Posts Tagged ‘Cleveland’

Writing for Blue Streak (2)

Friday, October 19th, 2018

I’ve been digging further into the Cuyahoga River and the 1969 fire that spurred the nascent environmental movement in preparation for my new piece for the Blue Streak Ensemble. Part of the difficulty is separating myth from reality, Randy Newman songs and Mark Weingartner novels aside.

I’ve become fascinated, or remain fascinated, with the way that the river has been changed into a man-made object rather than a natural feature, at least for its last six miles. An amazing app of Cleveland Historic Maps has helped with this, as I have pinpointed the location of the fire, mapped it onto my own experience of the river over the last six-and-a-half years living near it, and begun to consider a shape for this piece. I’m amazed at how much industrial plant that was present in 1951, the year of a USGS aerial survey, is simply gone, leaving either scars or having been redeveloped. I’ve have read and heard about the decline of heavy industry in Cleveland, but to look at how it was crammed into the river valley in the 1920s and see the shape of the same places nearly a century later drives it home.

The scale of the places is just as  daunting–plants that employed tens of thousands of workers at their peak could surely ruin a river, and a lake. Little wonder that such places symbolized optimism and progress for the mid-century mind in the ways that they dwarfed their inhabitants.

I’ve also taken a page from Nico Muhly, who describes in a recent article his compositional approach. While my experience of being a composer is lived quite differently than his (I have no doubt that he won’t ever be looking to my writing or music for inspiration), I’m taking his idea of a one phrase synopsis and a one-page birds-eye view map of the piece quite seriously. My map is going to be based on a tracing of the shipping channel of the river–the lowest six miles that pass through Cleveland and that have be reshaped for the economic purposes of our species.

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Little wonder that by 1969 the river was lifeless, a murky, roiling soup of human and industrial waste–it was not allowed to be itself, from the 1820s when its mouth was recut to eliminate its final bend before draining into the lake, to the addition of steel-walls to fix the location of its banks, and straighten its meanders.

How to express all this musically? This is the problem.  I created a little sketch the other day–a mixed-meter passage that I could imagine opening the work, but I wasn’t satisfied with it, and I realized I wasn’t ready to put down notes yet, but I will need to be ready one day soon.  I still want to see the valley, the mounds of slag and ore and limestone; the enormous plants; the scene of the crime of this fire. I was hoping for a river cruise, but I have missed that window for 2018–the tourist boats have finished for the season, and it is this moment when one needs Friends With Boats, I suppose.  I spent some time on the river vicariously this morning watching video taken from lakers going to or from Lake Erie up the river to ArcelorMittal Steel, the path I would like to take, and that may have to do for now. Tomorrow, however, I will be taking Noah and Melia either to the zoo (if the weather is fair) or the natural history museum (if not). We make take some time to attempt to drive some of these areas as well, and soon, very soon, it must be notes.

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Writing for Blue Streak (1)

Monday, October 1st, 2018

I’m going to be spending most of the rest of 2018 on a commission from Blue Streak Ensemble, a new music ensemble based in Cleveland and directed by composer Margaret Brouwer, who I’m proud to claim as my colleague and collaborator.

Margaret asked me to compose a piece for a concert coming in January 2019, and asked that it specifically be about the Cuyahoga River fire in June 1969 that, although actually quite minor and short-lived (so short that there are no known pictures of it), catapulted the nascent environmental movement into further prominence. The work will be about 10 minutes long, and for Pierrot-plus-percussion, and I’m quite excited to get to work with Blue Streak. Since I moved to Cleveland, I’ve wanted to become as much a “Northeast Ohio” composer as possible, and this is the kind of piece that will develop that connection.

I immediately contacted two of my colleagues at Lakeland, and both were helpful.  Dr. Matthew Hiner, in our history department, sent a batch of articles, and suggested that I canoe the Cuyahoga if possible (I haven’t been in a canoe since the early 1990s, so it may or may not be possible…). Dr. David Pierce, a geologist at Lakeland, gave me more homework, including the excellent, locally-produced documentary Return of the Cuyahoga, which I made Becky watch with me last night. It has provided excellent background, but there is nothing like seeing the place to really inspire a composer.

So yesterday, I took Noah and our bicycles and we headed for the Towpath Trail of the Ohio and Erie Canalway. Noah was just along for the bikeride, although he got a fair amount of history lesson from me at the same time with some riding commentary. We started behind Steelyard Commons, a large retail development just off I-71 and near the Tremont neighborhood. To one side was the retail area, where we parked the minivan, and on the other side was the railyard for the Cuyahoga Valley Railroad, which served the steel mills. Across the rails was the plant for LTV Steel, now Arcelor Mittal. Riding past this on bikes really gave a sense of the scale of the place.  Steelyard Commons was actually the site of even more of LTV’s plant, and it is fascinating to me how the land is continually reshaped and repurposed to fit the needs of its era.

The Steelyard Commons loop of the Towpath Trail is a little more than a mile long, although there is more trail under construction now at both ends of the loop, which is exciting to see (what a ride it would be from the Flats all the way to Bolivar and the end of the Canalway!). We hopped back in the car and headed for the Canalway Nature Center at the Ohio & Erie Canal Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks. The Nature Center is wonderful, and I have plans to return. Noah was enthralled by an exhibit of spiders, including the largest spider I’ve ever seen, a Goliath birdeater tarantula. We were here to ride, though. If at the Steelyard we were able to see neither canal nor river, both were in abundance in the Metropark, and in some places, the towpath runs with the canal on one side and the river on the other. We were able to see one lock up close, and to get a good look at the shape of the river in this area. As we headed south from the Nature Center, we crossed under multiple railroad bridges, and passed more of the enormous heaps of slag and ash, even in this park-like setting (which the Steelyard most certainly was not). After crossing under I-77, we came to the Southerly Waste Treatment plant, representing the biggest threat to the Cuyahoga River today: combined sewer overflow. Like many American cities, Cleveland’s sewers are designed in such a way that storm, sanitary and industrial sewers share a common pipe. When heavy rain overwhelms the system, the outflow of all three mix together and flows directly into the waterway, untreated. The result is bacteria-laden water that makes the river unsafe for swimming, and can result in beaches in Lake Erie being closed as well.

The juxtaposition of the canal–probably one of the core reasons for Cleveland’s early success as a city–the natural environment, and heavy industry and infrastructure is striking. It is as though the whole history of the area is laid out there.  I hope in the next few weeks to spend some time in the Flats as I embark on this project.  Musically, I don’t really know where it’s taking me yet, but I’m excited to drill down into the subject matter at least.

 

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John Luther Adams’ Inuksuit in Cleveland

Sunday, September 21st, 2014

About a month ago, my old college classmate Doug Perkins posted a notice on facebook about an upcoming performance of Inuksuit, John Luther Adams’ piece for lots of percussionists.  He was looking for volunteers (a trick that probably only really would work with percussionists, by the way… try getting ninety-nine string players to play a concert-length piece with two rehearsals and no pay), and as I tried to put him in touch with people, he mentioned that Group 1 requires conch players, and that it was nice to seed the group with a couple of brass players who could really blow.  I needed no more invitation.  A few days later, the conch I ordered from Steve Weiss had arrived.  Yesterday and today I took part in the rehearsals and performance of what is really an epic piece, with the composer in attendance, and with huge organizational assistance from my former theory student Amy Garapic.  It’s a small world (as if we didn’t need reminders).

I met all sorts of players–musicians came from six states, some of whom had played the piece before, and this reinforces my idea that music is about people.

Trying to understand Adams’ piece while playing my part (breathing, conch shell calls, a hand siren, a brake drum, and a triangle) wasn’t easy, but at today’s performance in Lake View Cemetery, I think it’s starting to make sense.

Homo sapiens is a species that is in the world, but not completely of it.  We are born breathing, living, like any other life form, but we eventually come to overwhelm our surroundings.  I asked John Luther Adams whether he had an ideal site in mind for the work, and he said that he did not–just as humanity has adapted itself (or adapted the environment to itself) no matter where it finds itself, in my “meaning” of the work.  It builds, and builds, and builds for nearly forty minutes–my hands are sore from cranking my siren, but the siren is perhaps representative of the crisis, or urgency created by our very presence.  And, finally, there is the moment when all of the “human” sounds give way, fading into the distance as the piece merges with its environment, and the performers merge with the audience.  The audience today didn’t know when to applaud, and there was a good minute of silence at the end, as the wind blew, and the sounds of Cleveland reclaimed the space, the space in which lie the remains of those humans who made Cleveland prosperous, but filthy, with a burning river, now decaying back into the dust from which they were formed.  In the end, the planet will remain after us.

This is only my program, of course, and if I had been an audience member instead of a performer, I might have come away with a very different idea.  The audience seemed at first festive, then curious, then rapt.  There were people taking cell phone pictures, and children playing, and some people who stumbled on to us during a Sunday afternoon stroll, but I think many had a kind of spiritual experience, akin to worship (incidentally, the wind seemed to be strongest at the beginning and the end, dying off in the middle–it seems to me that if you perform a piece about God’s creation on a Sunday morning, He will probably take an interest).  An incredible way to spend a weekend!

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New Music in Cleveland

Friday, 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.

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