Concerto for Piano and Orchestra

October 6th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Well-Tempered Summer

August 31st, 2013

With only teaching one class during the Summer term, it made sense to find a project, so I brought home two scores–Beethoven’s string quartets, and book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  I barely cracked the Beethoven–that may be next summer’s project–but playing through Bach has been good for my limited piano chops and, as always, a glimpse at the mind of one of the greatest composers who has ever lived.

I bought my first copy of the Well-Tempered Clavier as an undergraduate, after discovering the recordings of Glenn Gould and the c-minor Prelude and Fugue in our music history anthology.  I played from it now and again, but couldn’t really make my fingers work from it; in orchestration class, I scored the D-major fugue as my final project.  Then, after graduation, my copy disappeared, probably mistakenly picked up by a young piano student (taking lessons from my roommate) on her way out the door.  May she get as much from it as I have.

I purchased another copy around 2000, but never did much with it until I took advanced 18th-century counterpoint from Jan Radzynski as a doctoral student.  The subject of the course was fugue, so we duly studied many of the expositions.  At my first college position, in Oklahoma, I taught Form and Analysis, so I conducted in-depth analyses of the pieces found in that course’s anthology, and worked up the F-major fugue to an acceptable level.  I’ve also done an analysis of the e-minor fugue for this blog.

This summer, though, I’ve kept my score for WTC I on the piano rack continuously, picking through the pieces as they caught my fancy and generally enjoying Bach’s mastery of the form.  Some notable observations:

The c-minor fugue was really the one that started my interest in this collection back in about 1995, and I don’t know if it’s anthologized so often because it’s near the front of the volume, or because it’s just about perfect.

The c#-major prelude caught my fingers this summer–I wish I had the skills to play it well or the time to learn it passably.

The two five-voice fugues–c# minor and bb minor–are sprawling examples of the ricercar, and stunning in their effectiveness.  The c#-minor double fugue is particularly amazing.

I hated the D-major fugue when it was assigned to me in orchestration class and I really listened to it for the first time, but I came to love it, and for all its strangeness, I still do.  A fugue as the first part of a French overture…

The d-minor prelude is the kind of moto perpetuo that attracts so many of us to Bach in the first place–wondrous arpeggios against a simple bass.

The d-minor fugue is everything the one in c minor is, but features the subject in inversion and a real answer.  Genius!

The irony of the E-flat major set is that the prelude takes much longer than the fugue to play…

The e-flat-minor fugue has it all–inversion, stretto, augmentation–in the ricercar manner.

The E-major prelude has a wonderful lyricism mixed with surprising chromatic movements as punctuation, and ends without a perfect authentic cadence.

The F-major set is bright and sparkling, with a stretto-obsessed canzona-type fugue.

My copious notes on the F#-major fugue date from from graduate school, and Dr. Radzynski chose wisely.

For such a key as G major, Bach chooses a fugue subject that allows a pianist to be brilliant in that comfortable key.

The g-minor pieces are wondrous, and a joy to play, as are those in A-flat major.

The g#-minor fugue is in a daunting key, but well worth the effort, as Bach makes very interesting use of countersubject technique.

The subject of the A-major fugue is daring–only the best pianist can make it work when it’s surrounded by other voices.

I discovered the a-minor prelude last winter, and wish I would have known it sooner.  A little masterpiece, and the same is true of the fugue.

The Bb-major prelude is the perfect antidote to the long the fugue which precedes it, with its stile brise approach.  The repetition in the subject of its own fugue is infectious!

The b-minor prelude was clearly meant to be a trio sonata movement.  I may have to set it for brass trio…

The book ends with a fugue in b-minor that is almost a summation of all that has come before.

I don’t need to recommend this work, of course, but I do so anyway.  It is critical for a composer to have analysis projects of this sort–they are composition lessons with our greatest predecessors, and none of those more deserves our attention than J.S. Bach.

Tags: ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Being a “Real Composer”

August 31st, 2013

2012-2013 was a surprisingly good season for my music–about 20 performances, all told, in a variety of places and venues, with a nice balance between premieres (Lady Glides on the Moon, Nod a Don, Le Voyage Dans La Lune and my Suite for String Orchestra) and second, third and later performances.  Some were simple–me playing Twenty Views of the Trombone at a John Cage Musicircus event at MOCA Cleveland, while others were more elaborate.  Some involved my making them happen (performances of my Piano Sonata and Moriarty’s Necktie at the SCI Region VI conference at West Texas A&M, a conference I cohosted), and others happened all by themselves (Selena Adams’ performance of South Africa on her DMA recital at the University of Colorado, right before winning a gig with the US Army Field Band.  In all, a very good year for my music, and 2013-2014 is shaping up as well, although not quite as spectacularly, but with an early start, a repeat performance of Lady Glides at the Parma Music Festival/SCI Region I conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which, with a little luck, might lead to more, as always.

It makes me feel like a “real composer,” I’ve felt, along with acceptance into the Cleveland Composers Guild, for which one is elected, not simply enrolled.  March and April, in particular, felt very busy, and this fall, there will be a day (September 29) where my music is played at the same time in two cities (Dallas and Cleveland).  Another milestone is that many of these performances are happening without my being present, or even involved other than selling a copy of the sheet music through my website.  This is a big deal.  South Africa continues to be my “greatest hit,” which surprises me at times, but I’m also gratified by that fact.  I’ll be looking for a couple more sales of that piece as horn students begin to program their recitals for this year.

Going forward, the big challenge, I think, is to continue to get my music out there and build my reputation as a composer.  I have a sense that I need to become a “Cleveland composer,” which is a tougher nut, in some ways, than composing was in the Oklahoma Panhandle.   There are areas in which I’d like to see growth in myself as a composer over the next few years–handling larger forms, dealing with complexity, exploring percussion, working toward a greater depth of emotional expression in my work.  Over the summer, I had lunch with Donald Harris, my graduate advisor, and he stated that I was growing in interesting directions.  Another of my teachers, Tom Wells, heard my piece in New Hampshire and stated that he was proud of me as a student.  To have my teachers–themselves distinguished and experienced composers–feel that I have done good things years after my time with them is a good thing.

Being at Lakeland, where my tenure is not bound up in producing new compositions or having as many performances as possible, gives me the freedom to pursue projects at my own pace, and not to feel like I need to take pieces on, write another book, or submit to every conference of SCI or CMS.  Composition can be more artful now and not a part of my family’s livelihood.  My one composition student, young Cooper Wood, has been quite an inspiration this year as well, and as he enters high school, I’m hopeful that our work together will benefit both of us.

It is impossible to be without disappointments as well.  I still feel that Moriarty’s Necktie is a very good piece, possibly my best, but it has now been through the cycle of awards for band composition (Revelli, Beeler, Ostwold, etc.) without being recognized.  There will be more band music from my pen, of course.  One also does not apply to conferences and festivals without rejections; more rejections than acceptances, naturally.  While each of these hurts, my faith in my work is undiminished, and I will continue to write and submit.  I’ve been diligently informing ASCAP of all my performances, and applied for the Plus Award for the first time this year–between ASCAP and the website, it would be nice to see some monetary return, if only to cover costs, but I feel that that is probably still at least a couple of years off.

It isn’t about the money, though.  On the other hand, in our culture, money means that someone, somehow, values my music in important ways.  Money is the reason I haven’t pursued my dream project–a symphony for orchestra.  Not that I require an enormous payment, but at this point in my career, I can’t write a piece that won’t have a prospect of a performance, and so my Great American Symphony waits for a commitment.

Onward, then, into another year of being a Real Composer.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Active Art

July 30th, 2013

NPR had a piece on playwright and actor Wallace Shawn yesterday (you know him… he played Fezzini in The Princess Bride).  He made a comment about “active art” and “passive art.”  Passive art is art that tells us how to think, and is everywhere.  Active art, on the other hand, is a wake-up call, a glimpse into a greater reality.  I immediately tried to think of pieces of music that might fit into these categories.  As obvious as it might be this year, I have no doubt that Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps is active art–after 100 years, it still feels fresh, it still challenges us; it makes us question just what a piece of music is, and just what it means to be modern.  Perhaps Mahler falls into the category of “active art” as well.  I’ve been at work on my piano concerto this summer, and I think this term “active art” is what I’m trying to accomplish with it (I’ve tried to be deliberate in my work rather than the kind of “white heat” composing that I’ve been prone to over the last couple of years… I just want to give the piece time to be what it will be).    Have I written music that is “active” in this way?  One or two of my recent works may approach this:  Moriarty’s Necktie and my Piano Sonata.

Otherwise, it’s been a busy-but-not-busy summer.  Getting used to the new house (oh yeah, we bought a house), spending time with Becky and Noah, teaching.  I’ve been teaching counterpoint to a private composition student, which has got me going back through the species and thinking about contrapuntal approaches in my music; also, I brought home my well-worn Well-Tempered Clavier and have spent some time with that, although the Beethoven quartets are still mostly unopened on the piano.  And letting the concerto gestate. And in that last couple of weeks, score study for the upcoming season with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra–Verdi, Mendelssohn, Milhaud, and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Last week, I had lunch with my graduate adviser Donald Harris and his wife Marilyn.  After a lovely lunch at his home in Columbus, we went to his study and played CDs of our recent work for each other.  I had the privilege to hear his Symphony No. 2, which received a strong performance by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra in April 2012.  It was interesting to see the similarities in our work, although when I was his student, he never had me study his scores intensively, and rarely gave comments that led me in his own stylistic direction.  Don seemed pleased with my recent work as well, which makes me realize that the recently-ended “Oklahoma Period” was not in vain.

That said–more blogging in the future, hopefully.  I’ve missed several months, but hopefully I can put that to rest.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Mahler 7, Cleveland, Alan Gilbert

March 24th, 2013

Some thoughts about the music I heard at Severance tonight with Dan and Melinda Perttu. At the pre-concert talk Roger Klein quoted critics who found Mahler’s music, particularly the Seventh Symphony, banal. As I listened this evening, I realized that really isn’t other music like Mahler’s by composers of his own time. It is banal, and that is what makes it significant.  Mahler may have been writing the world within his symphonies, but his basic musical language is exactly that of the commonplace, the street, the Gypsy camp, the shtetl, the nursery, the cathedral, the bedroom, the privy. His point is that the meaning of life is in the living, in the filthy, disgusting, degrading living, and that by living for our best even among the worst, we achieve the transcendence that Mahler saw in the human condition.  Mahler acknowledges that we live in a world where children die young and are warped by abuse (or even well-meaning parenting), wives cheat on their husbands (and vice versa), governments persecute minorities, musicians care for their beer more than the music they are rehearsing, and wars, famine, pestilence and the rest are all realities.  By taking the songs of childhood, worship, the poor, the illiterate into his music, he points out that the solution is to live life all the same, that transcendence can come from the common, the ordinary, the plain, and, yes, from the banal.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Mahler symphonies | Comments Closed

New Music in Cleveland

March 22nd, 2013

One of my challenges now that I teach at a community college is to find ways of promoting my composition career that don’t center on out-of-town travel.  In the Oklahoma Panhandle, of course, all travel was out-of-town, but I now find myself in a part of the universe with a new music “scene.”  In fact… there seem to be multiple scenes, which is exciting.

So, I submitted my portfolio and joined the Cleveland Composers Guild, a venerable group that also includes several of the other music faculty at Lakeland.  My first meeting as a member was prior to the Sunday, March 17 concert, and I’m happy to be a part.  Sunday’s concert, featuring works performed by the Solaris Wind Quintet, was a nice introduction to the variety of styles and approaches represented by the Guild, and I hope I can find a place on their concerts in the future.

Tonight, Becky and Noah are at the in-laws, so I looked online to see if there was a free concert I might take in (tomorrow night, I’ll be at the Cleveland Orchestra’s performance of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, leaving me with only two more Mahler Symphonies on my bucket list).  Lo, at Cleveland State University, there was such a performance, and of new music, too!  The NO EXIT New Music Ensemble gave a fantastic performance of five works–two by local composers.

Two of the pieces were unaccompanied flute pieces by Brian Ferneyhough, and shame on me for not digging into his “new complexity” sooner (I think it’s a law that if you mention Brian Ferneyhough, you have to say “new complexity” as well).  In the hands of guest flutist Carlton Vickers, Cassandra’s Dream Song and Sisyphus Redux (for alto flute) were spectacular.  If this is what complexity means, then sign me up.  I’ve never written particularly “complex” music, and I often find that the nested-tuplets sort of approach to composition is simply difficult for its own sake (this is my beef with Elliott Carter’s work, too).  Of course, another aspect of this dilemma is that much of my music has been written for student and amateur ensembles–which I love about my ouevre, frankly.  I like the idea of writing for people who don’t have multiple degrees in music, and I’m glad that a good chunk of what I’ve done is at this level.  (Another issue might be that, as a trombone player, the music that I’ve played has tended to be the type of thing that, if you handed it to a cellist or a bassoonist with similar experience to my own, would seem laughably easy, thus my lack of experience with really technical music makes me less likely to write really technical music).  At any rate, these two pieces are an argument in favor of complexity, and they make me wonder what I’ve been leaving out of my own work.

Since Alberto Ginastera was roughly contemporary to Benjamin Britten, I shouldn’t have been surprised at his Puneña No. 2 for solo cello, performed splendidly by Nick Diodore.  My experience with Ginastera has been the Estancia suite and the Variaciones Concertantes, an orchestral work with a fiendish clarinet solo that my college girlfriend had to learn (if nothing else, being around her made me learn about the clarinet).  Ginastera incorporates the name of conductor Paul Sacher as the musical basis for the piece, which also depicts a specific Argentine setting, and it never once seemed contrived.

I was particularly taken by the world premiere of the evening, a piano quartet by Matthew Ivic.  This work combined a variety of techniques and approaches, from minimalist textures and more dissonant passages to surprising and refreshingly tonal chord progressions.  The final piece of the evening was a piano trio by Andrew Rindfleisch, head of composition studies at Cleveland State.  This work, celebrating its 20th birthday, was deemed complex enough that Dr. Rindfleisch conducted it, although I wonder how necessary that was, and he didn’t conduct all the way through.  I have also written chamber pieces that ended up being conducted, and while I stand behind the music, I always felt that I had conceived them to be playable without a conductor, and that to use one was only an expedient in the case of limited rehearsal time.  The piece tonight, however, was a joy otherwise.  The temptation in writing a piano trio is to let the namesake instrument dominate the texture, as in many of the examples in the genre from the Romantic era.  Rindfleisch, however, named his piece Trio for Piano, Violin and Violoncello, and it was just that, with some wonderful passages of two-voice counterpoint between the bowed instruments, including one spot where the D-string of the violin acted as a drone against a haunting line in the cello to make an almost Medieval sound.

So–new music is alive in Cleveland, and it will be up to me to become a part of things here.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

The Middle

February 5th, 2013

My last post described some things that I learned from another art form, woodcarving, through my father and his teacher, Spirit Williams.  Here’s another in the same vein, purely by chance, mind you.

I firmly believe that other art forms have a great deal to tell us about composing, which means that if I have a chance to chat up an artist during a plane ride, I’m going to take it. Last Spring, I met Kiersi Burkhart on a plane from somewhere to somewhere (I think it involved Denver, a city where I one day hope to see more than the airport and the hotel where the airline sends me when my flight is screwed up). She writes young adult novels, and also a blog. This post showed up the other day, about how to help the middle of a novel.   Her five suggestions have me thinking about the middle of pieces, so here are my thoughts about Kiersi’s thoughts and how they might relate to composing.

1. Raise the stakes. This “tip” gets thrown around a lot, and for a long time I wasn’t really sure how one could implement such broad-sided advice.

The easiest way I’ve found is to first work out what your characters’ goals are (both small and large), and then determine: what are the consequences of your characters not achieving those goals? Now make them even more dire. Life and death. Death and destruction. Whatever you can do to make the repercussions of your characters’ not achieving their goals worse, do it.

I think the best way to raise the stakes in a musical composition is to move beyond your starting material in some way.  I’m not suggesting that you string together theme after theme after theme (although it worked occasionally for Mozart), but if you’ve focused on one melodic idea up until this point, say, a third of the way in to the composition, it’s time for some contrast.  This new material should relate to earlier portions of the piece in some way–a similar harmonic framework, or a motivic relationship–but there is a need for variety as well.

Another way to raise the stakes might be to employ a change in texture–if things have been very homophonic up to now, it’s time for some counterpoint; if you’ve been writing lots of interwoven lines, it’s time to pare the texture down.  All kinds of great things can happen in the middle of pieces–the classical approach to creating a movement has a middle that is much more loosely-constructed than the beginning, and even in the middle of a Bach fugue, we can go long stretches without either a cadence or the fugal subject, just riffing on little ideas that have come up.  Speaking of riffing, think of the structure of a bebop jazz performance, with its tightly-constructed presentations of the head at the beginning and end and the loosely-constructed solos in the middle.

2. Lower the low points. The best part of middles is when it seems all hope is lost–that there is no possible way your character can achieve his purpose.

Remember in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, when Han Solo gets trapped in carbonite? Even worse, he’s shipped off with a bounty hunter to see Jabba the Hut, and our heroes are too busy trying to save Luke to chase him down.

At this moment in the story, we (the audience) feel somewhat defeated, like there’s no possible way Han can be rescued from his terrible fate. And in Return of the Jedi, this situation only gets worse when Leia is enslaved by Jabba.

Find that low point in your story (make one, if it’s not there already) and then make it worse. While you’re beating your hero into the ground, beat harder. Did something go wrong in his heist plan? Find three other things to go wrong, too. And it’ll be really satisfying to your audience when your clever protagonist manages to worm her way out of this ridiculous bind.

I think what Kiersi is getting at here is dramatic tension–the middle is the place where we really aren’t sure how things are going to work out, and as such, it has the possibility of being the most exciting part of a piece of music.  Certainly, as a composer, I often view my pieces this way when they are in process: there comes a point when I know what the rest of the piece is going to look like, and I know that I will be able to finish it.  Composing the middle, though, can be frustrating for exactly that reason–I don’t know how I’m going to get out of the situation in which I’ve placed myself.  There’s a famous moment in the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica where the texture devolves into these dissonant, repeated chords, as though Beethoven threw up his hands, smacked the piano keyboard, and wrote down the results.  Beethoven takes this almost-mistake and slowly winds his way out, with a diminuendo and resolutions of dissonant notes that leads back to the main theme–the beginning of the ending.  In my own Piano Sonata, about three-quarters of the way through, the relatively-complex rhythms and texture dissolve into a single line, notated in stemless noteheads, a moment of repose for performer and audience, and a summation of what has come so far in the piece, and preparation for some of the breathless material that lies ahead in the push to the climax.

3. Up the conflict. Are your characters friends, lovers, or comrades in arms? Are they getting along, smooching, snuggling and heisting in perfect harmony?

This is the primary way in which I find middles sag: the character relationships stale. Either they are at peace with one another for too long, or they’re at odds without any moments of relief.

Cause some conflict. Stir up some drama. But be wary of falling into common conflict traps: misunderstandings that would be easy to resolve, unlikely coincidences, or blowing up a small issue into a big one (this is my biggest complaint with romantic sub-plots).

Use inherent character flaws to guide your conflicts. Is one of your characters prideful? Have that pride lead her to hurt the other character in a way that seems irreparable.

Again, we have to turn to Beethoven, who can’t seem to write a middle section of a symphony movement without a fugato (and who was imitated by countless others).  As Kiersi mentions, though, it’s easy to fall into some common traps, and fugato is one of them (why does Brahms turn every movement of Ein Deutsches Requiem into a fugue?  I submit that it may have been youthful inexperience).  Unless your piece has been somewhat contrapuntal up to now, throwing a fugue in seems kind of desperate (Berlioz writes scathingly about this practice in his orchestration treatise).  But the beauty of fugue is that it does have that “cool” factor, and it’s critical to find something to do with your materials that propels the piece forward.  Look for the same kinds of rhythmic intensification that fugue can provide–change the position of motives within the bar, let them happen sooner, and closer together.  Foil the listener’s expectations about when things will happen: sooner (more drama), later (more tension).

4. Comic relief. I might be the only writer with this particular problem, but I have a hunch that I’m not. Why so serious? If things are getting intense in your middle–as it probably should–be cognizant of how your reader is feeling. In the middle of drama and conflict, give your reader the occasional break.

The break doesn’t always have to be comic. Let your characters have moments of tenderness or insight into one another. In a romance, let passion momentarily override conflict (leading to more conflict, of course). In a thriller, let your protagonist feel victory–short-lived victory. A good middle is a combination of low and high points, leading up to your dramatic finale.

This can be hard to remember, but great music can be funny, not just serious.  Whether it’s Bach’s quodlibet in the Goldberg Variations with its use of street songs (not funny to us, but probably hysterical to Bach), or the trio of the Scherzo in Persichetti’s Symphony for Band, where a little group of instruments, pulled along by a muted trombone, plays a little march that sounds like it would go with a Dr. Seuss story, there is humor in good music.  A composer is a human being, and being human means being both tragic and comic.  Some composers do this better than others: think of the burlesque version of the march from Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony that shows up in Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.  I’m sure that Shostakovich laughed the first time he heard it, because his own music is filled with irony and parody as well.

That said, it’s easier to plant comic relief in a dramatic work–the Papageno subplot in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, for example, and of course the dark humor of the graveyard scene in Hamlet that adds levity while staying on topic–the downstairs view of the goings on at Elsinor, perhaps.  Kiersi also suggests that intimate moments in the middle provide a break–it works in music, too, as in the piano-cello duet in the second movement of John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1–intimate not only in texture but in meaning as well.

5. Escalate tension. A good climax is the tip of the highest peak of your story arc. Leading up to that peak are your second, third, and fourth-highest peaks.

I suggest doing this with “post-outlining”: now that you know all the plot points of your story (all the “ups” and “downs,”) organize them in order of severity. Your lowest lows and your highest highs should come near the end, leading up to your finale.

This is especially important when revealing important plot information. You don’t want to save all of your high-value cards and staggering reveals for the very end; drop some of your big bombs (but not your biggest bomb) during that sagging middle section, then escalate leading up to that super mondo finale–and hopefully leave your readers panting.

This suggestion may or may not apply to a given situation–sometimes the beginning of the end of a piece of music is a moment where tension is released–the recapitulation of a sonata-form movement, for example, or the beginning of the “Simple Gifts” variations in Copland’s Appalachian Spring.  The ending of a piece is inevitable once it begins, and layering coda upon coda (in the way Tchaikovsky does in his Fifth Symphony, for example) doesn’t move the beginning of the ending anywhere closer to being the middle.  In good music there is a crucial difference between music of the beginning, music of the middle, and music of the end.  Some great middle moments, though–the trombone chorale in the last movement of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony comes to mind–are the last moment of calm, an eye in the hurricane.  The birdsong section of the slow movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony is a change of character that builds into a critical statement of the motto theme of the symphony before the return of the main theme for the movement.  It would behoove all of us to study the Romanza movements that Mozart frequently uses in his later piano concerti–the quick middle Sturm und Drang sections like the one in K.466 are the uber-middle–the middle part of the middle movement of the three-movement structure.  The formal considerations of music are somewhat different than those of the novel, of course, because of the way that repetition is a critical component of good composition, but the dramatic concerns are similar.

Ralph Vaughan Williams is said to have said what every composer (and author) knows: something to the effect that starting a piece is easy, but getting to the end is hard.  This is the difference between being a tunesmith and being a composer:  a song is all theme, but a composer has to be able to take themes (or the equivalent) and connect them in meaningful ways, constructing the musical equivalent of a novel.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Moving Wood

January 29th, 2013

When I was in high school, my father took up a new hobby:  woodcarving.  He was inspired to do so by the work of Spirit Williams, a woodcarver and artist who lived in Columbus, and whose work is, frankly, wonderful, at least in my memory.  One of her more fantastic pieces, Kenya Bush,  used to hang in the administration building at the Columbus Zoo, in a public area, and I remember it as a mural of African animals, in high relief.  I also remember seeing a work in progress, an in-the-round depiction of the Last Supper.

I was surrounded by creative people as a young person, and but my connection with Spirit was mostly secondhand–my father eventually took regular classes with her, but I spent time talking to him about his work, as I was fascinated with the way he learned to take a plain piece of basswood and use simple hand tools and his eyes (and Spirit’s eyes as well) to shape deeply realistic relief carvings.  Through my father, I learned three lessons Spirit that have served me well as a composer (and so the implied fourth lesson, that all artists can learn from other artists, no matter what the medium).

The first:  treat your materials with respect.  In Spirit’s studio, this meant that you could have a glass of water at the workbench, but it had to be a double-walled plastic cup, to avoid condensation that could drip onto the work.  In my work, this means writing always with the eventual human performer in mind.

The second:  don’t buy a new tool until you’ve done everything you can do with the tools you already have.  In woodcarving, this means don’t spend sums of money on specialized knives and gouges that promise to get you out of a jam when, with patience and ingenuity, the tools you already know how to use will serve you better.  Tools are not the answer: creativity and patience are.  In composition, this means having a “toolkit” of techniques, devices, and methods at the ready, and knowing when and how to apply each one.  To my music, it means not going for the flashy, novel, or merely schematic ideas when something more meaningful might be created through means that are more conservative, and, usually, more accessible, and–I’m out on a limb here–likely more durable in the end.  I learned this from the experience of a woman who began carving with a kitchen knife on a shelf pilfered from the closet in her bedroom–she discovered that she was able to make art with these sparse tools and materials, and in the end, it is the art that matters, not the medium or the technology that manipulates it.

The third:  sometimes you are being creative, and sometimes you are just “moving wood.”  Relief carving begins with a flat surface, and the excess material must be moved away.  It takes attention and technique at every phase, but clearing the field around the carving proper is one of the “chores” of the process–crucial, yet not as explicitly creative.  In composition, this is the endgame of my process, particularly when I’m composing for band or orchestra and switching from a short score to a full score.  In some ways, it’s the least frustrating part–predictable, full of skill as much as art, even somewhat capable of being automated by my notation software (ahh… the time saved over manuscript by the computer; in manuscript, it would be drudgery, but in the digital workspace, it is a romp).  The beauty of the “moving wood” phase of the work is that it can be done hodge-podge and higgeldy-piggledy–sessions of a half-hour can be productive, unlike the earlier parts of the process, which require either weeks of carrying ideas around in the mind, or uninterrupted hours in which to pound out the first drafts.  I currently have two projects in the “moving wood” phase, and being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel on both is encouraging, and gives me a sense that my time is being well-spent.

So, those are three things I learned from my dad’s woodcarving teacher, Spirit Williams, without ever picking up a knife.  Hopefully, they will serve others just as well.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Regaining my Sense of Snow

January 26th, 2013

In the five years that we lived in the Oklahoma Panhandle, it only snowed two or three times, and the sheer novelty of seeing snow made me not look at it too carefully. Yesterday I went out to my car in the faculty lot at Lakeland, though, and found it covered with about another inch of snow (yes… one of the joys of living in Northeast Ohio is cleaning snow off of your car multiple times in a day). As I was brushing, I noticed that the snow was extra fluffy–if I were a skier, I would probably have loved it. Looking closer, the flakes were very large, and mostly planar, like little pieces of plastic that almost looked fake… up close they were shiny and had the six-pointed structure we associate with snow flakes, writ large so that I could examine it easily. I realized that in the six or eight times that it’s snowed this season, the flakes have been different every time. I knew this–the eskimos famously are supposed to have 30 different words for snow in their language–but the reminder was fantastic. Winter can get to be grind, but we have to remember to stop and notice the beauty of Creation whenever we can.

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Film Scoring, Self-Taught

January 21st, 2013

It’s important to try new things, and I was inspired by BJ Brooks’ presentation of his silent film scores at the SCI Region VI Conference back in October.  Now that I’m conducting the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, and I can pick our repertoire, I have the chance to try my own hand at such a thing.  The orchestra at West Texas A&M, where BJ works, has been presenting silent movies with BJ’s scores every other year for the last few years, and they’ve been doing feature-length films, which is an exciting proposition.  I decided for Lakeland’s first effort to choose a shorter film (more on the difficulties of that later), but even at 13 minutes, this will be the longest single movement I’ve written for orchestra.  The film is Georges Melies’ Le Voyage Dans la Lune, from 1902, a somewhat groundbreaking piece from a groundbreaking era in cinema.

If you watch the film, you can see that Melies is operating in an era when the technology of film was brand new.  Many of the things that we take for granted about cinematography aren’t present–the movie is shot as though the action were happening on a stage, and the camera were an audience member, with no close-ups, no pans, no framing shots… some of the things that make film what we think of it today.  What is present, though, is the magic of cinema, which is not surprising, since Melies started out as an illusionist of note before switching to film.  Particularly fascinating are his special effects, which are somewhat crude, but surprisingly effective.

Composing to this has been interesting–I’ve completed the piece in short score, and will be orchestrating over the next couple of weeks.  I’m not the first to score the film–there is a score by George Antheil, and at least one uploaded to archive.org.  I made the decision early on to stick to sounds that could have been a part of the musical sound of 1902, so my score has references to Debussy, Elgar and Strauss, although not specifically.  The tricky part has been making things fit–identifying the places where the music needs to change, and making the notes change at the same time.  This is my first film score, unless you count my entry a few years back for the TCM Young Composers Competition.  Since then, Sibelius has added the ability to sync a score with a video, which has been invaluable–both in finding “hit points” and in seeing how my ideas fit the action on screen.

The style that’s coming out is different from how I usually write, which is somewhat intentional.  I’ve ended up with more repetition, and a great deal more of a “tonal” style than I’ve customarily used; in some ways, this is some of the most predictable music I’ve written.  Part of this is a decision to use the sounds typical of 1902, and part of this is knowing that I’m dealing with an orchestra and audience who aren’t expecting dissonant, angular music that might have been my first choice.

The sense of time in the music is intriguing as well.  Watching the movie with no sound, alone, as I have several times, is somewhat difficult.  A few weeks back, some of the orchestra members and I watched it together, again with no sound, and the experience was more rewarding.  But–now that I have a draft score to add to the film (which I now know very well, of course), the story seems to come to life–it will be incredible to see and hear it with live instruments!  The dimension that the music adds to the film is even more important than the “dimension” that 3-D aims to add.  Thirteen minutes that seemed to positively crawl by in silence are enlivened by the music in a way that explains why, as Richard Taruskin writes, “the movies were never silent.”

The other challenge has been dealing with the inherent flaws in Melies’ narrative–events are repeated (the moon landing, the celebration at the end), and the pre-launch events dominate the structure in a way that is somewhat unfortunate.  Melies was dealing with this brand-new idea–telling a story in moving images–so it’s not surprising that his early work moves somewhat creakily, but making my music work with this narrative has been tricky in the sense that some things go longer than I would like them to, while others peter out just as they are getting going in the score, but there are no more images for them.  Melies was really making science-fiction, which, for a fan of Star Trek and Star Wars, is exciting–he made this movie at the same time that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were inventing the literary genre.

The premiere is in April, and rehearsals start in five weeks, giving me time to finish the scoring and get the parts to the concertmaster, if I work hard.  Look for more as it progresses.

I’ve also spent some time over the last few days helping Daniel Perttu with his new trombone sonata, which has been interesting.  It’s been interesting to consider someone else’s ideas about my own instrument (it’s almost been an education in Dan’s instrument, the bassoon, because I feel like much of what he’s written for the trombone would work better on bassoon). It leads me to wonder about how I know what I know about “how” to write for an instrument, and how best to communicate that.  Certainly part of my training as a music education major has been useful here–the chance to take “methods” classes and get to play every instrument, even if only a few notes, makes writing for that instrument a different experience.  This is why I required two instrumental methods classes when I wrote the composition degree plan at OPSU, and I would push for the same thing again if I had the chance (now that I’m at a two-year school, I don’t think it makes much sense to be thinking about an Associate of Arts in Music Composition).  I recall an incident in Jean Sibelius’ biography where he spent an afternoon with an excellent English horn player–I don’t recall whether that correlated with his composition of The Swan of Tuonela.  It’s too bad that he didn’t write any film music.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »