on Beowulf, translation, transcription, and arranging.

In music, we have something similar to translation, namely arranging or transcribing music originally for one ensemble to be playable by a different ensemble, say, taking a piece written for organ and turning into something for concert band. It’s been done throughout the ages, by just about everyone: Bach reworked his own music, along with music by people like Vivaldi, into new combinations, and Beethoven actually paid a good number of his bills during the economic inflation of the Napoleonic Wars with arrangements of all sorts of folksongs. If you’re learning to orchestrate, making arrangements and transcriptions is a time-honored way of doing it. Some of the first orchestra music I ever had performed was an assignment for an undergraduate class to arrange a Bach keyboard fugue for the students we had available in the class.

I actually came to composition through arranging and transcribing other people’s music, mostly for the students I was teaching when I was a K-12 teacher… the list of composers I’ve arranged is long and distinguished, and includes the Gypsy Kings, K.C. and JoJo, the Beatles, Bach (of course), the Moody Blues, Dave Brubeck, Debussy, Schubert. I lived in Macon, Georgia for a while, and I knew the personnel manager with the Macon Symphony Orchestra, which led to doing some arranging for them, including a whole evening of Otis Redding songs for rock band and orchestra, with Otis Redding’s grandson as the vocalist. That one paid for Becky’s and my honeymoon. By that point, I had also started composing: it isn’t a big stretch from having to come up with an intro, an outro, or a transition, to writing a piece “based on” an existing tune, to just writing a whole new “freely composed” piece. 

I completely get Heaney’s moment of discovering one little nugget and then working out the rest: that’s pretty much my experience much of the time. “Oh, this line would be great for clarinet,” or “I can hear this combination here in the accompaniment.” Then, there’s a certain about of just workmanship that happens, what my dad’s woodcarving teacher used to call “moving wood.” Inevitably, there are the places where things don’t quite line up, and you have to get clever and creative. Music notation software makes the process so much more bearable… I don’t think I would be a composer if I had to do everything by hand.

I guess another equivalent in writing would be rehashing old stories. I took a creative writing course in college, and the prof had us take one of the stories we admired from our anthology and type a few pages into the computer just to see how it looked… many of my classmates realized that their writing was far too small compared to that year’s Best American Short Stories (especially the frat boy who wrote a four-page ripoff of Reservoir Dogs). He also had us attempt a style copy: mine was Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” We were on quarters, so all this, plus writing our stories, plus critiquing our classmates’ work fit into 10 weeks!

I had a big arranging moment this summer: The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performed my arrangement of Florence Price’s Adoration, which was originally for organ. This is the composer equivalent to starting for the Guardians (having an original work performed by them would be like starting for the Yankees or Red Sox). At any rate, it’s The Show. A conductor I’ve worked with (as arranger and composer) hired me to create two versions of the piece during the lockdown: one for ten musicians, and another for small orchestra. Then, he was named the Cincinnati Symphony’s diversity fellow, and he called me up for a third, new arrangement, “worthy of the Cincinnati Symphony.” I was able to write for a larger orchestra (really, I could have gone as big as I wanted, but I fit my requirements to the other music on the concert) and also write with a full-time professional group in mind. It was actually quite a lot of pressure to make sure absolutely everything was right—there’s no time to figure out how to fix something that isn’t working, because rehearsal on this relatively simple piece consisted of a couple of run-throughs in the two days before the concert: that’s all they needed, and their time is collectively worth about $1000 a minute. This is an extremely savvy group who has played everything​ worth playing, along with tons of arrangements for pops concerts: they would know immediately if I had screwed up or if I was worth their time, and not just by the sound, but by the look of the printed parts I was providing. So that’s how I spent my Spring Break last year.

In June, the kids and I drove down to Cincinnati to hear the thing: because of copyright laws and union rules, I wouldn’t be getting a copy of the recording (this annoys the crap out of composers, but it’s for everyone’s own good). So we had to be there, and they did comp our tickets. This wasn’t a subscription concert—it was at a great big megachurch in the suburbs as part of the orchestra’s community outreach program. The results of my work and the CSO’s playing were splendid: all the effects I had hoped for were there, and they all made sense, and I think I did justice to the composer’s intentions (Florence Price’s story is heartbreaking, as shouldn’t be a surprise for an African-American woman who died in the 1950s). My kids were amazed, and they proceeded to tell everyone around us that I was behind that music. Overall a good weekend. Since then, I’ve sold that sheet music three times, which is selling like hotcakes for me, to orchestras in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Mankato, Minnesota—another conductor has picked up the piece and programmed it this fall, and I hope Antoine finds space to use it again.

I went to college at the University of Cincinnati, and my trombone teacher was the principal trombonist for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (he’s long-retired now). I’ve probably heard that orchestra in concert more times than any other, so their sound and their approach is basically what I hear when I compose or play trombone. It awes me to think that something I arranged is now in their library, waiting for the next time they need it. I haven’t seen my royalty statement for it yet, but I think it will probably be a chunk…

So, I guess I’m back now.

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Springtime Projects Old and New

March 26th, 2022

The kids and I have both had our Spring Break, and since they didn’t happen at the same time, I didn’t end up travelling, although Becky took the kids to Mansfield for a couple of days this week. Lakeland’s Jazz Festival returned partly in-person last weekend, with live performances, but we won’t have adjudication of high school bands again until next year. I played fourth trombone with the Lakeland Civic Jazz Orchestra on their concert last Sunday, something I haven’t done in a very long time, since I was the regular bass trombonist with the second jazz ensemble at CCM in my first two years of college, where I met my first composition teacher, Wes Flinn (who I am currently serving as a partial sabbatical replacement for… so many connections).

I have five or so performances of my work coming up this Spring as musical life comes back together post-COVID.

COVID ruined three big events that I had planned: two trips (one to Germany and one to South Carolina) and a performance. We made the South Carolina trip a year late in 2021, and the Germany trip is on a longer-term hold, but might happen in 2023. The performance cancellation that stung was the Cleveland Chamber Symphony’s premiere of a new chamber orchestra version of Martian Dances, the piece that gives its name to my web domain and that I once considered to be my “signature” composition; if nothing else, it was my first mature composition, and the first major piece I wrote while in graduate school, where we played it several times. The original version is scored for the unlikely septet of flute, clarinet, trombone, viola, double bass, marimba, and harpsichord, and eked out two-and-a-half performances in 2005 at Ohio State. I reworked it a few years later for a Pierrot-plus-viola-and-marimba ensemble, but that version has never been performed. This latest version is for a large chamber orchestra: single winds, harp, piano, and strings, and will have its first hearing on April 22 at Baldwin Wallace University, with a dance performed by Verb Ballets. A big night for me.

Not only does Martian Dances hold a special significance for me, having a performance by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony takes me another step closer to being a “Cleveland” composer. The ensemble was founded by local legend Edwin London, and has played music by both local and non-local artists for decades. I even have a recording of them performing Donald Harris’ Mermaid Variations, commissioned by the ensemble. A lustruous recording of a colorful and appealing piece, it would have been recorded around the same time that I first heard Don’s music, a performance of his Symphony in Two Movements by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra when I was a senior in high school.

I’ve programmed my own work with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra on Sunday, April 24, when we will give the second performance of The Lovely Soul of Lakeland, which I wrote for the College’s 50th anniversary in 2017-2018. I think it’s important that a college have concert music associated with its songs, and Lakeland’s alma mater, The Soul of Lakeland College, provided excellent material for this project. It seemed like this year, with our return from COVID to live performance, was an appropriate time for this piece to make an appearance, on a program of short works featuring the various components of the orchestra and shared with the Lakeland Civic Band.

On May 6, the Lakeland Civic Flute Choir, directed by Judith Elias, will perform Nod a Don, my palindromic piece for eight flutes commissioned by Katherine Borst Jones in honor of Donald McGinnis, a mentor and inspiration to both of us, on his 95th birthday. This will be the second performance of this work in Cleveland, after the Greater Cleveland Flute Society’s performance a few years ago. Lakeland’s flutes have been rehearsing it during their Thursday morning rehearsals, and at least once I’ve had the pleasure of walking by the auditorium doors to hear my music coming out at me.

Also in May, on the 15th, I will have a composition featured on the thirtieth installment of the Cleveland Composers Guild’s Creativity: Learning Through Experience. In this case, a short piano piece for Nathan Hill, a student of Coren Estin Mino.

Then in June, something that for me is a huge deal. My frequent collaborator, Antoine Clark, asked me in 2020 for arrangements for small orchestra and chamber ensemble of Florence B. Price’s Adoration, for the college and chamber orchestras that he conducts. I created them, and they had their premieres, and Lakeland also performed the small orchestra version in 2021. Then this fall, Antoine called again, and asked for a large orchestra transcription of the same piece, this time for no less than the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Antoine and I are both alumni of the University of Cincinnati, and my trombone teacher Tony Chipurn was the principal trombonist of the Cincinnati Symphony. It would be a close count, but it’s possible that I’ve seen them in concert more than any other orchestra, and certainly saw them very frequently during my formative musical years. The sound of their Telarc recordings from the 80s and 90s is also burned into my head, whether as the Cincinnati Symphony, or as the Cincinnati Pops. So, I’ve been working on a transcription of the Price that involves all my knowledge of orchestral writing, and honors Price’s talents and music, and the tradition of an orchestra that I admire. The premiere is on a community concert in Cincinnati on June 11.

I’m still struggling with what my composing looks like, post-COVID. Getting out of my early-morning habit was a good idea for many reasons, but it hasn’t been good for my creative productivity, and there are projects I want to pursue, but don’t feel like I have time for right now. My 6am composing was for a long time a badge of honor, but I don’t see how it would fit our current schedule and my current responsibilities: or, I’m just being lazy and too in the habit of staying up late. Next fall, Noah and Melia will ride the same buses to and from school, so there is the possibility of a reset and a reconsideration of my routine, and I aim to have this worked out by then: there is more music to be written, and that music needs time to be worked on.

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Playwriting with Tecia Delores Wilson

October 22nd, 2021

Lakeland hosted playwright Tecia Delores Wilson for a workshop earlier this week, and I treated myself to attending as a midterm reward. Her approach of devised theater was intriguing. I signed up for the workshop for several reasons that involve my work: composition also deals with dramatic ideas; I may someday collaborate with a poet or librettist and need to understand some of that process; I have, over the last several years, written a play about some of my experiences. Devised theater could play into many of these needs for me, although not as directly as I had expected, as it turns out.

For a writer, it is tempting to start from words, but devised theater, as we experienced the process on Tuesday, begins with movement, and goes from movement to story. It was almost as much about dance as it was about language, which is many ways made it more relevant to my creative work.

In an email later with Jamie DeMonte, I expressed an idea I hadn’t really mused on before: while we tend to “silo” the arts into writing, theater, music, visual arts, dance… the reality is that they often lie more on a continuum, and that one can impact the other. I’ve blogged here before about people like woodcarver Spirit Williams and writer Kiersi Burkhart and how their ideas about working in other forms have impacted my own working process, but it’s also fascinating to see how those “disparate” arts themselves can be work that is neither-nor, or both, or all.

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Effort-Shapes and Ideas from Architecture

October 3rd, 2021

I’m amazed that it’s October already.

I was feeling very behind on some things for work and school, and my wife, Becky, got tired of my grumpiness about it and gave me the incredible gift of time last week: she took time off from her job so that she could be around and give me some relief from some parenting duties. I took advantage of that time to get back into my morning composing routine: waking up an hour ahead of everyone else to work. It feels good to be back on it. Plus, I was able to work ahead on some of the things I normally do on Fridays and clear the decks for most of a full day of composing this week. It felt good: too good… because it had me thinking about how it might work if I did that every week, and spent that day just building my composition business. It seems possible, but risky, but possibly very rewarding.

I suddenly find myself with multiple projects. Last month, Ted Williams of Choral Spectrum contacted me asking for Christmas music. There is a history there: eighteen years ago when I was living on the West Side of Cleveland, I joined that ensemble, starting the same concert cycle that Ted did. They performed one of the pieces that I submitted as part of my grad school applications, and I haven’t done a great job keeping in touch, but I’ve been in contact with Ted now and then. I found a nice, short poem by Ella Higginson called “Christmas Eve,” and suggested it as an original piece. I finished it this week, after creating a draft in my parents’ dining room in September, and rehearsals will start on Monday, for premiere performances in December.

Next, I’m returning to the first piece I wrote after graduate school, the fourth in my series of sonatinas for woodwind instrument and piano, in this case, oboe. There is a connection to that same time with Choral Spectrum, because I used the bassoon piece, the first in the series, as a part of grad school applications as well, including a recording with fellow Spectrum member Andrew Bertoni on the piano part. I’m now reworking the oboe piece, which has never been performed, for Justine Myers, and we are hoping for a performance on a Cleveland Composers Guild concert this spring. As I was working on both these pieces, I had advice from Donald Harris in my mind: “let the music breathe.”

Then, to the carillon project, I suppose. Last summer, Guild members had a tour of the McGaffin Carillon with George Leggiero for a collaboration that will feature our compositions for the instrument this fall. Fall is here, so I need to get started on mine.

After that, it will be the band piece I’m writing in memory of Chuck Frank for the Lakeland Civic Band . I have an idea for a wordless vocal soloist and Heidi Skok is on board, so while that part will be cued in the instrumental parts, it will be a great way to feature one of our great local musicians.

And then… I want to return to the symphony. Delayed first by COVID, now just by my procrastination.

The amazing thing is that these projects represent the fruits of a decade or more of collaboration, networking, and community-building. My goal since returning to Ohio has been to become a Cleveland composer, and I feel like I have achieved that, at least at the moment.

Now to the title of this post:

Two ideas for analytical or compositional tools came over my transom this week.

The first was when I went to observe Scott Posey’s Acting I class as part of my duties as a College Credit Plus faculty liaison. I had watched him work with his students at Lake Catholic before, but he started his class with a warm-up and review of something called “effort-shapes,” coming from Laban movement theory. This was immediately highly suggestive to me as a way to think about the physical expression suggested by a passage or piece of music. I also wonder if there is any similarity or connection to Dalcroze eurhythmics, which I have never had the chance to study.

The second is from a YouTube video. I’ve been watching architecture videos by Stewart Hicks lately, and his video on Francis Cheng’s Form, Space, and Order really struck me. Where  Laban seems to suggest itself as a tool for medium-scale analysis, Cheng’s five basic building plans (centralized, linear, radial, clustered, and grid) are highly suggestive of ways to understand the overall structure of a larger piece. Of the standard forms, fugue would be centralized; sonata would be regular; rondo would be radial; variations would be radial or clustered?; and something with a repeated bass or harmonic progression would be grid. Perhaps? Something to consider… Orchestrating or arranging for large ensemble often feels like working with a grid as well. Penderecki’s Threnody suggests a clustered approach; while Lutoslawski’s Fourth Symphony is more radial. Intriguing set of possibilities.

Then, yesterday, we went to Cedar Point. My approach to fun at theme parks is a little different than most people’s, I suppose, but I enjoy looking at how the place works, and at how people interact there and flow throw the space. I find that standing in line for rides gives plenty of time to watch how those rides work, and how people interface with them, and to think about what I’m seeing. Recently, one of my contacts on Twitter posted Baudrillard’s thoughts on Disneyland, and that was running through my head. While Cedar Point is in many ways a theme park in search of a theme (beyond, as Noah and I discovered, “Eat. Ride. Repeat”), it functions in much the same way Disneyland does on a technical level. This may not be true from a cultural standpoint, though. Disneyland also does not have nearly the history and layers that Cedar Point does, where there is an 80-year head start and any number of callbacks (such as the Blue Streak roller coaster) to earlier eras of American pleasure-seeking. I’ve decided that I’m going to have to read Simulacra and Simulation.

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Writing for the Fine Arts Association

July 16th, 2021

I’m currently wrapping up a commission from the Fine Arts Association for a concert their faculty will be presenting next month. The second half of the program will be Camille Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, so the instrumentation of my piece is the same: flute, clarinet, percussionist, two pianos, and string quintet. The resulting piece is about nine minutes long, and has turned into a tone-poem called Gamer Troll Loses Control.

This piece is my heftiest composition since the start of COVID, when I deliberately backed away from composing to focus on other things that needed to be done. Teaching almost completely online meant I had more computer time in my life than I needed, and I was loath to add to that. Additionally, I made the decision to forego my early-morning composing routine and add an extra opportunity for sleep to help keep my immune system in good condition in the event of illness. So, since March 2020, I’ve written a short piano piece, Power Play, two arrangements for small orchestra of Florence Price’s Adoration, a short piece, Mind, Body, and Soul for the Ekklesia Reed Quintet, and a bass clarinet duo, Child’s Play, for Just This. I put two long-awaited projects on hold: Thomas Lempner and I have been discussing a Carmen Fantasy for baritone saxophone, but other than listening through the opera and some score study, I haven’t got started on it yet, and of course, the symphony, which was stalled before COVID hit, and while I’ve listened through the Sibelius playback a couple of times, I haven’t done any work on it.

But I think about composing a lot. I’ve been studying Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons at the piano, and thinking more and more about a “yearlong” cycle of pieces about Lake Erie. Going to the bluffs here in Willowick has become one of my regular activities, and this project may be in the future. I’m also planning to write a new piece for concert band for the Lakeland Civic Band in memory of their founding director Charles Frank, to be premiered on a memorial concert for him. And, I’m starting to want to write a second piano sonata–partly inspired by Richard Danielpour’s American Mosaic for Simone Dinnerstein. I’m still not ready to write my COVID piece–which isn’t surprising. My experience of the pandemic has been of routine, and waiting, not of personally momentous events, and for that I’m thankful. I’m not saying I need to be personally impacted by the virus before I can write about it–but I’m not interested in writing for the sake of writing about it, which would feel forced and inauthentic. It may be some time, and I may never write a COVID piece.

So, in late Spring, Michael Lund Ziegler, director of education at the Fine Arts Association (FAA), called to ask if I would contribute to the first in their series of concerts for 2021-2022, and I agreed (I will appear on my own recital this winter, performing Twenty Views of the Trombone). We quickly finalized the instrumentation, which will mostly be provided by the FAA faculty, with Michael conducting. I suggested that we base the piece in some form on student work–this would bring together the music and visual arts sides of the FAA, and highlight the students, who are the reason that the FAA exists in the first place. We brought Melissa Sextella into the conversation. It was, fortuitously, near the end of the term, and several of her classes had final projects that could be helpful in generating some possible characters. She sent me four wonderful images, and I started thinking about what a piece about these characters might look like, and I contacted several of the artists to pick their brains. The kids were very helpful–down to the five-year-old creator of “Greenie Meanie,” a grumpy octopus on the lookout for walleye.

Then I went on vacation. We spent a week in Charleston, South Carolina, and I brought manuscript paper, but didn’t touch it. I did make a note in my travel journal that I was leaning toward a single-movement structure rather than a suite of pieces: and that has worked out. The result is more Till Eulenspiegel than Pictures at an Exhibition. I also decided to make references to Carnival of the Animals, since the two pieces will be paired at the premiere, and having the same forces, may be performed together down the road (in fact, I already have some interest in just that).

Upon returning home, I decided to start by writing a story. I decided on a fairy tale: Gamer Troll wakes up one morning and can’t find his video game controller. There are echoes of Band Camp 1993 in this inciting incident, for anyone who is reading this who happened to be there, although the ending is completely different. Being fairly stupid, as trolls are, Gamer Troll trudges to the beach, meeting some wacky surreal birds, is swept out to sea where he is almost eaten, saved by a mermaid princess, and sent back to the beach. He trudges back home to his parents’ cave, where he flops down on the couch to discover that his controller was in his pocket the whole time. The moral, in troll-like fashion, is, “It’s always the last place you look, because when you find it, you stop looking.”

Read the whole story here. I have to say I think it came out pretty well, and I read it to Melia, age seven, as a bedtime story, and it proved satisfactory for that purpose. Maybe I have a career as a children’s author?

Finally, it was time to write the music. My story was too in-depth to depict every nuance in music, at least not in nine minutes, but the highlights are there. I’ve never written a true tone-poem like this that attempted to adhere closely to a narrative and express it to the extent possible, but I started with a few sketches of motives (Gamer Troll saying “No controller, no games,” a combination of Saint-Saens’ chickens and cuckoo for the wacky birds). Conveniently, lots of rippling water and bubble music, and my two giant waves are in homage to John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean. The percussionist will add to Saint-Saens xylophone and glass harmonica (I assume that will be glockenspiel) with a snare drum and suspended cymbal. I didn’t study the Saint-Saens in great depth, and my piece is much more of an ensemble piece, where Carnival is more a piano duo with some obbligato parts. My pianist colleagues will have their hands full with Saint-Saens anyway, so they don’t need a second virtuoso piece. It was tempting to consistently have one instrument play each character, but I didn’t want to limit the roles: while Gamer Troll is featured continuously, the other characters are not, and the ensemble is too small to reserve one or more instruments for short sections.

I’m currently wrapping up layout and part extraction, and I’m looking forward to rehearsals and the premiere in the third week of August. Here is information on that (you have to scroll down past all the theater productions).

 

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School Days

May 22nd, 2021

They are tearing down my high school–Upper Arlington High School–over the summer, so I went back last month, and I took Noah, one day shy of turning 11, with me, to a walk-through day sponsored by the alumni association. It was the first time I had been back to most of the facility since I graduated, although I had been to the music area and the auditorium a couple times, mostly associated with the 2008 premiere of the piece I wrote for the band to commemorate the career of my high school band director, John Blevins.

I was surprised how much was the same. The building had not undergone any major renovations since before my time there, and even some of the fixtures were memorable. The light was the same—too little. The halls were surprisingly at once bigger or smaller than I remembered, and some doors seemed to be labelled with their original markings from the 1950s. It was a good day to be there, as the building was still very much in use, the final packing up for the summer still to come. In fact, there were signs asking us to stay out of classrooms. When I came to the band room, though, I couldn’t help myself, and Noah was shocked when I stepped over the caution tape to walk through the rehearsal space one last time, peeking at the locker that I had shared with Jay Moore during our junior and senior years, and snapping a couple of photos. Crossing lines put in place by authority is not something my son is accustomed to seeing me do, but I assured him that it would be alright, even while also telling him not to get any ideas.

Overall, I had a good four years in high school, from 1990 to 1994. I excelled academically, found my place in several groups of my classmates (band, mostly, but also the honors students, the gifted program, briefly the drama club, and too late the quiz team), and discovered the passion that would lead to my career. I wasn’t bullied, and I don’t think I was a bully, but neither was I a standout in the social world of my high school. My family lived a comfortable life, but I was surrounded by people whose parents were wealthier than us: lots of my friends were given a car when they turned sixteen, but I was given a set of keys to the family car.

What I am amazed by, these years later, is the quality of my teachers, especially after spending more than twenty years trying to be a teacher myself. I wrote once of the importance of every teenager having a role model who isn’t their parents—an uncle, spiritual guide, or teacher—and Upper Arlington High School had an embarrassment of riches among its faculty. If I hadn’t found that person in Mr. Blevins, there were easily three or four other teachers each year who could have been that person, and frequently were for my classmates. Even students who didn’t seem to fit could—and did—find these people. The huge number of clubs and sports coached by teachers meant that there were plenty of chances to interact with them in less-formal ways than in the classroom.

Upper Arlington High School was—and is—a well-funded school, attended by students who had all the advantages that wealth brings, and I’ve truthfully struggled my entire life to reconcile that experience with what I have seen and heard elsewhere, as a teacher, as a college professor, and as I’ve listened to the experiences of others in high school. In a negative sense, I have come to see what I often felt as entitlement, and white privilege, and I am frustrated that we can’t find a way to give what I had—and took for granted—to all kids.

Some things I would have done differently. Coming into high school, I had a pretty good network of friends, and leaving it, I had at least one close friend, but I don’t think I engaged in building relationships as much as I could have, and I didn’t manage to maintain those relationships in any kind of real way after graduation. On graduation day, I went home with my parents, and didn’t have any plans with the people I had just spent four years with. My father told me to go seemy friends, but I didn’t have anywhere to go: all my friendships but one were essentially situational, and when high school ended, they basically did, too. This was in part what I wanted—I was very ready to go on to the next thing and start living my life, and I viewed going away to college and leaving everything I knew mostly behind as a big part of that. It wasn’t until I got onto social media (nearly 15 years later) that I found out what happened to most people. Mistakenly, I had thought that the only important part of high school was high school.

I have also come to realize that for many of my classmates and peers at high schools of all types, the high school experience was not a good one. For a place that should be dedicated to learning and knowledge, too often there is very little of either. There are those who placed their trust one or another teacher, only to have that trust betrayed in often horrifying ways. There are people who were bullied, or ostracized, and they carry the damage with them into their adult lives—adulthood is high school with money, as the saying goes. There were people who simply had to wait and endure that four years in order to be able to go and pursue their visions, goals, and dreams in a way that didn’t fit in with a bell schedule, semesters, homework, and hall passes, and resented it. There were people who injured themselves in lifelong ways, either on the athletic field or otherwise, trying to come up to what was expected of them. As Hesse suggests, education is a way of placing us beneath the wheel; the Bildungsroman is almost always written while wearing rose-colored glasses.

As my children approach this world—Noah is headed into the minefield of middle school in the fall—I try to see what I want for them. The high school they will attend is most certainly not Upper Arlington in 1994, and I would like to see them aim higher than most of that school’s students who I seem to meet. I realize now that I am a very different person because of the people I was around in high school—the artists, musicians, and honors students. It was nothing in the water—it was constantly being around people whose parents shared the same goals as me. I want my children to be able to assume that they can use their minds to earn a living, to be able to provide a good life for their children, to not be afraid of books or art or people who are different (although there was plenty of that at Upper Arlington, too). I want them to know success, and to know a world where they believe success is possible, and where people are willing to at least give them a chance to succeed.

Twenty-seven years out of high school, I am still thinking about high school. As the physical evidence of the school is being torn down and replaced with something new, what happened to me in those four years—good, bad, indifferent—carries on, more than a look through old yearbooks (I am shocked at how many strangers stare back at me from those pages), or posts on social media, or the reunions that I’ve never been to.

I never wanted to be a nostalgic person, and I detest the kind of nostalgia that sees the past as better. I refuse to engage in golden age thinking (or gold-and-black age thinking, in this case). But the Greek roots of nostalgia refer to pain—pain for one’s home. There is a part of me that does ache for that time—to put on the band uniform, or learn fresh some way that the world works, or for once feel like I am meeting the world’s expectations. I shouldn’t, because that was all an illusion, and it was all designed for someone else. I wouldn’t go back—most days—but walking through that doomed building reminded me of what a time it was, and how it continues to make me who I am today.

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Christmas Playlist

December 11th, 2020

Last week, my co-worker Jennifer Smyser asked me to be “DJ for a Day” and create a Christmas playlist for Lakeland’s virtual holiday party. I was happy to oblige. Here is the result:

I truthfully found myself in tears putting this together. It’s been a rough year due to COVID, and let me say that I have been incredibly lucky to be steadily employed, healthy, and with family, but now, staring down the holidays without the prospect of many things that I’ve always loved about them is not easy, and this playlist brought all of that back, along with the fact that people I love aren’t getting any younger: in a couple of Christmases, we will be out of the Santa Claus years at our house, and my wife and I have both lost aunts and my last grandmother in the last few years, so in some way, there won’t be any going back. At any rate, here are my six songs, with a little bit of information on each.

“Deck the Halls,” Traditional, arranged and performed by Chip Davis and Mannheim Steamroller.

In the 1980s, we loved our synthesizers and drum machines, and Mannheim Steamroller gave us their first Christmas album in 1984, a digital sugar cookie for my musically-impressionable ears. We always traveled to my grandma’s house in Tuscarawas County on Christmas Day, and I vividly remember a Christmas afternoon with my cousins playing cards and listening to this record the way it was meant to be heard—on one of those new-fangled CD players. I wish I could play this whole album the opening track will have to do!

“Sleigh Ride” by Leroy Anderson, performed by Arthur Fiedler conducting the Boston Pops.

No self-respecting orchestra or band director would leave this one off the list, but for me, it’s a special one, because in 2001, when I was teaching high school band at a small school in Clark County, Ohio, I had a group of students that was hard-working, but not quite up to the challenges of this piece. I put it in front of them anyway, and over the next few weeks watched in amazement as they rose to the challenge of a piece of music that they clearly loved.

“Pat-a-Pan,” traditional, arranged and performed by the Quadriga Ensemble

I had a girlfriend in college who hated “Pat-a-Pan” and said it ruined Christmas to hear it. She left me in an ugly breakup, so ever since I have promoted awareness of this song, because I think it’s actually really fun. So if anyone knows any radio DJs in Salt Lake City… yeah, that’s where she was living the last I heard.

“Light One Candle” by Peter Yarrow, performed by Peter, Paul & Mary and the New York Choral Society.

My parents weren’t hippies, but they loved Peter, Paul & Mary, and this Hanukkah song from their 1988 holiday concert sums up what we can all take from their work. We didn’t have a VCR until about this time, and my parents taped this special when it was on PBS and wore out the tape rewatching it over the next year. If you haven’t seen it, go find the whole thing on YouTube!

“Linus and Lucy,” by Vince Guaraldi, performed by the Vince Guaraldi Trio

It just isn’t Christmas until we see Charlie Brown pick out a Christmas tree and hear Linus tell us what Christmas is all about. The jazz trio is one of the purest ways I know to make music, and even though this little Latin ditty with a swing bridge doesn’t have much to do with Christmas, it certainly gets me in the holiday spirit.

“Keep Christmas With You,” by Sam Pottle and David Axelrod, performed by the cast of Sesame Street.

I wore this record out as a preschooler in the very early 80s—I was a Sesame Street kid, and I was convinced that Bert and Ernie were Muppet versions of my brother and me. This song, in addition to being well-written like every song on that show, is a wonderful sentiment that I’ve tried to pass on to my kids as well. (Incidentally, the video in the playlist isn’t the version I listened to: you need to find the original Sesame Street Christmas album for that–there’s a really nice verse that precedes the main song in that recording.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!

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Not Dead from COVID-19 Yet

July 3rd, 2020

My last post was in November 2019, and what a half-year it has been.

Much of my life so far has been untouched by history. Plenty of history has happened since 1976, of course, but the great events have almost never caused any real disruption. 1989 happened somewhere else, to older people. 2001 was a shock, and horrific, but it, and the wars that followed, happened mostly to other people. 2008 may have caused Becky and I to stay longer in Oklahoma than we had planned, but then again, it may not have, and my career has not significantly suffered.

COVID-19, however, has touched us. Luckily, we have not contracted the disease, although that remains a possibility. Early on, I told myself that our family would be lucky to come through this without that happening, and while survival rates seem high, the risk that I will lose a family member to this, or die of it myself, is not zero.

It began at the end of last year, when I began to hear the news stories on the radio about the new virus in Wuhan, China. I remember in particular one day listening to it in the car while getting the kids from school. Donald Trump’s impeachment trial was happening at the same time, of course, and that failed attempt was a bigger story at the moment. The holidays happened more or less normally, although it was Becky’s first year since we’ve been married working retail, but at some point one of my contacts on Twitter whose husband is an epidemiologist posted a thread about just how serious COVID seemed to be, and I got to thinking. This would have been by about February or so.

I’ve read about epidemics and pandemics. In college, I read Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague, and discussed it at dinner with friends, horrifying my girlfriend, but fascinating at least one other person at the table. I read Anthony Fauci’s book a year or so ago. I watched Ebola unfold in 2014, and breathed a sigh of relief that it stayed far away from us. COVID-19 seemed to be unfolding the same way as SARS or MERS–new, but containable. But I still kept my ear to the ground.

My parents went to Hawaii around Valentines Day, just as the first cases were started to happen in this country. They were able to return with no problem, but soon others would not. At the grocery store, I began to put a little extra in the cart every week. Our finances allowed it easily, and my contact on Twitter suggested that this would be an effective measure: buy a little bit now without stressing the system, and avoid some of the panic buying that might happen when the system started to come under stress. Pasta. Pizza supplies. Breakfast and lunch. Over-the-counter medications that we use regularly. Cleaning supplies. And toilet paper. We still are ahead on toilet paper, and never really got behind, because I bought a package a week for most of February, and have kept our supply at about a hundred rolls on hand since then. All things that would keep and that we would use anyway, so it wasn’t really an extra expense, just money that we would spend now and not later.

I continued to teach my classes as normal, and rehearse the orchestra, up until Spring Break. Sunday, March 8 was our first concert of 2020, and it went well. We collected music as usual and planned to see each other after break. I had performances of my music on February 6 and March 1, with several more slated for the spring.

Spring Break proceeded apace. As usual, my break was not at the same time as Noah’s and Melia’s, which meant some quiet time at home and some couples time with Becky. Meanwhile, more people were getting sick, and things were starting to change.

March 11, the day that I’m told is the day that most Americans started to be impacted, was the day that I had agreed to judge the annual student concerto competition at Mentor High School. The orchestra director, Matt Yoke, ran the competition, and as usual, my co-judge was Terri Herschmann, retired choir director. I waited in the car for a few minutes, listening to what had become Ohio Governor Mike DeWine’s daily press briefing on COVID-19, but went into the school before it was over. By the time we were done judging, he had made the announcement that Ohio public schools would be closing for three weeks, starting the following Monday. Matt, Terri, and I weren’t sure what this meant–we thought that it might mean that our judging would be for nought, since it would limit the time the orchestra would have to rehearse the winners’ pieces. The closure included my job at Lakeland, so child care would not be a problem for us the way it has been for so many other people. Noah and Melia would have a week of online classes–hastily thrown together–then a week of their Spring Break, and then would finish online. Lakeland extended its Spring Break by a week so that instructors could prepare to finish the term as best we could completely online.

That night, Becky and I decided that I should go to the grocery store for a few extra things. I decided to use the Giant Eagle in Willoughby, since it is a larger store than the one here in Willowick, and a trip to the local Wal-Mart seemed like insanity–I still haven’t been back to Wal-Mart, where we were shopping regularly until March. The American supermarket is designed to suggest plenty and abundance, and that night it was clear just how worried people were, as key items were out. Toilet paper, of course. Eggs were nearly gone. Bottled water was cleared from the shelves, but I noticed two large pallets of it when I finally got to the check-out. What I remember most was the line: the store was packed, and I waited for over an hour, during which time I called my parents and told them that they shouldn’t worry about trying to come for my birthday that weekend as we had planned. Prices were normal, and most customers seemed frazzled, but not agitated to the point of making themselves worrisome. My cashier was a young woman who had come to work from school, and it was about 9pm by the time she rang me up. I thanked her for being there, and told her I hoped she was able to go home soon.

The next two days I wrapped up a few loose ends, trying to get ready for what might come next. I made sure that my second term class was ready to start, knowing that it would begin on time on March 14, so that I would have time to figure something out for my formerly-in-person classes. I voted early at the county board of elections for the Ohio primary on March 17 (which was eventually postponed), but I wanted to make sure that I voted for our local school levy. In general, there was the feeling of deliberateness and urgency to get things done, but also a calm-before-the-storm sense. The Board of Elections was a busy place, but no busier than I would expect on an early-voting day. On March 14, we had my birthday dinner, and I chose Mexican food. The restaurant was fairly empty for a Saturday night, and I spent a few weeks feeling bad that I picked it, since I’m the only one who really likes it, and it was our last meal out for quite some time.

Becky worked for the first couple of weeks that the kids and I were off, and then Ulta closed, and for several weeks, we saw only each other and the essential workers with whom we came into contact. We have been very fortunate so far that our finances have been unimpacted. We were able to save most of our income tax refund, as well as our stimulus check, and although it’s possible we will still need that money, our bank account is currently more flush than it has ever been.

We worked together to help Noah and Melia complete their schoolwork, with Becky and I tag-teaming the kids once she was home. The three of us all had to complete work with just one computer, although not everything the kids needed to do was online, as their teachers had sent math books and other materials home. I would put in about 2 hours a day on my online work, which I kept to a relative minimum, thinking that my students were mostly taking my course to fulfill a general education requirement, and certainly had other priorities. In the end, I didn’t fail many students: certainly not more than I would have in a typical semester, even with some students being unable to re-engage with the newly-online courses. I was very lenient, and if someone was passing before Spring Break, I tried to give them a passing grade for the term. After my work, we would begin on the kids’ work for the day. This would extend well into the afternoon at first, but once Becky was home, it would take much longer. We had a disused tablet that we found would work to access much of the kids’ work, which also helped, although the result is that Melia has claimed it for herself and become a tablet junkie, something we tried to avoid for a long time.

Online schooling was not ideal, by any sense, but it also showed just how much of the school day is used for non-instructional time, and how much more quickly learning can happen individually. It also showed me where some deficiencies lay. Noah was behind in math, and, to my thinking, at risk of falling further back, and so this summer we have embarked on a review of fourth-grade math. Piano and trombone lessons also moved online. Noah’s teacher continued to work with him, although the process was frustrating for him. I stayed in the room for lessons to act as a tech person–I used binder clips to attach my phone to the music stand to get the right angle, and we used the now-ubiquitous Zoom app for both piano and trombone with a degree of success. Mrs. Rita (Cyvas-Kliorys) even arranged for a virtual recital at the end of the term, but she has now taken the summer off–it must have been exhausting with a studio her size.

For the seven weeks that Becky was completely off from Ulta, we stayed home almost all the time. I took the kids outside every day for at least an hour, and within a week or so, the weather was pleasant enough to ride bicycles (although occasionally with winter coats on). Melia had not mastered her two-wheeler by the end of last summer, but this spring she was ready, and has taken to it. The three of us have gone on two extended bike rides of about eight miles. The Richland County B&O Trail, the Ohio & Erie Towpath Trail, and the Cleveland Metroparks have all been destination rides, but we’ve also been around much of the neighborhood. We’re now at a point where the kids are a little more resistant to the bike riding, but I tell them that their father needs to do it, and we go all the same, and after a few hundred yards, they are all in.

I planned three meals a day at home, with a once-a-week carry-out or drive-thru meal. I suffered “breakfast for dinner,” which isn’t my favorite M.O., but is beloved of our kids, and we invented the “smorgasbord” dinner of popcorn, pepperoni, cheese, fruit, and hummus that has become a favorite for Melia. We instituted a nightly movie night for much of the lockdown, with most movies taking two nights. With Becky back at work from early May, we’ve gotten out of this habit, with later dinners. I got out of the habit of reading to the kids every night, but last week picked up a copy of The Hobbit with a gift card I received for Father’s Day, and we’ve started it back up.

My reading has been way off pace. Too much time on Twitter, perhaps, but also missing the three or four karate classes, dance class, and piano lesson, and Cub Scout meeting each week where I can sit and read while the kids do their thing. By the end of June, I had read only 20 books, 6 off my book-a-week goal. I have also been studying German through the DuoLingo app, and am almost through that course, so there is reading time lost as well.

Cub Scouts ended after a socially-distanced Pinewood Derby on March 15. Noah’s den leaders were phoning it in this year at any rate, and I haven’t heard from them at all. Summer camp was cancelled, a real disappointment to Noah, and by extension, for us–last year’s camp was one of the great experiences of his life so far.

I made the decision to prioritize sleep and limit my computer time, so while I had started sketching a brass fanfare commissioned by the Ohio Valley Majestic Brass in the days before the lockdown, I put my composing aside until the end of the school year. I had been in a slump since stalling out on my symphony at any rate, and some time away made sense. Since May, I have been back at it, and I completed the fanfare and received payment for it last week. I’m also most of the way through a short suite for the local Ekklesia Reed Quintet, called Mind, Body, and Soul. After that, I’ve promised a big band chart to Ed Michaels for next season, and then, I suppose, there will be the symphony. I haven’t opened those files since November.

Several performances of my work had to be cancelled. The Cleveland Chamber Symphony had been slated to play a new chamber orchestra version of Martian Dances in April, and the Lakeland Civic Band was scheduled for a second performance of Mysterious Marvels on my birthday, but the concert was cancelled. Lady Glides on the Moon was down for two performances in Illinois this spring, but I haven’t heard anything about them since, and the Cleveland Composers Guild has morphed this year’s Junior Concert into an online presentation, which will, at least, include a short piece I’ve written for guitar. In mid-March, when it became clear that we were cancelling our remaining three concerts for the season, I began sending out a “piece of the day” for the Composers Guild, sending music by our members to the membership and posting to social media. This has been popular among our membership, and a great opportunity for me to get to know the work of my colleagues, and to just stay connected to the composing world. I’ve had ideas about what I might do in the way of collaborations or getting work out there, but it just hasn’t happened yet. I would love to make videos of Twenty Views of the Trombone, for instance, but I just don’t have the right equipment. I tried to record and video a part for a band piece by a student composer I know on Twitter, but I’m not completely sure that I was able to create something usable.

I haven’t heard any live music since those auditions at Mentor High School, other than Noah’s and my practicing. I had one concert remaining on my Cleveland Orchestra subscription, and of course ended up donating my ticket. It will be good to get back to that.

Noah and I were planning a trip to Germany in April to spend ten days with my brother and his family. I hadn’t been there since 2001, and Noah had never been at all. That trip was in the works for months–we had our passports and flights booked, of course, and it would have been an exquisite experience that I was very excited to give my son.  We had planned our spring around it, and even bought new luggage, and it still stings every time I think about it. One result, though, is that Nate and I have done a better job being in touch.

Since Christmas, we’ve only seen my parents one time–to meet in a Wendy’s parking lot and have lunch in separate cars on Mother’s Day. Since then, we’ve seen my in-laws several times, but my parents have decided to stay locked down as much as possible, and declined to meet us on Father’s Day. Hopefully, this will mean many more opportunities to see them when this is all over.

I feel like I’ve handled things remarkably well, given that all of this started during my annual winter slump. It has forced me to focus on practicalities and on taking care of my family, and myself. My diet has never been great, but I haven’t succumbed to the temptation to eat nothing but junk food, although our ice cream consumption is up, and for the first couple of weeks, I was buying Easter chocolate like mad. The regular outdoors time has been good for the kids and me, and we mostly get along. I thrive on routine, so a daily shower, exercise, work and artistic goals have all been critical.

That said, I am nervous about the future. We are in contract negotiations, and I don’t think that will be good news, as college enrollment is down for the fall. I scheduled my usual in-person classes as hybrid in-person/online, and they are not filling, meaning that I will likely end up taking from adjuncts to make load, my nightmare scenario, and a particularly bleak prospect that it would pain me to inflict on people I consider my colleagues and friends at a time when it will be difficult for them to find other work in the field. Yesterday came the announcement that K-12 schools will reopen with in-person instruction in the fall, and this makes me nervous, amidst the current surge in cases of COVID-19 and with no news of a vaccine. Tonight, Melia woke me up at 4am having had a nightmare, and after I put her back to bed, I was unable to get back to sleep myself: once the birds started chirping, I decided to come write this post, which I’ve been meaning to do. My first truly sleepless night of this era, and really, in a long time.

Becky’s long-running insomnia continues, although she seems to be sleeping better for having to go to work. She injured her shoulder, and has an arthroscopy scheduled for later this month, but meanwhile is in even more pain than usual. I have been giving her at least one massage a day for years now.

Noah goes through times when he is anxious, restless, and discontented with the state of affairs. He is resourceful, though, and has found ways to occupy himself. He has built a large layout of Legos based on the Normandy beach of the D-Day invasion, and has been studying World War 2 to try to make it realistic, inspired by a stop-motion animation that he found on YouTube. Melia has been reporting chronic stomach pain, and has a doctor’s visit scheduled. The kids have become closer, and somewhat more self-reliant, as I typically leave them to their own devices after breakfast while I work for an hour or two. A year ago, they would have required much more direct supervision, and I would have had to be scrupulous about waking up early to work before breakfast–today is an anomaly.

We press on then, and for all my apocalyptic visions of a pandemic, fueled by books and movies, history’s touch on our has been relatively light thus far, and for that I am thankful. I am planning to ramp up my grocery spending again, as our March stockpile is looking a little depleted, and cases are on the rise again. The Germany trip is postponed indefinitely, as is the vacation to South Carolina we had planned. School will resume in some fashion, as will musical life, and I can only hope that we are lucky to be observers of the worst.

Posted in Cleveland Concerts, Composing, Personal Reflections | Comments Closed

The Symphony: In a Stall

November 27th, 2019

In aviation, a stall is a dreaded moment: an airplane climbs at too steep an angle, and doesn’t have sufficient thrust to maintain airspeed over the wings, loses lift, and begins to fall out of the sky. This is a problem so basic that even working on Aviation Merit Badge as a Scout (where the national BSA policy was that you wouldn’t actually leave the ground), I found myself in a simulator and put the simulated plane into a simulated stall within seconds of taking to the simulated sky. Stalls happen for a number of reasons, including pilot error, and every pilot needs to know how to correct (and avoid) them.

In writing my symphony, I am in the process of drafting the second movement, and I find myself in a stall. Late September and the first part of October, as detailed in my previous post, saw me composing a first movement in a white heat–consistently getting up early for my 6-7am timeslot, taking advantage of days when more time was available, working through a plan–both for work and for the form of the piece–that I was very happy with. It was my usual productive fall–I’ve seen this before, and I’ve mentioned my season-correlated cyclic energy levels. The months of September and October are important–I am rested from summer break, the days are getting shorter, but they are often sunny. After my blog post on October 20, I deliberately took some time away from the symphony, though. I knew that I was only at the beginning of a long journey, and that it is important to let the project rest and marinate from time to time. After a week, though, it seemed like enough, and I dove into the second movement: my first sketches are dated October 30, and I proudly wrote “Reformation Day” at the top of my outline for the second movement.

For the first part of November, all was going well, although I notice that my work on the sketches doesn’t reflect every day. My musical language in this movement is different, and I made the decision to incorporate some quotations from a piece that I wrote for my father’s aunt, Nancy Turner Sturdivant, who passed away this month (I wasn’t close to her, but I admired her, and she was very special to my father; there should be a blog post on her). I have also been working with string glissandi and some use of the kind of controlled aleatory. Not a piece that goes easily into Sibelius, and not a piece that, frankly, matches well with the first movement I was so excited about. About a week ago, in a fit of procrastination, I went back to the first movement and listened again, and now I’m worried that, in order for what I’m doing in the second movement to make sense, the first movement will require some major revisions.

Self-care is a word that gets thrown around a lot by composers, and I’ve been trying to make sure that I give myself time and space to do good composing on this project–my dream project of a quarter-century. I pretend that my work and my composing are two different worlds: my job at Lakeland Community College is a very good one, but there is no expectation in it that I be a composer (a conductor, yes, but not a composer). As the semester pushes forward, my job changes: I add an online class during the second 8-weeks of the term, more work is due in the full-term classes, the end-of-semester tasks begin to loom, and the things that were started earlier in the semester have to be wrapped up. Just as I know my seasonal rhythm, after thirteen years on the semester plan, I know this rhythm as well. My job isn’t especially stressful (at least not the way I work), but it requires mental energy that comes from a limited supply, and when things ramp up there (an orchestra concert in November, with another looming on December 9; my post-tenure review due; switching over to my 2nd 8-weeks classes; beginning to think about Spring semester), it starts to impinge on my creative work.

Then there is the reality of family life. Becky is under tremendous stress right now. In October, she accepted a promotion in her job at Ulta Beauty to a full-time management position. I whole-heartedly support this, but it has meant a different schedule, as she is now opening and closing the store at times, and just working more hours. Is October the best time to take on additional responsibilities in a retail environment? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t think she is struggling at work in any way, but it is still a source of stress, and she feels that she is pushing herself, just as I am pushing myself in writing this symphony. On top of it, her parents are in the process of downsizing, and it hasn’t been an easy process for anyone, which compounds her stress at work.

So now I find myself taking time away from the piece: days when I find something else to do with my hour; mornings when I hit the snooze bar and lose part of my hour; mornings when my hour isn’t productive because I’m too tired from staying up late to support Becky or just to read a science fiction novel. I am in a stall at the moment.

Like the pilot facing a stall, I have seen these things coming: I knew that Becky’s job would shift some things at home onto me. I knew that the workload at Lakeland would shift as the semester progresses. I knew that my fall energy would fade and that the excitement of beginning this project wouldn’t last. This was completely predictable.

  • Just as any pilot is trained to break out a stall, I have an idea of what to do:
  • Allow myself the time away, firm in the knowledge that the work will be there when I come back to it, and that there is plenty of time: the better part of two years before the final piece needs to be ready for a November 2021 premiere.
  • Get more sleep. Going to bed much after 10pm means that my 6am composition slot is not a healthy habit. For a few weeks, I wonder if I ought to make a rule that I’m not getting up early if I go to bed late and stick to it.
  • Change up the routine: I have this opportunity coming with the end of the semester. I have a couple of weeks where I may not have to rely on my 6am hour as much. As good a thing as it is, some of my best work happens when I am able to break out of the 6am slot and compose in other times and places.
  • Exercise. I can’t get the sunlight I was getting earlier this semester, but I can at least get my body moving.
  • Diet. Halloween put a temporary end to my attempts to lower my refined sugar consumption. Since then, it has been a cookie or a piece of candy whenever I feel like it, and that can’t continue. I’ve gotten into a 2:30pm diet cola habit at work, too, and I need to break out of that.
  • Confidence in my training. I know that I can write this piece. I know that I know what to do to keep going in the face of a loss of lift.

I can pull out of this stall.

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Posted in Composing, Personal Reflections | Comments Closed

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