Posts Tagged ‘David Morneau’

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.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Composing, Personal Reflections, Twenty Views of the Trombone | Comments Closed

A View of Twenty Views, part 1

Friday, January 27th, 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 first in a series of posts about that piece and how it has come to be what it is.

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.

 

In 2009, I was teaching at Oklahoma Panhandle State University.  David Morneau invited me to come to New York City as a composer, with a piece he remembered from our days together as graduate students called Let Everything that Has Breath Praise the Lord.  A short piece for trombone and electronics, I could play it myself on a Vox Novus Composer’s Voice concert that he was curating.  David asked if there was anything else we could program, and told him there wasn’t, since I didn’t have any other connections in New York, and no money to pay them, anyway.  He suggested that I write and learn a second short piece, for unaccompanied trombone, and I remembered the first assignment I like to give to new composers:  write a one-minute piece for your instrument that describes what it’s like to play your instrument.

The result was What It’s Like.  I played it on a faculty recital in Oklahoma before I left, and then in New York City in March 2009 at Jan Hus Church, alongside pieces by David Morneau, Jeremy Ribando, and Milica Paranosic.  That trip was many firsts–my first time bringing my trombone on an airplane; my first time missing a connection and getting stuck in Denver (on the way home, luckily); my first time visiting Queens, where David played the host with his gracious wife Jolayne; the first performance of my music in New York City, or anywhere on the East Coast; and the birth of what would become an eight-year composition project, Twenty Views of the Trombone.

I quickly discovered that having music of one’s own to play alone is a useful thing.  What It’s Like expanded from one piece to four for an Oklahoma Composers Association Salon Concert in 2010, and to six pieces for the Aspen Composers Conference in 2011.  I’m not sure at what point I began to think of an eventual large-scale work–twenty pieces, in homage to Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jesus–but by the time I left Oklahoma in 2012, I’m certain that was the plan.

In Cleveland, more new pieces followed–for a John Cage Musicircus organized by Chris Auerbach-Brown at MOCA Cleveland, for the first performance of my work on a concert of the Cleveland Composers Guild, and for the 2015 Manchester New Music Festival in Indiana.  By that point, there were ten pieces, with ideas for a couple more. I didn’t know how I would wrap things up, but the plan was to always begin with What It’s Like, always end with What It’s Really Like, and include at least one new piece in the bunch every time I played the piece until there were twenty of them.

Meanwhile, I was playing trombone less and less–I wasn’t teaching lessons, or actively seeking gigs.  I don’t think there has been a time in my life since I started playing in 1986 that I was spending less time with the instrument, and that concerned me.  Two decades of developing my skills, of pushing my own limitations on this instrument would be lost, withering on the vine.

It reminded me of how, once upon a time, I knew Spanish fairly well.  Fluent might be an overstatement, but I think after five years of study in middle school and high school, I was relatively comfortable with it.  When I arrived at college, I had the chance to study the language further.  I had taken the AP exam in Spanish, but the modern language department wouldn’t grant credit for it–only placement by taking a computer-based test.  I took the test to see what might come of it, but chose not to enroll in the class.  There were other things to pursue, despite how useful fluency in a foreign language might be, and while I retain some limited ability with the language, I would say I’ve forgotten most of it.  Losing my skills as a trombonist would be much worse, a far greater loss.  I have difficulty imagining becoming an ex-trombonist.

I have friends in this situation, of course.  Not every college music student continues to pursue music seriously.  The horn player who develops focal dystonia and changes directions.  The violist who becomes a realtor, or the clarinetist who ends up in law school.  The many of my female classmates who simply seem to have gotten married and become mothers, leaving little time for music.  The music education major who ends up an administrator.  This is not what I want for myself, and in an important way, Twenty Views of the Trombone has been a reason to forestall it.

Continuing to play the trombone gives me a connection to some of what brought me to music in the first place.  It helps me meet people who can relate to playing an instrument much more than they can relate to composition.  And it gives me a certain credibility when I place my music before other musicians.  It keeps me grounded and realistic in my expectations as a composer–my flawed, often rusty technique reminds me that most of the musicians I will work with possess the same.  My music is performed mostly by amateurs, students, and teachers, most of whom face the same challenges that I do when it comes to building or maintaining their skills.

In my fortieth year, then, 2016, I heard about Eyedrum.  One of my Atlanta connections posted Olivia Kieffer’s call for composers to present their music at this club/gallery/venue in a city I hadn’t visited in a very long time.  I contacted Olivia, and told her my proposed work, and shared the recordings I had of existing movements.  A forty-minute work for unaccompanied trombone is daunting on many levels, but it’s the kind of thing that works well at Eyedrum, apparently, and I was booked.  The plane ticket purchased, arrangements made.  I had only to write the remaining pieces, and, as always when I have a goal and a deadline, the music came quickly.

 

This is the first of a short series of posts about Twenty Views of the Trombone.  The next posts will discuss the individual pieces and serve as a program note.

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in Composing, Personal Reflections, Twenty Views of the Trombone | Comments Closed

Opus 111

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Here it is… the last one. 

Two big, beefy substantial movements.  Lutoslawski justified writing one-movement symphonies by saying that Brahms’ and Beethovens’ symphonies tended toward two big-idea statements per piece, presumably the first and last movements, although it is often possible that Beethoven is trying for three or four (perhaps in the Eroica).  It would be impossible to accuse Beethoven of overreaching his grasp in this case.  The two movements are well-balanced–a muscular, decisive sonata-allegro paired with an expansive set of variations. 

First things first–the proportions of the first movement are not especially large or striking–in my (G.Schirmer) edition, the development section scarcely lasts a page.  Once again, Beethoven is not the composer of long, overwhelming development sections the way we were all taught.  A glance at the score suggests that the proportional model for sonata-allegro is largely intact.   Why do we teach undergraduates that Beethoven’s development sections are overgrown?  My experience with the piano sonatas suggests that they are not.  On the other hand, motivic development technique often appears in unexpected places–codas, transitional sections, and within themes–places that in Haydn or Mozart would be simple or sequential repetition in Beethoven are more fully ornamented.  An example is the second theme of this movement.

I have to admire Beethoven’s approach to the start of the Allegro con brio.  It is almost as though it takes three (or more) attempts to get the theme going, and the full theme doesn’t appear until after a fairly extended attempt.   There is wonderful invertible counterpoint in the transitional thematic area, and the ubiquitous fugato in the development.  Beethoven struggled in his counterpoint lessons with Albrechtsberger, but they seem to have paid off in the end, as his command of these devices is perfect.  I taught 16th-century counterpoint last semester, and we didn’t make it to invertible counterpoint.  I think that the next time around, I will take the option in our textbook (Peter Schubert’s Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style) to introduce it from the beginning, because of its power as a developmental tool in any style.

Stylistically, I’m a bit at odds with this movement–it doesn’t reek of Beethoven’s “late” style in the way that other pieces do.  Admittedly, I haven’t read up on current musicological ideas about this piece, but it seems as though it would fit fairly well with the Waldstein, and lacks the scope of Hammerklavier.  Note–this in no way detracts from my astonishment with this piece and my awe at its compositional greatness.

The theme and variations is masterful as well, despite some very interesting notational choices.  The tone called for by the first few notes is wonderfully dark and rich.  Finally, Beethoven has stopped writing full triads in the bass staff, an activity I am constantly telling my students to avoid.  The more open chord positions he chooses in the theme are dark but not muddy.  Has this composer finally come to terms with the more resonant instruments that were starting to become available to him?  What does it mean that, despite his deafness, he was able to figure this out?  More importantly, what does it tell the contemporary composer who must assimilate much greater and more frequent changes in technology that Beethoven could have imagined?

There is a wonderful sort of rhythmic accelerando amongst these variations.  The theme gives a basic compound-triple approach with homophonic chords.   Variation 1 now has an event on every division of the beat, and events are happening (roughly) two to three times as often.  Variation 2 is simply not in the correct meter.  6/16 implies two beats to the measure, and there are clearly three.  3/8 would make sense, if it weren’t for the marked metric modulation (eighth=dotted eighth) and/or the alternating 16th-32nd-note pattern that makes up the highest rhythmic level (highest in the Schenkerian sense of “most-complex”).  What appear as accompanying 16ths or eighths should be dotted notes… or the alternating 16th-32nd patterns should be under sextuplets… or the patterns should be dotted-32nd-64th!  What a mess!  I can only assume that in later editions to which I don’t have access, some wise editor has made a decision that clears this up.  On my reference recording, Ashkenazy plays the first and second options, at least to my ear.  The editors of my edition, Hans von Bulow and Sigmund Lebert chose to only comment on the situation rather than rectify it.

In variation 3 is another meter signature that would make my students cringe–12/32, again, not reflective of the triple-meter feel of the music.  What a mess, but the musical intent is clear enough.  The final four measures of this variation are wonderful.

In my own work, I need to accomplish what Beethoven does in the fourth and fifth variations–that is, build larger sections of single textures.  I feel like I accomplished this in several recent pieces, notably in South Africa.  It is, again, the old adage I’ve often told myself of letting the music breathe.  I have great admiration for my friend David Morneau and his cultivation of the miniature, especially in his project 60×365, but I feel that I need to cultivate a different approach.  Yes, brevity is the soul of wit, but our world is deprived of the long view, the long term and patience to understand them.  Film may be our best hope–I know so few people who really listen to music, but nearly all Americans shell out for multi-hour long movies.  All the same, music that is longer than three minutes and that doesn’t make its meaning purely through language is, I am discovering now more than ever, my big project for the time being.  As a composer, I need to be able to write a single movement that lasts 20 minutes while still saying something.  I don’t know where the commission, or even the performers will come from for this, because for the time being I’m not in the class of composers who get that type of work.  When I entered graduate school in 2004, I was writing movements of one-to-two minutes’ length on a regular basis, and a five-minute one-movement instrumental piece was a stretch.  I discovered the tactic of creating larger pieces by writing transitions–my Martian Dances is a fantastic example of this, and my Homo sapiens trombonensis has a fantastia-like form that is exciting, but lacks rigor and cohesiveness.  Nothing ever comes back.  I learned how to let a piece breathe and expand to its true length rather than simply become a rush of ideas.  Beethoven’s sonatas–indeed, the sonata principle–require that I build on this even more.  I need, simply, the right commission now, because a twenty-minute unaccompanied trombone piece just doesn’t seem like a good idea.  A string quartet, or a piano sonata.  My latest completed piece, my Piano Trio that I just shipped off to its commissioner, runs almost ten minutes in a single movement.  I’m getting there… I’m getting there.

I began my journey through Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas in November 2006 as a way to start a project that looked beyong the end of my graduate work, and I feel that I have done myself a great service–so much so that July 2009 marks the beginning of a new project on the Mahler symphonies.  I kicked around some different possibilities–Bach, Chopin, a single large work like the St. Matthew Passion or a Mozart opera, but it seems that Mahler is calling to me the most, so it will be half of a Mahler symphony each month until the end of 2010 (yes, I may decide to include other Mahler such as the 10th symphony or Das Lied von der Erde, but I’ll think about that later).   Please feel free to join me on that trip.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Beethoven Piano Sonatas | Comments Closed

A long trip

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

I’m currently stuck in Denver at the tail end of a long trip, but it’s been fantastic.

First, I went with the OPSU choirs on their trip to Chicago.  Our choir director, Matt Howell, did a fantastic job planning and executing a great trip while still keeping it within a reasonable price range for the students.  The choirs performed, but more importantly, they got to spend a week in the big city, navigating public transportation and taking in cultural things that just aren’t available in the Panhandle.  The London Symphony Orchestra gave a fantastic concert of Prokofiev with Gergiev and Feltsman–core repertoire.  The woodwinds in that group are simply astounding, and really made the Classical symphony sparkle.  I first saw Feltsman play about 15 years ago in Cincinnati, and he hasn’t lost any of his charm or technique–the Prokofiev 2nd concerto was putty in his hands.  The program ended with Prokofiev’s fifth symphony, which was absolutely sublime.

We were fortunate to get both a backstage tour and take in a performance at the Lyric Opera.  The production values and musical technique made me feel like I’d never heard opera before.  If you are in Chicago, be sure to take in the Lyric.

On our last full day, I spent the afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago, which was absolutely worth the price of admission, even with their modern and contemporary collections currently in transition to the new building opening in May.  Then it was across the street to hear the Chicago Symphony play Mendelssohn (Italian), Prokofiev (left hand concerto), and Beethoven (Eroica).  I dare say it may have been an off night for the group… no need to mention any names.

Then it was back to Garden City, Kansas, where the choir headed back home and I hopped a plane to begin the rest of the trip.  I have now appeared in New York City as composer and trombonist.  David Morneau, Rob Voisey and Vox Novus set up a wonderful concert in the Jan Hus church in Manhattan, and I had a great time.  I played my trombone and electronic piece “Let Everything that Has Breath Praise the Lord” and my solo trombone piece, “What It’s Like.”  David, as always, had a fascinating collaboration with a dancer and a visual artist.  I only wish I was so cool.  A big “thank you” to David for making that happen.  Vox Novus does a concert at this fantastic venue on the East Side on the last Sunday afternoon of every month, so be sure to check it out.    It was a thrill to visit New York again (I hadn’t been since 1996) and to be there “on business.”  David and his wife Jolaine were wonderful hosts, and around the corner from their place in Astoria is an Italian bakery that I will remember until I die… amaretti!

So… I’m now stuck for the night in Denver because my flight home was delayed and I missed the connection back to Garden City, delaying my return to my beautiful, wonderful wife.  I still have one more stop on my “six weeks of insanity” that began with Oklahoma City in Feburary… the national SCI conference in Santa Fe.

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

David Morneau on Kalvos & Damian

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

I’m listening to David Morneau’s extended interview with Kalvos and Damian on www.kalvos.org.  If you haven’t listened to these blissfully long conversations with composers, I suggest you head over there right now.  I find David’s music to be compelling and his approach to it to be uncompromising… so if nothing else, you get to hear his stuff.  Head on over…

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed