Posts Tagged ‘Lakeland Civic Orchestra’

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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The Symphony: A Golden Spike Moment

Sunday, October 20th, 2019

In May 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, working from both ends simultaneously, with a golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah. This morning, I had my own Golden Spike Moment as I completed the first rough draft of the first movement of my first symphony.

I decided to write a symphony earlier this year, from an inspiration I had several years ago. The hymn “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,” which our church sings to the tune Old Hundredth nearly every Sunday as the Doxology, struck me one Sunday as an interesting possibility, and each Sunday, as we sang it again, I was pulled closer to it, thinking about what an extended meditation on that hymn might be like. While it isn’t perfectly ecumenical, it is a broad acknowledgement of a Creator God who loves us and wants us to be happy.

Earlier this year, I was in a difficult place creatively. My mid-winter depressive tendencies seemed to strike especially hard, and must difficultly, I had only one small project with a specific deadline (a piece that I was very happy with as it turned out). Despite a promising start to 2019 in terms of performances, nothing specific loomed on the horizon either, and creatively, I felt stuck, with no specific reason to continue. I even failed to complete another piece in time for the call for scores for which I envisioned it, which turned out to be a real missed opportunity. I was wondering if I had a future as a composer. This doldrum lasted well into the summer, and a fanfare commission which should have been done in a matter of weeks dragged on, actually interfering with the symphony project. Part of me was wondering if I had a future as a composer at all.

For several years, I have been telling myself that I would write a symphony for 2021, the year I turn 45: my last attempt was a false start when I was composing my doctoral graduation piece at age 30–that piece ended up being Five Rhythmic Etudes, and the tale is cautionary, because despite a strong premiere of the outer movements, I have never heard the complete piece. Would a full-scale symphony find a place on anyone’s program? As the director of the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, I knew that if I tailored the work to their strengths, we could perform it.

In May of this year, I cast the die: doubling down on my uncertainty, I wrote a commissioning agreement, as I usually do for my compositions, only this time, I commissioned myself, for a forty-minute symphony based on Old Hundredth to be delivered in time for a November 2021 performance. The goal seemed far enough away to be possible, and I didn’t tell anyone at first. If this is my final work as a composer, then I have accomplished most of what I hoped I would do when I started writing music: I have dreamed of composing a symphony for about 30 years now.

The next step was to take the large goal and set smaller ones:

Date Goal
September 1, 2019 Planning and Sketching Completed
November 1, 2019 1st Movement Short Score
January 1, 2020 2nd Movement Short Score
April 1, 2020 3rd Movement Short Score
July 1, 2020 4th Movement Short Score
September 1, 2020 1st Movement Orchestrated
November 1, 2020 2nd Movement Orchestrated
January 1, 2021 3rd Movement Orchestrated
March 1, 2021 4th Movement Orchestrated
June 1, 2021 Full Score Finalized
August 1, 2021 Parts to Orchestra
o/a November 7, 2021 Premiere Performance

This in hand, I relaxed, and here was a mistake. My depression continued into the summer, in part because a course I had planned to teach was cancelled for low enrollment, and I just wasn’t putting the time in. I was staying up late at night and sleeping through my early-morning composing sessions, finding it difficult to get back on track. A week turned into a month, and by August 15, I had nothing sketched. I also had a fanfare for the Lakeland Civic Band that was still undone. With the start of classes at Lakeland, however, I had an incentive to reset my sleep schedule, and I got back to work. By early September, the fanfare, Mysterious Marvels, was completed, and I turned my attention to the symphony.

I began with the chorale, thinking that each phrase could be expanded into one of the four movements of the standard form. I examined the harmonizations from several hymnals, and settled on the one in use in my current church, No. 95 in the United Methodist Hymnal. In mid-September, I made a few sketches, and then created this overall plan:

The one-page outline of the first movement of my symphony.

The one-page outline of the first movement of my symphony.

The date, September 19, is somewhat later than I had hoped, but I was on my way. On the back of this page, I wrote:

What makes music “symphonic?”

  • “combining of tones”–whole is greater than sum of parts
  • development–motivic, thematic
  • explanation of a musical thesis
  • timbral variety and contrast
  • block scoring
  • weight and depth of emotional impact
  • breadth of expression and variety of means of expression
  • public, community-oriented statement meant for a broad audience

What do I want from this symphony?

  • summation of my work thus far (but do I break new ground here?)
  • statement about who I am now
  • cohesive, unified design (Panufnik, Lutoslawski)
  • playable, enjoyable for musician and listener
  • praise to God: four movements based on Old Hundredth, but is that
    • structural
    • motivic
    • more explicit?
  • but also ecumenical–invitation to praise and community, but faith is private

I began sketching on paper–a technique I have started to rely on increasingly over the last couple of years, and with the sketches I had created ahead of the one-page outline, I began to develop a plan that expressed the outline. It was only a single line of music in places, but by the end of September, it was continuous music from beginning to end of the movement. I then began to put ideas into the computer–still using Sibelius 6–and flesh them out as I described my process: a short score, with one staff for every instrument. As it happened, I started scoring the end of the movement first, from “D1” in my outline, and when I reached the end, I went back to the beginning, and so today, I reached D1 again, and drove the Golden Spike with a staccato D for low strings, oboe, and bassoon. A gentle hammer blow, since gold is soft.

This project has invigorated me: I have my usual fall energy for it, and the music has flowed easily. My years of composing have led to a workflow that I feel I can rely on: I don’t wait on the muse for inspiration–I sit down and write when it is time, and it is now time. With a movement under my belt, I am confident that two years from now, we will be rehearsing for a premiere.

And so today, I listened to my entire draft of the first movement, about 11 minutes of music. I will tweak it a little, and then lay it aside while I compose the rest of the symphony. Last week, my wife asked if she could hear it, and I had to respond that it was not yet ready–when she wakes up, I’ll tell her that it is today, because I have driven the golden spike.

 

 

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Summer?

Thursday, August 24th, 2017

All summer, I kept meaning to post something–I was somewhat lazy, but a few things happened, so here is an update.

I’ve started and finished two pieces since May.  My new work for Galo Arboledo is On a Clear Night You Can See Forever for violin and piano, and is an ode to the Shafran Planetarium at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.  We are hoping to premiere the piece in the Museum on a Cleveland Composers Guild concert on November 26, but we’re still awaiting the decision of the program committee on that.  The piece is a fantasy that explores the wonders of the Universe, starting close to home with the aurora, and zooming out to the ultimate panorama.  More updates on this piece in the near future!

I’m also ready to send copies of my first big band piece to Ed Michaels, who will premiere it with Lakeland Jazz Impact this year.  Appropriately, the title is Maximum Impact.  I’m always pleased when my work can intersect with my job in some way.  Jazz Impact has a storied history, and is the only high school honors jazz band in Northeast Ohio.

A big first for me was conducting the Resonanz production of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortileges.  I can now call myself an opera conductor.  Even just conducting a piano-vocal arrangement was an amazing challenge, and while I felt some trepidation, I’m glad that I took it on.  I’m also pleased to be working with a group that is bringing serious music to Lake County, where, outside the schools, there isn’t enough.

The Lakeland Civic Orchestra will start up on Monday.  I’m excited to see our group again, and it looks like a good season ahead.  We are starting our season with a concert on November 5 that includes Massenet’s Ballet Music from Le Cid, Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, and Alice Mary Smith’s The Masque of Pandora.  It is always hard to choose music for the orchestra–nothing too easy, nothing too hard, and always the knowledge that whatever I pick we have to live with for a few months while we prepare it.  Sam Rotburg, violin faculty at Baldwin Wallace University, approached me with the idea of the Beethoven Triple a couple of years ago, and that is now coming to fruition.  His wife and colleague Sungyeun Kim will play piano, and Chauncey Arecet will play cello.  The Massenet is a piece I first encountered in college in a band transcription, and when I was playing the CD in the car recently, Noah reminded me that he had heard it in a cartoon, as well.  The odd duck, then, is the Smith.  A composer who deserves to be better known, certainly.  I resolved this season to begin to make more of an effort to include music by under-represented voices in our concerts, after I realized that Jennifer Jolley’s Ferry Crossing was the first piece by a female composer that we had played in the five years that I have conducted the group.  The challenge, then, is that we are not a new music ensemble, so I need to educate myself and find repertoire by female composers and composers of color of the past.  Hence, Alice Mary Smith.  Since her style is close to Mendelssohn, she will fit nicely into what we do, and I’m excited to give the local premiere of this piece.  If the Cleveland Orchestra won’t do any better than it has in programming diversely, the Lakeland Civic Orchestra can lead the way.

We had a wonderful trip in June to Dearborn, Michigan to see the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village.  It was great family time, as we stayed at “the pink hotel” and absorbed some of the history of our nation.  The Henry Ford is really a Smithsonian West in many ways, and Noah was especially excited about seeing the chair Abraham Lincoln was sitting in when he was assassinated.  I’m moved that my kids were able to sit in the same bus that Rosa Parks was arrested in, and a little stunned that the exhibit on consumer technology now includes things I had in my house as a high schooler.  We also lived more history at Hale Farm and Village here in Cleveland, when we attended their Civil War reenactment earlier this month.  Noah has developed in interest in this, and he was fascinated by it, of course.  My first orchestra conducting gig was conducting artillery reenactors for the 1812 Overture, but I had never been to an encampment like this.  The tough part of it all, is trying to explain why people do this–not only to my son, but also to my sister-in-law Connie and her two nieces, who were visiting from Germany.

I also took Becky to see Billy Joel perform at Progressive Field in July.  I’m glad we went, but the musician in me found it too loud.  I can’t imagine a concert by a group meant to be loud.  He only sings hits now, of course, since he hasn’t had a new album in 15 years.  He threw in a couple of deep cuts, but mostly, everyone got to hear what they came to hear.  One of my favorite sights of the evening was a man wearing a Fantasies and Delusions t-shirt.  That is a true Billy Joel fan, and having had my music on the same program as some of those pieces (thanks, Avguste Antonov), it’s fun to know that I’m artistically connected to such a big name.  I’ve always loved his music, even before I realized it was his music, and I’m glad I had a chance to see him while he is still performing.  Not bad for my first stadium concert.

Now fall semester looms.  Noah is back in school, everyone who has visited has visited, and it’s time to open the folder called Compositions Fall 2017.  Ahead of me are a trio for piano, violin, and trumpet for Troika Melange; a piece for soprano and jazz trio for Carrie Hennessey; and possibly some songs for a connection from Resonanz.  Dianna Anderson has agreed to premiere Sisters in Stone, but we haven’t figured out when; I would like to do it at the High Museum of Art, since the statues that inspired it come from there.  I would like to get Twenty Views of the Trombone out there as well.  I hope to present it at Lakeland and in some other college venues this year.  I’m also hoping to return to the CMS circuit, since their Great Lakes Regional conference is in Columbus, and I wouldn’t have to spend my entire travel budget on one trip.  I had a great opportunity to reconnect with Nancy Joy, who commissioned South Africa, my horn and marimba piece which is just about my greatest hit.  She is planning to record the work sometime this year, which will be another boost for that surprise success.

Where did the summer go?

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Cleveland Orchestra plays Barber, Schumann, Copland

Sunday, December 1st, 2013

Always a joy to head down to Severance Hall to hear the local band, the Cleveland Orchestra, and that’s where Dan Perttu and I were last night.  Marin Alsop conducted Barber’s Second Essay, Schumann’s Piano Concerto, and Copland’s Third Symphony.  A stellar performance in many respects.

Some thoughts.  I want to try out some of Maestra Alsop’s moves–in both of the 20th-century pieces, her baton arm was frequently quite low–almost at waist level–as it went away from her body.  Not so much in the Schumann, which of course has considerably more lightness both in tone and in what is actually required of the orchestra.  The “low beat” is something I associate with choral conducting, but I always liked the way it can encourage a group to give a full-bodied, massive tone–if it can be seen over the podium!

The Barber may be something that is in the realm of possibility for the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, and I need to look into it.  I wasn’t very familiar with it before I decided to attend this concert and did some preparatory listening.  A somewhat hesitant start from the orchestra, but a thrilling conclusion.

The Schumann piano concerto has been one of my favorites for many years, which means that I usually want to hear it just-so.  Pianist David Fray was competent, but not astonishing, at least not from where I sat.  It seemed, particularly in the outer movements, that he had somewhere else that he needed to be just then.  In particular, the first movement cadenza felt rushed–for a part of the piece that certainly invites a pianist to take some time and space, no matter what tempo one chooses for the main body of the movement.

The Copland was splendidly done.  Alsop gave a wonderfully cogent explanation of the motivic structure of the piece before playing it that, I think, would help almost any audience hear what Copland does with the “Common Man” material.  The full performance was revelatory–I had only heard the piece on CD before, and to me one the advantages of watching a live performance is the visual reinforcement of a composer’s orchestrational technique.  There are doublings, of course, that only really great players can make work–horn and flute, for example, but of course the Clevelanders play them with ease.  My only quibble was a lack of energy and drive in the second movement, but it is, after all, an enormous piece, and to expend so much in the scherzo would endanger the effectiveness of the finale.

Also picked up trombonist Massimo La Rosa’s new CD in the gift shop, and I’m about halfway through listening to it as I type this entry.  An interesting balance of standard repertoire and new transcriptions, including a daring trombone version of the Bach G-major cello suite.  Love his tone and musicality (the solo in the first movement of the Copland last night was exquisite)!

One of the exciting things about conducting the Lakeland Civic Orchestra is going to a concert like this and seeing four or five of the orchestra members in attendance–what a change from previous groups!

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Active Art

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

NPR had a piece on playwright and actor Wallace Shawn yesterday (you know him… he played Fezzini in The Princess Bride).  He made a comment about “active art” and “passive art.”  Passive art is art that tells us how to think, and is everywhere.  Active art, on the other hand, is a wake-up call, a glimpse into a greater reality.  I immediately tried to think of pieces of music that might fit into these categories.  As obvious as it might be this year, I have no doubt that Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps is active art–after 100 years, it still feels fresh, it still challenges us; it makes us question just what a piece of music is, and just what it means to be modern.  Perhaps Mahler falls into the category of “active art” as well.  I’ve been at work on my piano concerto this summer, and I think this term “active art” is what I’m trying to accomplish with it (I’ve tried to be deliberate in my work rather than the kind of “white heat” composing that I’ve been prone to over the last couple of years… I just want to give the piece time to be what it will be).    Have I written music that is “active” in this way?  One or two of my recent works may approach this:  Moriarty’s Necktie and my Piano Sonata.

Otherwise, it’s been a busy-but-not-busy summer.  Getting used to the new house (oh yeah, we bought a house), spending time with Becky and Noah, teaching.  I’ve been teaching counterpoint to a private composition student, which has got me going back through the species and thinking about contrapuntal approaches in my music; also, I brought home my well-worn Well-Tempered Clavier and have spent some time with that, although the Beethoven quartets are still mostly unopened on the piano.  And letting the concerto gestate. And in that last couple of weeks, score study for the upcoming season with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra–Verdi, Mendelssohn, Milhaud, and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Last week, I had lunch with my graduate adviser Donald Harris and his wife Marilyn.  After a lovely lunch at his home in Columbus, we went to his study and played CDs of our recent work for each other.  I had the privilege to hear his Symphony No. 2, which received a strong performance by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra in April 2012.  It was interesting to see the similarities in our work, although when I was his student, he never had me study his scores intensively, and rarely gave comments that led me in his own stylistic direction.  Don seemed pleased with my recent work as well, which makes me realize that the recently-ended “Oklahoma Period” was not in vain.

That said–more blogging in the future, hopefully.  I’ve missed several months, but hopefully I can put that to rest.

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Film Scoring, Self-Taught

Monday, January 21st, 2013

It’s important to try new things, and I was inspired by BJ Brooks’ presentation of his silent film scores at the SCI Region VI Conference back in October.  Now that I’m conducting the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, and I can pick our repertoire, I have the chance to try my own hand at such a thing.  The orchestra at West Texas A&M, where BJ works, has been presenting silent movies with BJ’s scores every other year for the last few years, and they’ve been doing feature-length films, which is an exciting proposition.  I decided for Lakeland’s first effort to choose a shorter film (more on the difficulties of that later), but even at 13 minutes, this will be the longest single movement I’ve written for orchestra.  The film is Georges Melies’ Le Voyage Dans la Lune, from 1902, a somewhat groundbreaking piece from a groundbreaking era in cinema.

If you watch the film, you can see that Melies is operating in an era when the technology of film was brand new.  Many of the things that we take for granted about cinematography aren’t present–the movie is shot as though the action were happening on a stage, and the camera were an audience member, with no close-ups, no pans, no framing shots… some of the things that make film what we think of it today.  What is present, though, is the magic of cinema, which is not surprising, since Melies started out as an illusionist of note before switching to film.  Particularly fascinating are his special effects, which are somewhat crude, but surprisingly effective.

Composing to this has been interesting–I’ve completed the piece in short score, and will be orchestrating over the next couple of weeks.  I’m not the first to score the film–there is a score by George Antheil, and at least one uploaded to archive.org.  I made the decision early on to stick to sounds that could have been a part of the musical sound of 1902, so my score has references to Debussy, Elgar and Strauss, although not specifically.  The tricky part has been making things fit–identifying the places where the music needs to change, and making the notes change at the same time.  This is my first film score, unless you count my entry a few years back for the TCM Young Composers Competition.  Since then, Sibelius has added the ability to sync a score with a video, which has been invaluable–both in finding “hit points” and in seeing how my ideas fit the action on screen.

The style that’s coming out is different from how I usually write, which is somewhat intentional.  I’ve ended up with more repetition, and a great deal more of a “tonal” style than I’ve customarily used; in some ways, this is some of the most predictable music I’ve written.  Part of this is a decision to use the sounds typical of 1902, and part of this is knowing that I’m dealing with an orchestra and audience who aren’t expecting dissonant, angular music that might have been my first choice.

The sense of time in the music is intriguing as well.  Watching the movie with no sound, alone, as I have several times, is somewhat difficult.  A few weeks back, some of the orchestra members and I watched it together, again with no sound, and the experience was more rewarding.  But–now that I have a draft score to add to the film (which I now know very well, of course), the story seems to come to life–it will be incredible to see and hear it with live instruments!  The dimension that the music adds to the film is even more important than the “dimension” that 3-D aims to add.  Thirteen minutes that seemed to positively crawl by in silence are enlivened by the music in a way that explains why, as Richard Taruskin writes, “the movies were never silent.”

The other challenge has been dealing with the inherent flaws in Melies’ narrative–events are repeated (the moon landing, the celebration at the end), and the pre-launch events dominate the structure in a way that is somewhat unfortunate.  Melies was dealing with this brand-new idea–telling a story in moving images–so it’s not surprising that his early work moves somewhat creakily, but making my music work with this narrative has been tricky in the sense that some things go longer than I would like them to, while others peter out just as they are getting going in the score, but there are no more images for them.  Melies was really making science-fiction, which, for a fan of Star Trek and Star Wars, is exciting–he made this movie at the same time that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were inventing the literary genre.

The premiere is in April, and rehearsals start in five weeks, giving me time to finish the scoring and get the parts to the concertmaster, if I work hard.  Look for more as it progresses.

I’ve also spent some time over the last few days helping Daniel Perttu with his new trombone sonata, which has been interesting.  It’s been interesting to consider someone else’s ideas about my own instrument (it’s almost been an education in Dan’s instrument, the bassoon, because I feel like much of what he’s written for the trombone would work better on bassoon). It leads me to wonder about how I know what I know about “how” to write for an instrument, and how best to communicate that.  Certainly part of my training as a music education major has been useful here–the chance to take “methods” classes and get to play every instrument, even if only a few notes, makes writing for that instrument a different experience.  This is why I required two instrumental methods classes when I wrote the composition degree plan at OPSU, and I would push for the same thing again if I had the chance (now that I’m at a two-year school, I don’t think it makes much sense to be thinking about an Associate of Arts in Music Composition).  I recall an incident in Jean Sibelius’ biography where he spent an afternoon with an excellent English horn player–I don’t recall whether that correlated with his composition of The Swan of Tuonela.  It’s too bad that he didn’t write any film music.

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Building Community

Saturday, November 10th, 2012

On Saturday, November 17, I’ll be in Dayton, Ohio for the world premiere of Daytime Drama, a concertpiece for clarinet and band.  Magie Smith, a classmate from Ohio State, will be the soloist and she’ll be accompanied by Ken Kohlenberg leading the Sinclair Community College Wind Symphony.  The next day, I’ll make my debut as the music director with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, one of our five community-based ensembles at Lakeland Community College.  Looking back on my career as a musician, this is not at all unusual.

The list of community groups I’ve been a part of over the years is long–I’ve spent much more time being a non-paid member of a community musical ensemble or paid director of one than I have getting paid for gigs or performing with professional groups.  The list of groups is long–the Middle Georgia Concert Band, Tara Winds, the Sinclair Community College Wind Symphony, the Ohio Valley British Brass Band, the Community Concert Band, Community Orchestra and Community Jazz Ensemble at Lorain County Community College, the Oberlin Choral Spectrum, the Oklahoma Panhandle State University Concert Band and Concert Choir, and now the Lakeland Civic Orchestra.

What makes next Saturday’s premiere so exciting, though, is that I credit the Sinclair Wind Symphony with saving my life in some respects.

In September 1999, I was starting a new teaching job in Springfield, Ohio.  I had gone through a divorce over the summer that came as a complete surprise to me, and had decided to move back to Ohio after what had been a very difficult year teaching in an inner-city school in Georgia.  Getting a late start, I was glad to have nailed down a full-time job teaching choir, as it meant that I wouldn’t be living with my parents, but it was not the direction I thought my career would take.  I was lonely, despite being close to my parents, and the weeks seemed simply endless.  One of the ironies about teaching is that you are surrounded by people all day, and none of them can really be your friends.  Trying to become friends with students is almost always a mistake, and I’ve always found it difficult to befriend my colleagues; at this particular job, I traveled between two schools and didn’t share a common lunch hour with the rest of the faculty, which made the situation even worse.

One day, a representative from a fund-raising company came to visit.  Don Rader was a former band director, as so many of these reps are, and we got to talking about music.  He mentioned that he played in a group in Dayton, about a half-hour drive from where I was living, and that I should look into joining.  Desperate to get out of my apartment, I called the director, Ken Kohlenberg.  Dr. Kohlenberg explained that they didn’t need trombone players, so I quickly volunteered myself for euphonium, and he invited me to come on in, and I joined the Sinclair Wind Symphony that fall.

There was something fortuitous about this–I’m not a particularly good euphonium player, and I have a strange bell-front instrument that doesn’t always blend well.  Furthermore, the band already had two euphonium players and probably didn’t really need a third.  Somehow, I ended up in the back row of the band, as though Ken realized that I needed to be there.

And that fall, I needed to be there.  More importantly, I needed someplace to be where I wouldn’t hang out with my cat and feel sorry for myself at least one night a week.  That fall, there were days that I just wanted to quit my job, get out of music completely and find something that would let me wallow more than getting in front of thirty seventh-graders seemed to allow.  I thought there might be something where young, eager minds weren’t depending on me to somehow pull it together.  There were weeks when the only thing I had to look forward to was the Wednesday night rehearsal, and it wasn’t even about making through the week until Friday–it was about getting to 3:30 on Wednesday, when I would take myself to a fast-food dinner and drive over to Dayton.  In the band, I was a musician, not a divorced guy on his second teaching job in as many years–I was doing what had got me into music in a serious way in the first place, namely, playing in a band.

I spent three years in the Sinclair band, until a new job took me away, and I didn’t do a particularly good job keeping in touch, as with many other parts of my life in those years.  I know that some members of the group have probably moved on–at least one, Joanie Apfel, who mentored me as a teacher, has died, a loss for the profession and for the world.  Next Saturday, when I get to rehearsal, I hope to see some familiar faces, and I hope to take a moment to express to everyone what that group has meant to me–if not, there will at least be this blog post.

I hope my story makes the point of why we need community music-making.  In a society in which we are increasingly distant from our “friends,” neighbors and even our families, community music groups offer the chance to be together, enjoying something we are passionate about.  They keep us young, and they keep us happy.  They keep us from disappearing into our iPads or Androids or whatever other technology vies for our attention.  They keep us human.

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Lunchtime Thoughts

Wednesday, October 31st, 2012

Looking back, I’ve been neglecting this blog–posting every six weeks isn’t really going to do it. So–my Halloween resolution is now and then to go on at lunchtime and put up about ten minutes worth of thoughts. Here goes:
I’ve been spending some time getting together a group of composition projects for the next year or so, and it’s looking good. First, there will be a piece for flute choir in honor of Donald McGinnis’ 95th birthday, commissioned by Katherine Borst Jones at Ohio State for her Flute Troupe there. Dr. McGinnis was Kathy’s teacher and the subject of my doctoral research–he was the band director at Ohio State for over thirty years (from the 40s to the 70s), and was also a composer and flutist, so it’s a very interesting commission from a personal point of view. I’ve started a couple of different openings, but I haven’t found the one that really makes me want to keep writing–when I do, the piece will come, so I’m giving it another shot this weekend.

After that will be a first for me–a film score. At the Region VI Society of Composers conference earlier this month, the WTAMU Symphony Orchestra performed excerpts of the silent film scores that BJ Brooks has created for them over the last few years. Now that I’m conducting the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, I’ve decided to try the same thing with them in April, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to use Georges Melies’ 1902 Le Voyage Dans La Lune, which I will score and we will then project during our performance.

Next, a collaborative project–Antoine Clark, a clarinetist who was at Ohio State at the same time I was, approached me about scoring a new work of his for clarinet and band.  Antoine’s work is a Fantasy on Themes from the Barber of Seville for clarinet and piano, and would make an excellent solo vehicle in the tradition of pieces for cornet by Clarke and Arban, and I’m very excited about working on this.  Look for performances in the Columbus area next fall.

Finally–and I find this incredibly exciting, I will be writing a piano concerto for pianist Avguste Antonov, who is based in Grapevine, Texas and has performed my Starry Wanderers and my Piano Sonata.  Avguste performs as a concerto soloist regularly, and the piece won’t be ready until the 2014-2015 season, but I’m thrilled to be writing for this medium.  If you need a preview, Avguste is playing excerpts from Starry Wanderers tonight in Youngstown!

Those are the new projects–there are plenty of performances of old pieces on the horizon as well:  In two weeks, Magie Smith will be the clarinet soloist with the Sinclair Community College Wind Symphony and Kenneth Kohlenberg in the premiere of my concerto Daytime Drama–a piece that has been waiting longer than it was supposed to wait, but that is in good hands with a group I used to play in.  November 17 in Dayton, Ohio.  Two weeks late, I’ll be conducting my Variations on a French Carol with the Lakeland Civic Band, on December 2 here in Kirtland.  Then after the new year, performances of my Suite for String Orchestra will get rolling, beginning with Maura Brown and that Batavia High School strings at the Illinois Music Educators Association convention on Friday, January 25 in Peoria–at 9:30am, but it’s my first MEA convention performance, so I’m excited.  Performances will follow thereafter in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas and Florida!

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