Posts Tagged ‘CCM’

A View of Twenty Views, part 2

Thursday, February 2nd, 2017

In February, I will be travelling to Atlanta, where I will give the premiere performance of the complete Twenty Views of the Trombone at Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery, at the invitation of Olivia Kieffer.  This is the second in a series of posts about that piece and how it has come to be what it is.

Read the first post, on the history of this piece’s composition so far, here.

I performed Twenty Views of the Trombone in October 2013 on a concert of the Cleveland Composers Guild.  At that time, it was still a work in progress, with only eight or nine pieces complete, but you can listen to that performance here.

The premiere performance will be Friday, February 17 at 8pm at Eyedrum.  Admission is $7 at the door.

I will be tweeting using the handle @MattSComposer before, during, and after this process.  Join the conversation with #twentyviews–the final post in this series will be a Q&A, so send me your questions about the piece, or composing, or life in general, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Twenty short pieces is a lot to keep track of, even for the person who is writing and performing them.  I’m not completely sure how to keep the audience on track–perhaps they should open their phones to this blog during the performance!

At any rate, here are my thoughts on the first seven pieces, in the order in which I am currently planning to play them at the premiere.

1. What It’s Like

This is the piece that started it all.  The title is deliberately incomplete: the full statement is “What It’s Like to Play Trombone.”  Every idea behind Twenty Views, musical or otherwise, grows out of this one-minute sketch from 2009, first performed at Jan Hus Church in New York City in March 2009 on a Vox Novus Composer’s Voice concert organized by David Morneau, with a preview the month before on a faculty recital at Oklahoma Panhandle State University.  I had been out of graduate school less than two  years at that point, and I hear quite clearly my style from that period.  There are distinct resemblances to my graduation piece for orchestra, Five Rhythmic Etudes, especially the first movement, “Hobnob.”  Thirty-seven measures of mixed meter, an essentially pentatonic approach, and is it in the key of A?  Possibly.  I tried to write a piece that was comfortable, humorous, and light-hearted, and I think I succeeded.  I also succeeded in creating a piece that was exactly one minute in length, and this was useful a year or so later when I arranged it for orchestra to enter in Vox Novus’ call for scores for 60×60 Orchestra.  It was selected, but that project has yet to come to fruition, so the amplified version of this piece has yet to be performed.  Luckily, I amplified What It’s Like in another way: the final piece of Twenty Views of the Trombone, “What It’s Really Like,” is an expansion of the first piece.  I don’t know what “official” order I will eventually settle on for these pieces, but I do know that “What It’s Like” will be first, and “What It’s Really Like” will be last.  Any partial performance should begin (and always has) with “What It’s Like” and end with “What It’s Really Like.”

One idea that I incorporate in Twenty Views of the Trombone is synecdoche.  I didn’t start out thinking this way, but as the movements accumulated, it turned out that there were some opportunities for pieces to represent parts of a whole.  (The phrase All hands on deck is a synecdoche because the word hands substitutes for entire human beings).  Thus, “What It’s Like” is a synecdoche both for “What It’s Really Like,” and, in a way, for Twenty Views as a whole, and for the entire experience of playing the trombone or listening to trombone music, or for the experience of life.   Libby Larsen said that music tells us something about “what it’s like to be alive,” and there is that sense in the title as well.  As Twenty Views of the Trombone came together over the years, I found that in many ways it was a piece about my life–I have played trombone for most of my life, after all, and my love for doing that has determined the course of my life.

2. What It Once Was Like (I)

Also from 2009, as I began to expand upon “What It’s Like.”  First performed on a faculty recital at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, and then premiered formally at an Oklahoma Composers Association Salon concert in the fall of 2009, alongside three other movements, and, again, Let Everything That Has Breath Praise the Lord.  This is the first of several backward-looking pieces–in this case to my studies with Tony Chipurn at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in the mid-1990s.  It begins with an interval–Bb3 up to Gb4–familiar to any trombonist as the first two notes of Alexandre Guilmant’s Morceau Symphonique.  

3. What It Could Be Like (I)

The third piece that I presented for the Oklahoma Composers Association in 2009.  The “What It Could Be Like” pieces envision the future–specifically, life after death.  As a Christian, I accept salvation, but more on that later.  This piece envisions the mind fading away into nothingness as the brain fires off a last few electro-chemical bursts.  Marked Sempre rallentando e diminuendo, it is written in free rhythm, and calls for the Harmon mute, which has me greatly concerned, as I’m not sure how to safely get my mutes from Cleveland to Atlanta on a commercial airliner.

4. What One Philistine Thinks It’s Like

First performance at Eyedrum in February. From the sublime to the ridiculous, then.  I don’t know if I should call the method for playing this piece an “extended technique.”  There are plenty of people who choose not to understand what it is that musicians do.  This is a reminiscence about one of them, and something of an inside joke between my wife and me.

5. What It Sounds Like When the Philistines Talk About What It’s Like

First performance at Eyedrum in February.  I am an expert in the field of music.  Over the years there have been many ways in which people have said things about playing the trombone to me that, if they only knew what they were saying, they probably wouldn’t have said.  Am I an elitist snob?  Probably, but no more so than anyone who involves himself deeply in some area of endeavor who then has to speak to people about it outside the field.  I try not to be a jerk about it.  This piece explores what I’ve heard from people–most well-meaning, some not–over the years, starting in the 1980s, when everyone I met seemed to mention Glenn Miller.  This is the first piece in the cycle to employ spoken word, something I have been thinking about for quite some time, since I heard Dan Trueman’s doctoral composition recital in college in which the Amernet String Quartet spoke a somewhat Dadaist text.  I incorporated a “commercial” with a narrator in my clarinet concerto Daytime Drama in 2011, but the use of speech in these pieces is somewhat different–perhaps as a shorthand for musical expression, since these are short pieces.  Perhaps a better composer would not require such recourse.

6. What I Thought It Would Be Like (I)

First performance at Eyedrum in February.  A short piece as a sort of march with lots of 16th notes.  You enter a career with certain expectations, and sometimes those are met, and sometimes they aren’t.  This piece isn’t not what being a trombonist has turned out to be (especially since it has turned out that I am playing this piece), but it isn’t exactly it, either.  It would be more fun if more trombone music were like this, but it would also be much more stressful.  Woe to the trombonist who would write music for himself to play.

7. What It’s Like When I’m Working (Aubade)

First performance at Eyedrum in February.  As a father of young children, the solution to my need for a set composing schedule over the last two years has been met (somewhat) satisfactorily by getting up an hour before everyone else.  This works because I compose at the computer and can do so in silence.  It then becomes a race between my ability to keep working and not get distracted by email or social media, and my children’s desire to awaken seemingly earlier every day (my daughter is stirring right now…).  So, the piece begins with a warm-up, and just as it seems to get started, it has to stop.

This is the second of a short series of posts about Twenty Views of the Trombone.  The first post gave an overview of the history of the composition of the piece, and next posts will continue to discuss the individual pieces and serve as a program note.

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A student’s question

Tuesday, August 26th, 2014

I’ve been teaching composition to a very talented young man, Cooper Wood for not quite two years now.  This week he discovered Varese, and emailed me with a question:  

I’ve been doing a lot of listening to 20th century composers recently because I want to liberate myself from composing invariably in a tonal idiom. I’ve been listening to Antheil, Cowell, Varesé, and Hovannes [sic]. I love the sound all of them have, but every time I try to compose non tonally I get stuck and fall back on tonalism. When and how did you sort of break free from tonalism and started relying on other parameters of music to compose?

Here’s my response:

Boy, this is a big question.

We’ve never really talked about how I got going in composition. My junior year of high school, I had a free period and didn’t want to take a study hall, so my guidance counselor suggested our school’s gifted and talented program, in which about twenty of us pursued our own interests and passions, with a teacher to facilitate things (and make sure we actually did something). The year before, I had taken a class in computer graphics and sound in which we learned Encore, an early notation program, so I had developed a taste for moving notes around. Based on that, I decided that my “thing” would be composition, and I now had a class period every day to devote to it. I didn’t really know where to start, and I didn’t have very much guidance, which in some ways was a blessing, because I had to figure things out on my own. Up until this point, I loved doing music, was excited about it, and even thought of myself as rather good at it, but I had never thought of making it a profession before, and I wasn’t even taking private trombone lessons. That year, I worked through a part-writing book, practiced a lot of trombone, listened to a ton of music (the public library let you check out four CDs every week, and I had my driver’s license by that point, so I could get there when I wanted to go; they had a great selection of classical music, including a good amount of the cool late-minimalist stuff that was coming out in the 80s and 90s).

There was one other composer in the class, Renee Goubeaux, who was later my first girlfriend, and is now a cellist in the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.  We sort of spurred each other on, sharing stuff with each other and talking about pieces we wanted to write.  I had done a lot of reading, and was starting to put sounds with what I had read.  I tried to write a few pieces–I was interested in writing band music, canons, modal things that incorporated serial transformations.  We performed a couple of pieces as part of the performances that the class would put on.

The next year, my senior year, I did more of the same, culminating with my senior thesis, a concerto for trombone and string orchestra.  I played in the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra that year, and auditioned for colleges as a trombone performance and music education major.  I thought that perhaps composition would have some place in what I was doing in college, but I didn’t feel like I had been doing it long enough to make it my main focus.  I did take some private lessons as an undergrad with Wes Flinn, who is now on faculty at the University of Minnesota-Morris, and with Joel Hoffmann, who is still at CCM.  I immensely enjoyed taking orchestration and studying counterpoint in my theory classes, but I still didn’t consider myself a composer.

Despite all the listening I had done, I still didn’t understand that a composer didn’t have to be someone who wrote pretty melodies–I thought there had to be a catchy tune, somehow.  It didn’t seem to occur to me that what I was hearing in, say, Philip Glass, wasn’t about tune at all–it just sounded good.  In those pre-Internet days, scores were hard to come by, and I wouldn’t have necessarily thought to go looking for them, either.  So I spent years thinking of myself as an arranger, or as someone with an interest in composition but not doing much composing.

I’ve also realized that I never really was a “tonal” composer, in that I never took the time to really absorb the language to tonal music and let that be my pure expression.  Perhaps this is my background as a trombonist instead of a pianist, or just listening to years of rock music (my other favorite music), and then being dumped into the world of wind ensemble literature in college (although we played Persichetti in high school, too).  I have a real ear for orchestration and a strong rhythmic understanding of things (we’ve discussed this), but I’m not a tonal harmonic composer in my heart of hearts.

I also am not a part of what used to be called the “avant-garde,” and what these days we refer to as “new complexity.”  I don’t compose tonally, but I don’t compose in such a way as to be deliberately ground-breaking or difficult all the time.  I want to compose music that expresses what I want to express while also being something people want to hear and perform.  Sometimes I’m successful in this, sometimes not.

So–as much as I’ve been exposing you to post-tonal methods, techniques, materials, and repertoire, if you are, in your heart-of-hearts, a “tonal” composer, you need to write that way.  Study the rest, because it may come in handy someday.  What I’ve been trying to get you away from isn’t “tonal” composition, but writing that is merely a copy of historical styles.  There are reasons to write like Chopin or Mozart, but it’s difficult to be taken seriously in 2014 if that’s all you do (in fact, I’ve found it useful to engage in style copies at several different points in my career).

That trombone concerto back in 1994 was an attempt to be tonal.  I didn’t follow the “rules” very well, and as satisfying as it was to write that piece, it wasn’t very successful from a musical standpoint.  The very next piece I wrote, a song cycle, worries much less about keys and more about rhythm and the flow of melody–it was my first vocal piece, setting some of my favorite poems from high school English class.

In some ways, the important thing is to keep writing, keep listening, keep reading.  If I push you on to certain things, it’s because I think it’s my job as your teacher to try to help you get into a college program, and that means we have a hard deadline about twenty-eight months from now.  Your personal style–tonal or not–will develop as long as you keep writing, keep listening, keep reading.

I hope this helps!

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Glenn Gould: Fifty Years of Solitude

Thursday, April 10th, 2014

Fifty years ago today, April 10, 1964, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould gave his last public performance.

Sometime around twenty years ago, I discovered Glenn Gould, first through Evan Eisenberg’s book The Recording Angel, and later, and more importantly, through Francois Girard’s film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which my father and I went to see at the Drexel Theatre in Columbus on its first release, sometime in late 1993 or early 1994.  Coincidentally, I’ve been showing this film to my music appreciation students this week.  I love it for my own reasons, of course, but I love the way it (and Gould’s story) portrays the eternal triangle of composer-performer-audience, and shows that this triangle is perhaps not as eternal as we once thought it.

I also love that it’s a grown-up movie.  It isn’t a romantic comedy, and there are no explosions, which right away make it very different from what my students are accustomed to seeing.  On the other hand, the movie’s structure as a set of short vignettes, no more than about five minutes long each, is perfect for the way that many of them have encountered media–through YouTube clips, Vine videos, and the like.  It deals with genius, with the plans our parents set into motion for us, with what an intelligent person does when he can no longer tolerate the path of his life, it deals with the consequences of personal decisions, and it deals with death.  And it’s funny.  Very funny, on a couple of occasions.

But more importantly, trying to explain Gould to my students every semester makes me rethink why he was so important to me in the first place.  So here’s what I have this time around.

In 1993 and 1994, I was excited about going to college, and I didn’t only consider going as a music major.  I prepared my own audition repertoire, and when I took auditions, I hadn’t had a regular private trombone teacher in two years.  I practiced, and I played, and I began to study music theory.  I had some experience on piano to fall back upon, and I had started to compose a little.  I would eventually complete a trombone concerto as my senior thesis, without much guidance other than my own reading and listening.  It wasn’t particularly good, and I wasn’t a standout candidate for conservatory.  I’m still amazed that Tony Chipurn took me into his studio at CCM because I had a lot of catching up to do in terms of my technique, although I was just fine in theory and history classes.

It has been said that it is a mistake to make a career of music if one has other options, and I certainly did.  If I had really understood the differences in the educational approaches of different schools, I might have made a very different decision.  I also might have made a very different decision if I hadn’t known about Glenn Gould.

I learned about Glenn Gould the man before I ever heard Glenn Gould the pianist.  What struck me was his personality, both as displayed in Girard’s film and in Otto Friederich’s Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations.  A musician, yes, but a true intellectual.  A man of staggering intellect.  And a man whose personality seemed to fit my own–exacting, idealistic, introverted, yet brilliant (I thought quite a bit of myself), uncompromising (at eighteen, I hadn’t had much to compromise over).  Seeing a potential future self in Gould, I could begin to see a future as a musician.  Composer?  Perhaps.  Band director?  If necessary.  I’m not completely sure what I wanted from my years at CCM when I got there, except to immerse myself in this musical world and somehow come out transfigured, shining-faced, prepared to be audacious, brilliant, uncompromising.

Almost the first thing I did on arriving in Cincinnati was find my way to the listening center in the music library, and have the attendant–Ben Rydell–put on Gould’s 1955 Goldberg Variations.  My first hearing, the first music I heard as a college student.  Even though it is the 1981 recording of that piece that I have played again and again after finally receiving it for Christmas that year, the notes of Gould’s breakthrough record were what bracketed my time in college.  My idea of what Bach could be was transformed, of course, and when I took piano lessons with Dianna Anderson, I drove her nuts trying to play Bach the way Gould did, but it was more than that.  I genuinely attempted to channel Gould, in my young, awkward, deliberately boisterous way, at once musical, literary, philosophical.  Those who were there may remember some of it, the heart-on-the-sleeve, Young Werther-type who walked around Cincinnati that year, reveling in the freedom to simply be a student of music, to keep my own hours, to determine for myself just how much solitude I needed (perhaps it was because my birth cohort is relatively small, but it seemed that there were any number of places for a person to be alone on that campus).

What does Gould mean for my students, then?  I wish I could get them to think more deeply about it–they aren’t always in that habit.  I think that Gould is the precursor of the postmodern performer–after all, he quit performing three years before the Beatles did.  There are any number of popular music stars today, particularly in techno and EDM, who only give lip service to the idea of public performance.  Is playing a set of recorded music a public performance?  Not in any kind of traditional sense, but I think Glenn Gould would have appreciated it.  While “artists” (and my students use this word more frequently than “musician” to describe musical performers) may appear before the public, many do not truly perform their music before the public, preferring to lip synch instead.  YouTube is filled with mashups–the result of the public doing just what Gould imagined–creating performances out of existing material.  In a sense, we have arrived at Gould’s future.

The world of Glenn Gould recedes from us a little more each year–I noticed this particularly on this week’s viewing’s of Thirty Two Short Films, with its typewriters, phone booths, and newspaper stock prices.  In 1993, only ten years on, things were not so different–after all, Gould’s second reading of the Goldberg Variations was recorded digitally and released on CD.  Now I find myself explaining some of the technology to the students, alongside with the idea that a man might then (as now) devote his entire life to performing the music of someone else.  This in particular baffles my students, who think of a “song”  (always a song) as being linked with a specific performer rather than a composer or songwriter.  I try to imagine what Gould and his producers were doing–making the first recordings which have withstood the test of time and changes of medium, and I see that if it hadn’t been Gould to quit the stage, it would have been someone.

And yet, the man fascinates me, and I think will continue to do so until I am older than he was at his death when I was only six years old.

Congratulations on fifty years of solitude, Mr. Gould.

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Chapter 51: Zek

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

How in the world have fifteen years gone by?  The world has changed since November 1997, my friends.  I don’t even know how to begin to explain this, but it’s the day before Thanksgiving, and Matt Specter hasn’t posted this yet,  so here it is, with his attempt at an explanation (to which I would add that some things can’t ever be fully explained):

To some of you, welcome! To some of you, welcome back. Like it or not, everyone on this list has deemed themselves worthy of the strangest Thanksgiving tradition ever. From old friends, to former students, to current colleagues and graduate school mates, you are all about to experience the wonder that is Chapter 51.

Please allow me to explain for those who are totally lost.

Many years ago, I was but a mere undergraduate student in Music Education at CCM. While there, I and my closest friends began what can only be described as a serial story, told by email, detailing our many adventures together. A work of fiction which spanned several years, it chronicled our struggles to, among other things:

* Rid CCM of the demons which had overrun it.
* Close the portal to Hell which was a part of CCM
* Escape from Hell
* Travel to alternate universes
* Travel in time
* Destroy and save several universes along the way
* Continue to attend class and get our degrees.

This story (which simply became known as “The story”) grew into a life of its own, lived through three incarnations, and became a personal legend for all of us, as we used our writing abilities to vicariously live through our other selves, releasing some of the frustration we felt with our lives at the time.

Alas, The Story has ended, but every Thanksgiving, I send the most famous of all episodes, Chapter 51, to all I deem worthy. Most likely, you will end up shaking your head in confusion or disgust. If you find it funny, God help you. You understand my bizarre mind.

The background: In Chapter 51, my friends and I have been travelling from universe to universe, each universe being based on some TV show or movie from our own universe (how this is possible is explained in great detail in previous chapters – if you want to know more, ask me about the photon leak). We are trying desperately to get home, and have landed at last in the “Star Wars” universe. Naturally, we seek guidance from the great Jedi Master, Yoda.

Enjoy the chapter. And believe it or not, this is really my way of sincerely wishing everyone a truly happy Thanksgiving.

Author’s note – Due to recent years’ increase in the number of people who don’t ‘get it’ – I have done the unthinkable. I have made a slight edit to the text. Purists forgive me. Anyone who can spot the difference will win a free copy of the Specter Family 2009 Road Trip DVDs – all 5 discs.

Chapter 51 – Zek
_____________

“Mmm, come, come. With a Jedi it is time to eat as well,” said Yoda.

Yoda had laid out quite a spread. We didn’t know what anything was, but
there sure was an awful lot of it.

“Eat, eat. Mmmm, good food, yes? M-hm-hm-hm-hm-hm-hm. Ohhh.”

We sat down around the tiny table, careful not to bang our heads on the
low ceiling.

“Mmmm…Came you very far, yes? Hungry you must be! Eat, eat.”

We looked at each other hesitatingly. Quite frankly, the stuff looked
and smelled gross. Finally, Saunders decided we had better not make an
incident, and started scooping himself some glop.

“Why all the food?” asked Saunders conversationally, as the rest of us
followed his lead and helped ourselves.

“Is it not holiday in universe from where you came?”

I almost dropped by plate of swamp algae. I wasn’t shocked that Yoda
knew where we were from, but Yoda’s use of the word ‘Holiday’…

I looked at my watch, which still continued to function as if I were
walking around earth. The date said 11/26.

“You made us Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked Yoda.

“Yes! Yes…good food we have, talk we will. Work I not on holidays,
whatever universe may they be in. Come, eat, eat.”

I paused for a moment, then said genuinely and sincerely, “Thank you.”
The others turned to look at me, shocked by my sudden mood swing.
Slowly they seemed to realize that this really was our Thanksgiving
dinner, and that we should be truly thankful for it. Yoda had gone to
great trouble to make us feel welcome. I smiled, and took a bite of my
food.

It was nasty. I chewed slowly, fighting the urge to spit it back out.
Everyone around me was having a similar reaction, except for Yoda, who
ate with wild abandon, constantly commenting on the quality of the food.

Suddenly, he stopped, and looked up in shock.

“Ohhh…” he said, “Forgot I the most important thing!”

We all watched with intent curiosity as he picked up an empty bowl, got
up from the table, went over to the corner of the room, and opened a
large door, revealing a small horse-like creature. Yoda placed the bowl
on the ground in front of the horse-thing, then calmy went to its side
and punched it in the gut. The horse responded by vomiting into the
bowl. We stared in a mixture of horror, confusion, and nausea, as Yoda
brought the bowl back to the table, and began to spoon it over his food
like gravy. Suzanne had her hand over her mouth, and Loren looked
green.

Yoda finished scooping, and offered the bowl to us, speaking with a quiet intensity.

“Use the horse puke,” he said, “Use the horse puke!”

__________________________

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

Matt

P.S. If you don’t get it, say it out loud.

And there it is.  You are now one of the select few.  Try not to let it go to your head.

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