Posts Tagged ‘Cleveland Composers Guild’

Late Night Ramblings of an Absentee Blogger

Tuesday, June 18th, 2024

So, yeah… seven months has been a blur, and I don’t exactly know what happened to the first half of 2024. I certainly haven’t been blogging, and I mostly, until the last week or so, haven’t been composing.

So… it’s a hot night and it’s pushing 3am, and I already did some composing, so it must be the perfect time to blog.

Here’s why I haven’t been:

Spring 2024 was not my favorite semester at work. The inevitable happened in a long slide that reached a tipping point during the pandemic: I taught only one in-person class (plus orchestra) at Lakeland, and the rest of my full-time load was online and administrative.

I would say that I don’t know how I felt about that… but I know exactly how I felt about it, and it’s the same way that I feel about Slipknot.

I’ve been teaching online in one way or another almost all of my college teaching career. It has never not been a challenge. It has never not been frustrating for me, and certainly for my students. I like to think that I’ve gotten better at it, but it did not feel that way this last year, and it especially didn’t feel that way this Spring. I will spare my readers all the gory details of student underacheivement and the resulting instructor soul-searching and course revision: suffice to say that I’m trying some new things this summer (I’m a week into that term), and we’ll see how that goes.

But on top of that, work this Spring was all staring at the computer, implementing my planned course, seeing what students did (or didn’t) do, and putting in my rubric scores and comments.

Of course, having had all the screen time I could handle in my 9-5 work day, I just wasn’t all that keen about opening up good old Sibelius 6 and moving notes around. I gave up my 6 to 7am composition time during COVID, and I have to say, I never really got back into that groove. It’s too easy to stay up late with Becky, then read for a while and even with the best of intentions, not be energized to get out of bed with the first alarm, especially on those winter mornings. (Ahh… give me some winter mornings right now, please as we deal with the first heat wave of the summer).

So, the last couple of years, I’ve tried a different plan: get the kids on the school bus at 7:45am, have a shower by 8:15 or so, and have most of an hour before I needed to get to Lakeland. This broke down last Spring as well, as out of the shower crept later and later, and answering email took up most of the time leftover.

At one time Fridays were a time I could devote to composition, but between the demands of the online classes and Friday laundry day, that time slipped away from me.

But all excuses: because if I had really wanted to blog or compose, I would have found them time.

I haven’t been all that busy… I just haven’t wanted to.

I completed two pieces in the first three months of 2024: a one-minute fanfare for the Cleveland Composers Guild collaboration with Factory Seconds Brass Trio, and my usual contribution to the Guild’s Junior Concert, a piece for a young pianist about dragons. Nice little pieces, neither of which took much more than a few hours, total, to come up with. Then, not much of anything, when I should have been writing a trumpet piece for Matthew Swihart–I got the first two minutes in, but I couldn’t get back into it.

I missed the deadline, which was May 1.

I got a start on it over winter break, then set it aside, telling myself there was Spring Break, then telling myself there was the whole month of April, and then telling myself there was no way it would get finished in April, and sending Matt an email explaining myself.

Meanwhile, it was a fairly good Spring for performances, which was heartening: Composers Guild in January, April, and May–a total of four premieres; a fantastic trip with Becky to Williamsburg, Virginia for the William & Mary band to play Mysterious Marvels; my first performance in Nebraska, of I Live With the Fiction that I Never Get Mad by Andrew White; the premiere of my string piece for the Wake Forest Youth Orchestra; a second performance of my cello piece at Dennison University… I mean… not bad at all, really. Makes one feel like a real composer, as usual.

It’d be nice to have more of that–as always, it ebbs and flows, and lately it’s been an ebb. The News page on the old website is looking pretty thin, but I can only blame my slump as a composer for it.

But only now, a month after my mostly-online Spring, am I starting to get back to writing music. My summer section of Popular Music is small, and leaves time for writing, and Becky is home for the summer, so there is some coverage for me, and the kids don’t need me to be right downstairs with them anymore, and we’re not doing swimming lessons–I miss the poolside reading time, though. I find myself thinking about projects again that might work–would this person collaborate, or how could I make this happen.

In the last week, I took my SATB choral piece Christmas Eve and turned it into something that the Lakeland Civic Flute Choir can use, and I’ve started cutting down my organ cycle Seven Last Words into a suite that I can submit for the Guild’s collaboration with the American Guild of Organists–I’m trying to compress it to about 25% of its original size, and it’s been interesting to revisit that piece. Next up is the trumpet piece–I watched this video from my former student and collaborator Maria Finkelmeier, who wasn’t a composer when I first met her, but has now really taken the ball and run with it: one of her suggestions really hit me as a solution to this trumpet quandary, and we’ll see where it takes me.

And from there?

  • I listened to the symphony again last week. I think I still want to finish it.
  • I want to write a piece about the eclipse in April–I don’t care how cliche that sounds.
  • Some reading I did led me to a musical motive that I want to carry around and think about and make into the kernel of a piece.
  • Again, thinking about collaborators to approach.

And I’ve been tromboning again. This spring I had eight students in my studio–more than ever, and Wednesdays at the Fine Arts Association got long, but having some older students in the mix has been good as well. On top of that, fellow Guild member Cara Haxo has written me a trombone and piano piece, and we’re wrapping it up and starting to think about performances. It’s good to have different gears to switch into.

Not long ago, Becky remarked that I didn’t seem to be as interested in composition as I once was. I’m not sure that was quite correct: it’s just easy to get away from something that isn’t your job and that takes you away from other commitments. And I think I did need a break–more screen time wasn’t the answer this term. But my past experience has taught me two things: 1) that a week or so of being back at it doesn’t mean that I’m permanently back at it, and 2) it will be there when I’m ready to come back to it, even if there are long stretches where I can just think about it.

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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.

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Effort-Shapes and Ideas from Architecture

Sunday, October 3rd, 2021

I’m amazed that it’s October already.

I was feeling very behind on some things for work and school, and my wife, Becky, got tired of my grumpiness about it and gave me the incredible gift of time last week: she took time off from her job so that she could be around and give me some relief from some parenting duties. I took advantage of that time to get back into my morning composing routine: waking up an hour ahead of everyone else to work. It feels good to be back on it. Plus, I was able to work ahead on some of the things I normally do on Fridays and clear the decks for most of a full day of composing this week. It felt good: too good… because it had me thinking about how it might work if I did that every week, and spent that day just building my composition business. It seems possible, but risky, but possibly very rewarding.

I suddenly find myself with multiple projects. Last month, Ted Williams of Choral Spectrum contacted me asking for Christmas music. There is a history there: eighteen years ago when I was living on the West Side of Cleveland, I joined that ensemble, starting the same concert cycle that Ted did. They performed one of the pieces that I submitted as part of my grad school applications, and I haven’t done a great job keeping in touch, but I’ve been in contact with Ted now and then. I found a nice, short poem by Ella Higginson called “Christmas Eve,” and suggested it as an original piece. I finished it this week, after creating a draft in my parents’ dining room in September, and rehearsals will start on Monday, for premiere performances in December.

Next, I’m returning to the first piece I wrote after graduate school, the fourth in my series of sonatinas for woodwind instrument and piano, in this case, oboe. There is a connection to that same time with Choral Spectrum, because I used the bassoon piece, the first in the series, as a part of grad school applications as well, including a recording with fellow Spectrum member Andrew Bertoni on the piano part. I’m now reworking the oboe piece, which has never been performed, for Justine Myers, and we are hoping for a performance on a Cleveland Composers Guild concert this spring. As I was working on both these pieces, I had advice from Donald Harris in my mind: “let the music breathe.”

Then, to the carillon project, I suppose. Last summer, Guild members had a tour of the McGaffin Carillon with George Leggiero for a collaboration that will feature our compositions for the instrument this fall. Fall is here, so I need to get started on mine.

After that, it will be the band piece I’m writing in memory of Chuck Frank for the Lakeland Civic Band . I have an idea for a wordless vocal soloist and Heidi Skok is on board, so while that part will be cued in the instrumental parts, it will be a great way to feature one of our great local musicians.

And then… I want to return to the symphony. Delayed first by COVID, now just by my procrastination.

The amazing thing is that these projects represent the fruits of a decade or more of collaboration, networking, and community-building. My goal since returning to Ohio has been to become a Cleveland composer, and I feel like I have achieved that, at least at the moment.

Now to the title of this post:

Two ideas for analytical or compositional tools came over my transom this week.

The first was when I went to observe Scott Posey’s Acting I class as part of my duties as a College Credit Plus faculty liaison. I had watched him work with his students at Lake Catholic before, but he started his class with a warm-up and review of something called “effort-shapes,” coming from Laban movement theory. This was immediately highly suggestive to me as a way to think about the physical expression suggested by a passage or piece of music. I also wonder if there is any similarity or connection to Dalcroze eurhythmics, which I have never had the chance to study.

The second is from a YouTube video. I’ve been watching architecture videos by Stewart Hicks lately, and his video on Francis Cheng’s Form, Space, and Order really struck me. Where  Laban seems to suggest itself as a tool for medium-scale analysis, Cheng’s five basic building plans (centralized, linear, radial, clustered, and grid) are highly suggestive of ways to understand the overall structure of a larger piece. Of the standard forms, fugue would be centralized; sonata would be regular; rondo would be radial; variations would be radial or clustered?; and something with a repeated bass or harmonic progression would be grid. Perhaps? Something to consider… Orchestrating or arranging for large ensemble often feels like working with a grid as well. Penderecki’s Threnody suggests a clustered approach; while Lutoslawski’s Fourth Symphony is more radial. Intriguing set of possibilities.

Then, yesterday, we went to Cedar Point. My approach to fun at theme parks is a little different than most people’s, I suppose, but I enjoy looking at how the place works, and at how people interact there and flow throw the space. I find that standing in line for rides gives plenty of time to watch how those rides work, and how people interface with them, and to think about what I’m seeing. Recently, one of my contacts on Twitter posted Baudrillard’s thoughts on Disneyland, and that was running through my head. While Cedar Point is in many ways a theme park in search of a theme (beyond, as Noah and I discovered, “Eat. Ride. Repeat”), it functions in much the same way Disneyland does on a technical level. This may not be true from a cultural standpoint, though. Disneyland also does not have nearly the history and layers that Cedar Point does, where there is an 80-year head start and any number of callbacks (such as the Blue Streak roller coaster) to earlier eras of American pleasure-seeking. I’ve decided that I’m going to have to read Simulacra and Simulation.

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A Week of Music

Friday, October 18th, 2019

A quick post so that I can get back to the major project in which I have been immersed.

It has been a busy week for my music and for my experience of music.

A week ago, I awoke in Mattoon, Illinois so that I could drive up the road to Eastern Illinois University for my first Society of Composers conference in five years. I haven’t deliberately stayed away, but timing and location have conspired against me. I was able to enjoy five of the eight concerts, including performances of Daniel Perttu’s preludes for piano, my own Maximum Impact for jazz ensemble, and Kevin Wilson’s cello sonata. My personal highlight of the conference was James Romig’s Still. This hour-long solo piano work, with a very low density of notes, might have lulled me to sleep after a long weekend of driving and conferencing, but quite the opposite–I found the work intriguing and invigorating. The other highlight was getting to spend time with Becky, especially on Friday evening, when we reconnected with Dan Perttu and Magie Smith, who is professor of clarinet at EIU. It was practically a grad school reunion.

We left the conference early so that we could drive back on Saturday because on Sunday, I needed to attend the first Cleveland Composers Guild concert of the season at Cleveland State University. I can’t remember a stronger program, in no small part because of the performers, including Peter Otto and Randy Fusco playing Margi Griebling-Haigh’s Rhapsody and the Cavani Quartet playing Sebastian Birch’s Life in a Day. But of all eight pieces, there were really no duds. The premiere of my song And I Live With the Fiction that I Never Get Mad by Loren Reash-Henz and Ben Malkevitch went off very well, and the lyricist, Janice Reash, was in the audience and quite impressed. I wasn’t quite sure that I liked the piece until I was able to hear a performance of it, and I believe that I will keep it in my catalog, because it really does work well.

An embarrassment of riches, this week, really. Last night I went to hear the Cleveland Orchestra for the second time this season. The “build your own” subscription allowed me to pick exactly the music that I wanted to hear, and I was excited to hear Louis Andriessen’s newish work Agamemnon. Life intervened: conductor Jaap van Zweden was called to his family, and the replacement conductor, Klaus Mäkelä, was presumably unfamiliar with a work premiered by van Zweden. This was disappointing, but I determined that whatever music the orchestra would play would be excellent, and decided to not feel short-changed.

I was not wrong. A lesser orchestra would have thrown a familiar piece onto the program: a Brahms overture or the like, but we were given instead a reasonable replacement: Olivier Messiaen’s little-heard Les Offrandes oubliées. This early work was a revelation–especially the ending, which was reminiscent of Holst’s Neptune. Violinist Augustin Hadelich played Prokovief’s second violin concerto beautifully, although that work is not one of my favorites–there remain only a few violin concerti that really connect with me after all these years. After intermission, Mäkelä’s rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh was splendid: full of the life and vigor central to that work. I hope that he will be engaged again.

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A View of Twenty Views, part 4

Thursday, February 9th, 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 third 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.

Read the second post, specific comments on the first seven movements, here.

Read the third post, specific comments on the eighth through the fourteenth movements, 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 last six pieces, in the order in which I am currently planning to play them at the premiere.

15. What They Might Think It’s Like

Another of the group of pieces written in 2016 to bring Twenty Views of the Trombone to completion.  This is the only political piece in the group, and I have generally not been a political composer.  The revelations of warrantless wire-tapping and domestic surveillance by the United States government, however, are concerning and troubling to me, and this piece imagines snips of phone conversation that might be misconstrued or misunderstood as they are picked up by massively parallel copies of speech recognition software in a government computing center.

16. What It Might Have Been Like (II)

Another of the 2016 crop of pieces–a bumper crop, if there is one, since completing the piece for the upcoming premiere required writing as many pieces as I had already composed.  In 2007, after applying to full-time college teaching jobs across the United States and in Canada, I accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Bands at Oklahoma Panhandle State University.  It was as far off as it sounds, but my wife and I learned to love the people there, if not always the place itself, and we look back on it as a wonderful adventure in our lives.  It was also where we found our family, since both of our children were born there (although, not to us–adoption is a wonderful thing).  In 2012, we moved back to Ohio, again after an intense job search on my part.

In Oklahoma, the wind never stops, and in the Panhandle, it seems particularly strong all the time.  The first really windy night, Becky and I lay in bed in our apartment wondering if the roof of the building would be torn off, but we soon came to realize that it was nothing special.  We could have stayed in the Panhandle–our chief unhappiness was the distance from our families (a two-day drive).  “What It Might Have Been Like (II)” imagines a counterfactual in which we stayed there.

17.  What It Could Be Like (III)

This piece, also from 2016, wraps up the “life after death” group of pieces, which considered first oblivion, and then Heaven.  This final piece imagines Hell.  Gary Larson’s The Far Side gave two images of musical hell:  Charlie Parker trapped in a soundproof room with easy listening music, and a conductor being led by the Devil to his room, filled with banjo players.  I truthfully find it harder to imagine Hell than it is to imagine Heaven.  I can imagine unpleasantness and pain, but to imagine them going on for eternity is another thing.  All of our metaphors likely fail.  So, perhaps this: just as the music seems to get good, it is interrupted, and the interruption, becomes the final word.

18.  What It’s Like at the End

Another piece from 2016, in fact, the last piece to be composed.  In a way, this is a slower, more reluctant answer to the assignment that inspired “What It’s Like” in the first place–a one-minute composition that describes the experience of playing trombone.  Have I answered this question completely in Twenty Views of the Trombone?  I have left something crucial out, perhaps, and that is the resting.  Trombone players are great at counting rests, which is probably why we’re called upon to do it all the time.  As I’ve been preparing to play this entire piece, it is not lost on me that playing a forty-minute composition with no long rests is a very rare experience for a trombonist–I am pleasantly relieved that my chops seem to be up to the task.  Last night (February 5) I played through the complete piece for the first time, and it is a testament to the great teachers I have had over the years that I didn’t come out particularly fatigued at the end–not ready to do it all again, perhaps, but not completely exhausted, either.  I can thank Tony Chipurn and Joseph Duchi for their guidance in this area–I’ve been fortunate to have had two great teachers with different approaches.

19.  How I Remember What It Was Like

The other piece composed in the summer of 2013 for a first performance with the Cleveland Composers Guild in September of that year.  Over the last few years, I have been writing pieces that give into a sense of nostalgia that I have felt increasingly.  Both “How I Remember What It Was Like” and my 2015 orchestra composition …into the suggestive waters…  explore this aspect of my inner life–something I outwardly denied myself for a long time. Both pieces reflect on my childhood and teenaged years growing up in Columbus, Ohio, and both are centered on a motive derived from one of the Remington Warm-Up Studies for trombone.  “How I Remember What It Was Like” recalls my experiences in high school band, when playing the trombone slowly changed from something I did to something at the center of my college and career plans.  This piece also contains quotations from my high school fight song, “Stand Up and Cheer,” (borrowed from Ohio University) and “Simple Gifts,” a tune which kept appearing through high school, first in Copland’s Variations on a Shaker Melody (in both band and orchestra versions), then in John Zdechlik’s Chorale and Shaker Dance, then, in youth orchestra my senior year, in Copland’s full Appalachian Spring.

20.  What It’s Really Like

The last piece in the cycle is from 2009, and was first performed that year on a faculty recital at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, and then formally premiered at an Oklahoma Composers Association Salon Concert in Norman, Oklahoma.  Once I realized that there was going to be a Twenty Views of the Trombone, and that it would grow and develop over a period of years, adding pieces as they were needed, I decided that the best way to tie the entire group together would be with a closing piece that echoed the opening piece, “What It’s Like.”  So, every performance since 2009 has begun with “What It’s Like,” and ended with “What It’s Really Like,” and any partial performances should do the same.  In fact, all of “What It’s Like” is contained within “What It’s Really Like,” making the first movement a synecdoche of the last movement.  Both, in their ways, are synecdoches of the entire work, and of the experience of playing trombone, and perhaps, of the experience of listening to trombone music.  “What It’s Really Like,” then, amplifies “What It’s Like” by extending phrases, by repeating some ideas, and by inserting additional developmental material.  The piece ends where it began, and the composer ends where he began–a man who loves to play the trombone, and wants everyone to know What It’s Really Like.

 

This is the third 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.  The second post describes the first seven movements in detail, the third describes the eighth through fourteenth pieces, and the last will answer questions about the piece, received from facebook and Twitter.

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What I’ve Been Writing, and a World Premiere

Saturday, November 28th, 2015

I took a moment this morning to put the final touches on one work, and “check in” with two more.

I spent part of October finishing a new piano cycle, The Rainbow’s Daughter.  This is one of those rare pieces that I’ve written without a commission, although the first movement, “Polychrome’s Prism,” was composed as part of the Cleveland Composer’s Guild collaboration with the Music Settlement for Taniya Dsouza, a student of Nella Kammerman here in Cleveland.  I wanted to explore more fully the character of Polychrome, who appears in L. Frank Baum’s The Road to Oz, the fourth of his Oz novels.  I discovered Polychrome as I was reading the Oz books to my son, Noah, and thinking about a set of pieces based on characters from this land across the desert.  I knew that I didn’t want to focus on the obvious foursome–Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion–but on at least a few of the other very interesting characters in Baum’s world.  I considered writing short sketches about several subjects, but in writing “Polychrome’s Prism,” I discovered a tetrachord, [0236], that could be easily modified to any of the four triads.  “Prism” made use of the minor triad, so I developed a plan to base three subsequent movements on the augmented, diminished and major triads.  Thus, “Polychrome’s Passion,” “Polychrome’s Pearl,” and “Polychrome’s Power.”  It has been interesting, and refreshing, to write a piece using such specific harmonic materials.  This is not my typical way of composing, but it felt like a necessary and important exercise.  The four pieces seem to speak a common language, and, as intended, reflect a single character.  I am now, of course, stuck with a piece that has no plan for a performance.  I will send it out to some of my previous collaborators, or perhaps find a performer for an upcoming Cleveland Composers Guild performance.

In October, I also began work on a commission from Renee Goubeaux, a cellist with the Toledo Symphony, for a new work for cello and piano.  It has been nearly a decade since I wrote for a solo stringed instrument, and it has been fun digging into the capabilities and potential of a world I haven’t visited in a while.  I have the piece about half-written–it will be a ten- to twelve-minute piece, and there is currently about six minutes of music, but it is on hold while I’ve given the draft to Renee for comment.  I’m curious to see how this part of the collaboration works.  Renee and I went to high school together, and she is the first composer I ever met–we both started composing in the gifted and talented program.  I don’t think she has kept up with that side of her creative work, but she at least knows about the process of putting notes on paper, and it will be interesting to bring someone with her background in at this phase of the creative process.  The piece is tentatively titled Meditation, since I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius this fall.

Earlier this month, I sat down with Jon Wilterdink, our pastor at Shoregate United Methodist Church, for lunch in the cafeteria at Lakeland.  We discussed worship and the arts, and what the church can be doing to foster the work of artists.  I had reached out to him after reading this article on the subject.  At the end of our conversation, he asked me to contribute musically to our worship for the coming Lenten season.  The idea that immediately came to mind was a cycle of organ pieces based on the Seven Last Words of Christ.  Rob Shuss, our organist, was game, so I have started writing, according to a fairly intricate plan.  I have associated each saying with several Scriptural and musical elements, so each movement will also refer to one of Jesus’ parables and to a Psalm, as well as being focused on a specific diatonic mode (progressing from Lydian to Locrian over the course of the cycle), and emphasize a diatonic interval within that mode.  The pieces will be premiered on the six Sundays in Lent (beginning Febraury 14, 2016) and on Good Friday.  This is my first work for organ, so I’m taking some time to try to understand this instrument, but also trying to work steadily, as Rob will need the pieces as soon as possible.  I have written the first movement, “Father forgive them,” in Lydian mode, emphasizing the interval of the second, and associated with Psalm 3, and the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

This is my first sacred music written on commission in many years, and the first to be performed in over a decade.  One struggle I have had as a composer is finding outlets and opportunities to write music about my faith.  There is a huge demand for music in the church, of course, but not for work that pushes musical boundaries in search of a spiritual experience.  The difficult thing has been to find a community that meets our spiritual needs but that is also interested in what I can offer.  I’m excited to make this attempt, although 28 minutes of music for an unfamiliar instrument in just a couple of months is a little daunting.  At least Christmas break is in the intervening period, and the later pieces can be polished even as the earlier ones are being premiered.

Speaking of premieres, Antoine Clark and the McConnell Arts Center Chamber Orchestra gave a splendid first performance of my work …into the suggestive waters… in Worthington, Ohio on November 1.  Becky was unable to attend because of back troubles, but my father and brother came along, and my mother came to the dress rehearsal so that she could watch the kids during the concert.  Having a professional orchestra commission and play my music was a fantastic feeling.  I now need to work on getting a second performance of the piece somewhere, and that means leaning on conductors and sending them the excellent recording of the premiere.  I made some great contacts at the post-concert reception, and I would love to increase the presence of my music in my hometown.

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Being Here, Not Being There

Saturday, October 18th, 2014

Last Sunday, October 12, was a big day for my music.  Here in Cleveland, Liliana Garlisi gave the first performance in Ohio of the complete Starry Wanderers on a concert of the Cleveland Composers Guild.  And, in St. Louis, Avguste Antonov was the soloist in the world premiere of my piano concerto, with the University City Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Leon Burke.  Both concerts happened more or less simultaneously, and while I was glad to be here in Cleveland for Liliana’s fantastic performance, missing the concert in St. Louis stung a bit.

The good news first.  Liliana gave an amazing reading, from memory, of Starry Wanderers.  As a composer, the feeling of having someone take a piece that seriously is second-to-none.  Dianna Anderson, who gave the premiere of Starry Wanderers and my piano sonata, has treated my work in the same way, as though she were playing Beethoven or Scriabin rather than the work of a relatively obscure Midwesterner.  I now consider myself fortunate to have collaborated with three pianists who bring that kind of musicianship to the table.

During Lilian’s performance, a child who had been brought to the concert began to fuss, and let’s just say that it won’t be a pristine recording.  A colleague at the concert expressed her dismay in an email later this week, and while I appreciate her sentiment on behalf of Liliana and myself, I personally think that it’s wrong.

I teach students every day who don’t buy into the “pristine concert hall” experience.  In fact, it is one of the factors they find most intimidating when they attend concerts as required.  In our kid-friendly world, how can we expect that people won’t bring their children to something that children have every right to experience?  I was fortunate to grow up in a time and place where schoolchildren were regularly exposed to such things–the Columbus Symphony Orchestra gave a concert at my high school twice while I was there–but with budgets and grants increasingly less available, this just doesn’t happen as often.

If someone wants to come to a concert on which my piece is being played, and the only way that they can do so is to bring their young child, then let them come.  The point of a concert is not to make the perfect recording — if that is what is required, then the dress rehearsal should be recorded, or a studio session scheduled.  I put my music before the public so as many people as possible can experience it in the way it was intended to be heard–played by a living person in front of a living audience.  I would no more ask my audience not to breathe.  I would love to know that my music elicits audible responses from time to time–laughs, gasps, sighs, cries, whatever.  And if that recording is so important, than whoever listens to it will have affirmation that it is, in fact, a live recording rather than a studio recording with applause edited in at the end.

The St. Louis performance went well, so I’m told.  It was frustrating that a piece I had been thinking about for twenty years, and spent most of 2013 writing, was premiered without my being present.  I talked with Leon Burke over the phone, and he also tried to have me listen in on a rehearsal over his cell phone.  This was frustrating, because as I followed the score, I could almost hear my piece through the distortion, if I really squinted my ears.  I held on until the end of the run-through, so that I could take a moment to thank the players, but there wasn’t really much that I could tell them.  I’ve seen pictures of the performance on the Internet, and the concert was recorded and videoed, so hopefully I will have those artifacts–again, the recording is crucial, but is not the piece itself.  I wasn’t there because the funding was there from the orchestra to bring me out, and the composition business has done well this year, but there was no money for a plane ticket.  As a younger, single man, I would have hopped in the car and driven the eight hours, and probably driven back immediately after the concert so that I wouldn’t miss class on Monday morning, but I have responsibilities now.  I had been hoping for a second performance in Pennsylvania this year, but that doesn’t seem like it will materialize, so at this point, there is a major work of mine that has been premiered, but that I haven’t heard, except as a ghost of itself through a cell phone.  Avguste, having taken the time to learn the piece, is now behind it, and hopes to play it again in 2015-2016, but nothing firm has been committed.  The irony is that usually I take a performance that goes on without me as a sign that I’m making progress as a composer, but it has happened only rarely for a premiere.  The last time a piece was premiered without me, though, was in 2009, when my flight to North Dakota was cancelled, and I missed Dianna Anderson’s premiere of Starry Wanderers, which has gone on to be a relatively important piece, and was the start of a significant collaboration with my former teacher.  Perhaps, then, there are more and better things in store for this concerto.

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Being a “Real Composer”

Saturday, 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.

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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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