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.