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.