The (Mostly) Empty Horizon, or, Is Anyone Looking for Something to Play?

February 12th, 2023

I was updating the News page on my website, which I hadn’t done in a while, and I realized that there wasn’t all that much to say: the horizon is mostly empty at the moment. While this would be frightening if I were a full-time composer, and honestly isn’t a great feeling for this part-time composer, I’ve accepted over the past couple of decades that composing work and performances of that work both come in fairly cyclical ways, and the storm of managing multiple projects and deadlines occasionally gives way to clear skies. In some ways, I’m reaping what was sown in March 2020: I decided to slow down my work on composing new music in order to make sure that I was focusing on what my family might need during the pandemic, while at the same time, lots of performances were postponed or cancelled. The postponed performances have now mostly been presented, but lots of people still aren’t back in their “normal” groove, and at least a few of my collaborators find themselves in different positions in life than three years ago. I took about two years to really get back into a composing routine, and even so, I haven’t been putting as much time in as I was pre-pandemic. My output has slowed, and I haven’t worked as hard on the “softer” side of the work in building connections and showing my face (we’ll see if my experiment with leaving social media last year will ultimately doom my composition career).

You get energy out of a system when you put energy in, and I truthfully have been putting less energy in over the last couple of years. It isn’t that I’m no longer interested in composition: it’s just that, as for everyone else, life has been in the way. I recently listened back to a podcast interview I gave to Kendall Halman six years ago when I was in a really different kind of place, and I don’t recognize everything about myself (unsurprisingly). I don’t know that I like the guy in the podcast better, exactly, but I was honestly more assured about my place in the music ecosystem.

So, I’ve been trying to do better: submitting to more out-of-town opportunities, for one thing, although outside of the conference circuit, which I haven’t really done since 2020, I’ve never had much luck here. My sense is that most opportunities online are simply deluged by applications, so getting picked for even one is like winning the lottery. A couple of these over the years have gone my way, and it’s always gratifying, even when the only thing you get is the performance and maybe a recording or video, but my sense is that building one-on-one relationships with performers is a better way to go.

So this post: I’m going to put two lists here, and I might even decide to break radio silence on social media and share this post there: I have no idea if anyone ever looks at this blog besides me, and in some ways, I’ve felt for more than a decade that I’ve been shouting into the void with it.

If you’re interested in anything from either of these lists, use the contact form on my website.

List 1 is pieces that are ready to go, but that I think are underplayed, or which have not even had a premiere.

Orchestra: As we all know, getting performances of orchestral music is really darn hard, but if you’re looking for something, I probably have it for you.

  1. I happen to think 2015’s …into the suggestive waters… is a really good piece for small orchestra that audiences can really enjoy, if they have the chance to hear it. It’s only had one performance, but if you think you might want to change that, give it a listen.
  2. My 2014 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra has had two performances, and if you’re a pianist looking for an exciting 20-minute piece, look no further.
  3. If string orchestra is more your style, my three-movement Suite for String Orchestra from 2012 pays homage to three of my favorite compositional influences; it’s had a few performances, but it’s due for a revival, and can be done by as few as nine players.
  4. Gamer Troll Loses Control had a good premiere in 2021, and is the same instrumentation as Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals. About nine minutes long, it is a tone poem based on an original fairy-tale.

Band/Large Wind Ensemble: Once upon a time, I was actually afraid to be “just” a band composer, and I knew I was wrong to feel that way. Here are a few gems:

  1. One of my relatively few works from 2020, Majestic Fanfare is for symphonic brass ensemble. The commissioning group, Ohio Valley Majestic Brass, played it around in 2021-2022, but because of the nature of their gigs, I didn’t get a recording to share.
  2. The last work I had premiered pre-pandemic was Mysterious Marvels for concert band (one cancelled performance was never rescheduled). It’s had one performance, and is ripe for more (it’s probably a grade 4.5 or 5).
  3. I’ve played the solo part in 2005’s Homo sapiens trombonensis twice, and I’d love to see another trombonist pick it up. The solo part is for an advanced player (but not as hard as the Creston Fantasy), and the band part is probably a grade 5.

Choral and Vocal Music: I have two a cappella choral pieces from the last few years.

  1. Christmas Eve from 2021 had a great set of premiere performances by Choral Spectrum that year. It’s about 3 minutes long, for SATB with a few divisi, as you can see in the score-follow video that I’ve linked.
  2. A piece that is currently orphaned is my setting of Yeats’ Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven from 2019. Some choirs have expressed interest, but no luck yet. It’s about five minutes, for SSAATTBB.
  3. And I Live With the Fiction That I Never Get Mad, for baritone and piano, is a long standalone song that had a premiere in 2019. I’m particularly proud of my approach in this piece, and if a baritone is looking for repertoire that addresses the impact that media can have on our lives, this might be for you.

Chamber and Solo Music: The most orphans live here, I suppose, along with a few pieces that need a second hearing.

  1. Child’s Play from 2020 for bass clarinet duo needs a premiere. It’s about 10 minutes long, uses a few multiphonics, and is inspired by the short story of the same name by Alice Munro. I’d be up to rework this piece for another instrumentation if there’s interest.
  2. Gamer Troll Loses Control (also listed in Orchestra) had a good premiere in 2021, and is the same instrumentation as Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals. About nine minutes long, it’s a tone poem based on an original fairy-tale, itself based on children’s artwork.
  3. Duo Capriccio is a set of variations on *that* theme by Paganini for flute and clarinet, if you need something to give variety to your recital. It had a premiere in South Dakota in 2018, and I think it should go out there again.
  4. Autumn Fantasy from 2016, eight minutes in one movement for alto clarinet and piano, is another orphan of the collaborative process that has never had a premiere as far as I know. I’d be up for reworking this for bass clarinet, or English horn, or some other woodwind.
  5. Meditation for cello and piano is a ten-minute, one movement piece from 2015 that had a great premiere, but needs to get out there more: it’s one of my favorites from the 2010s, and is inspired by the writings of Marcus Aurelius.
  6. One more orphan is my 2009 Piano Trio, which had a reading session, so I have a good recording, but never a public premiere, and I think the piece deserves one. It’s about 8 minutes in one movement.

I have many more pieces for solo piano and other solo instruments with and without piano, ranging in difficulty from fairly short and simple to college-recital or professional level. Why not go check out my Works List and see what might be there for you!

List 2 is pieces that I’ve been thinking about or dreaming about, often for decades… if you’ve ever been interested in playing my music, but wondered when I’d get around to writing for your instrument or ensemble, now is probably a great time to reach out.

  1. Music for worship. My faith is an important part of my life, but I don’t always get the chance to combine it with my compositional work. I’m not talking about contemporary Christian music here: that stuff is fine, but it’s not my bag. Let me write for your choir, organist, brass ensemble, soloists, or some combination. Anything from an offertory to a full cantata is something I’d be up to discuss.
  2. String quartet. I wrote a student piece string quartet based on some favorite children’s books back in 2006, but I’d love the chance to do something more serious and extended for the ensemble.
  3. Choral and vocal music. Yes, please! If you have poetry that you want set, or if you are a poet, or you just want a new piece for you or your chorus, reach out. I haven’t had enough chances to write for voices, but I love to do it when I can.
  4. Trombone ensemble. How have I not written for trombone quartet or octet or choir before?
  5. Band or orchestra music. Definitely something that I won’t write (usually) without a guarantee of a performance, even though I love to do it: it’s just too much work otherwise. It would be cool to take another crack at creating a silent film score like I did in 2013 for Georges Melies’ Voyage Dans La Lune. Really big bucket list piece: I have half of a forty-minute symphony written based on the chorale tune Old Hundredth (the Doxology in many churches).
  6. Similar vein: fanfares! So much fun to write, and so exciting to put together, and I love pushing the idea of what a festive, bright, piece can be. Let me write your concert opener!
  7. Percussion music. I’m tired of being intimidated by the cool kids in the back of the room. I want to tackle percussion ensemble, but I want to do it as a collaboration with players who will guide me through the process.
  8. I’d love to collaborate on more dance projects. I’ve conducted for ballet, and had one of my works, Martian Dances, form the basis for some beautiful choreography. I’m a terrible dancer, but I can provide a good beat.
  9. I’m often inspired by science, especially space. Let’s write a cool piece about the Universe, or nature, or the human brain, or DNA. What are you into?
  10. I’m always game to write more piano music. Piano was my first instrument, although never my best. I’d love to write a second piano sonata, or a suite of pieces based on Lake Erie and its shoreline here in Northeast Ohio, or something inspired by whatever inspires you!
  11. Solo instrument with piano. There are a few standard instruments in this combination that I’ve never tackled, and I’d be up for that, plus I’d be happy to return to any that I’ve already done. What about: viola, euphonium, double-bass, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, saxophone, English horn?
  12. Any sort of ongoing project that results in multiple pieces and performances. I don’t know–hit me up! Multimedia isn’t really my thing, but I’m happy to collaborate with non-musicians.
  13. Whatever chamber ensemble you’re a part of, no matter how weird. I’m always happy to help build someone’s repertoire!

So… this took longer than I expected, but maybe something will come of it, and if you don’t work with me for whatever reason, find another living composer and work with them! It’s good for our art form!

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Back to Severance After Three Years

January 6th, 2023

In February 2020, I went to see the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall. I expected to go again in May 2020, but we know what happened there.

Somehow, I skipped the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 seasons completely, making me officially out of the habit. The first year was certainly out of good sense: I wasn’t eligible for a COVID vaccine until mid-2021, and wasn’t really teaching much in person until Fall 2021: I’m still not back in the classroom as much as I was in Fall 2019, and wouldn’t be surprised if I never am. As well, Becky has been back at work, and scheduling a concert for just myself has been tricky: we don’t refer to taking care of our own kids as “babysitting,” but solo parenting for optional reasons is not something we like to stick each other with if we don’t have to.

The kids and I drove all the way to Cincinnati in June to hear the Cincinnati Symphony perform my Florence Price arrangement, but otherwise, I haven’t been to many things that I wasn’t specifically involved in putting on.

So, last night, I ended the drought, and went to hear the Cleveland Orchestra perform works by James Oliverio, Haydn, and Nielsen, under the baton of Alan Gilbert. Here’s the program.

Gilbert has been on my list of conductors to see since he took over the New York Philharmonic in 2009. My impression last night was that he is certainly charming and personable, with real “music director” energy that seems to invite musicians and audiences to trust him. His approach to the last movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 90, with its multiple false endings, had the audience in more laughter than I think I’ve ever heard at a symphony concert, and he successfully enlisted new concertmaster David Radzynski as accomplice (this was also my first chance to see Radzynski, whose father was on my doctoral committee, in action in the front chair). Coming from the band world, I think I tend to appreciate economy of gesture in a conductor, and this was a part of Gilbert’s approach in a way, but I don’t think in a useful way. The danger with a group such as Cleveland is that they will play the conductor, and I’m not convinced this wasn’t evident last night. I really only noticed one sort of beat from the right hand, which I would characterize as overly staccato, and the left hand seemed to mirror much of the time. Gilbert prefers a grip on the baton that I would find awkward, pointing and jabbing rather than amplifying and clarifying. The “gravitational” beat that I consider to be crucial was lost–and in one of the hammerblows that begin the Nielsen Third Symphony, the result was sloppiness of ensemble rare among Cleveland Orchestra performances.

I met James Oliverio once in graduate school when he came to Columbus for a performance of his first timpani concerto: it must have been 2005 or 2006. I don’t remember going to the performance, only being present for his masterclass, but I remember his affable, easygoing manner, shooting straight with young composers and percussionists, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that he now holds an academic position. That good-naturedness was on full display in the pre-concert talk in an interview by Dr. Emily Laurance. It was also present in Oliverio’s new timpani concerto, Legacy Ascendant, with the solo part taken by Cleveland Orchestra principal timpanist Paul Yancich. Oliverio and Yancich have a decades-long collaboration stemming from their student years at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Legacy Ascendant is a work with a fair amount of heft, and solves the problem of how to make a concerto for timpani in interesting ways. Yancich’s ability to retune the drums (seven of them) between strokes is impressive, and his phrasing allows the instrument to sing, despite the same problems that the piano or the guitar have with the sustain that we expect from a truly lyrical line. One method Oliverio uses for this is to use the cello and bass sections as resonators that hold a note after the timpanist plays it: this works well in slow-to-medium tempo passages, but he wisely avoids it for faster notes. I didn’t feel enough contrast between the three movements, and the promised “groove” in the last movement never seemed to materialize.

The Haydn, and Gilbert’s approach to it, were a pleasant surprise, and the core members of the orchestra played spectacularly in a piece the orchestra last played in 1967. I don’t generally seek out performances of the Classical repertoire when I select Cleveland Orchestra concerts, but I’m always impressed with the results when I happen to hear them.

The main event (at least to me) was Nielsen’s Third Symphony. I discovered this piece on CD in the summer of 1996, when I spent a lot of time listening through my collection, which by that point included Neeme Jarvi’s recording of Nielsen’s symphonies with Gothenberg. I was especially charmed by the Third, with its opening movement, and got as far as checking out the score from the CCM library, where I discovered to my delight that Nielsen indicated that the baritone solo could be performed on trombone and the soprano solo on clarinet (I have to wonder if the piece has ever actually been performed this way). In relistening to the piece and studying the score over the last couple of days, I hear the musical challenges: the long-breathed formal sections, the orchestration that is sometimes too heavy, and a certain harmonic ambiguity. But: it has been a piece I’ve wanted to hear in person for a long time, so I bookmarked this concert.

Gilbert and the Orchestra returned a very solid performance (despite a mishap here and there). The piece rewards the kind of ensemble playing that the Cleveland Orchestra makes a specialty of, while also giving ample opportunities to the principal players. As much as I’ve always loved the first movement, it was the third movement that really shone last night. It’s not quite a scherzo, and Dr. Laurence suggested similarities to Shostakovich, which may be a little premature, but I certainly hear Janacek and Bartok waiting in the wings. A great night for flutist Jessica Sindell, filling in the principal chair.

I’m on the lookout for a concert that will feature recently-appointed principal trombonist Brian Wendel. Of course, Ravel’s Bolero is coming up next month, but as important as that solo is for trombonists, it’s one among the crowd in the work itself. Mozart’s Requiem is on the way, but it’s solo is in the second trombone part, so I wouldn’t expect the principal to play it.

Severance Hall seems to be back to its old self. One disappointment is that, while the autograph manuscript of Mahler’s Second Symphony is on display, it is largely obscured within a box that projects video in front of it, which is somewhat confusing. Last night it was open to a page from the Scherzo with no explanation.

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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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