Posts Tagged ‘Oklahoma Composers Association’

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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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.

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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.

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Playing my own music

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Over the last eight days, I’ve played my own music in three different venues in three cities here in Oklahoma.  I played my trombone-with-electronics piece Let Everything That Has Breath Praise the Lord here in Guymon at a concert at my church.  Then on Friday, I premiered part of my unaccompanied trombone piece Twenty Views of the Trombone on a faculty recital at Oklahoma Panhandle State University.  Then, last night, Becky and I went to Norman, Oklahoma so that I could play both pieces as a featured composer at a Salon Concert of the Oklahoma Composers Association.  All the performances went well, and they bring me to a topic I’ve, understandably, been thinking about lately, and that is the need for a composer to write music for him- or herself to perform, and to perform it.

A Beethoven or a Gershwin could, of course, at the drop of a hat, find a piano and regale those assembled with any number of their original works; Schubert wrote for himself, and composers like Bach and Haydn had jobs that required them to compose, rehearse and lead their newest pieces in quick succession. 

No one can be as passionate a performer of a new piece than its composer, and there’s no better way to show how a new piece should be played.   If my ideal is to write with a performer in mind, then writing for myself is the closest relationship I can have with a performer. 

From a practical standpoint, playing my own music means that I can “take the show on the road” very easily–in my case, with only my trombone and perhaps a mute or the CD of the accompaniment.

While I avoided writing for the trombone for a while–I didn’t just want to be a trombone composer, and there were other media to explore–it will always be the instrument I understand best.  I love to play the trombone, and it will, hopefully, always be my primary instrument, even if I don’t get nearly the amount of practice I would like.   It only seems natural that I would combine my compositional and performing personae.

I would urge all composers to consider this avenue–and I intend to keep exploring it myself.

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