Posts Tagged ‘Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’

Back with Beowulf

Sunday, 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.

Springtime Projects Old and New

Saturday, 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.