Posts Tagged ‘Oklahoma Panhandle State University’

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.

The Contest Post

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Anyone who knows me very well knows that for years–probably since I was 9 or 10 and my piano teacher sent me to “Scale Olympics”– I’ve had reservations about musical competitions.  My attitudes have developed and simmered over the years, but I must admit that I remain somewhat wary, especially of the culture of large-ensemble contests that has, for better or worse, become the focus of secondary-level music education in this country.

In the last few weeks, I’ve watched the Music Department here at OPSU get ready to host Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association (OSSAA) vocal contest, then traveled to Alva, Oklahoma to judge regional band and solo & ensemble contest at Northwestern Oklahoma State University (NWOSU) and then host our own band and solo & ensemble contest here.  Shortly thereafter, two of the adjunct instructors in our department who have full-time jobs as high school band directors took their bands to Texas’ UIL regional contest (and did well, so congratulations to Kevin and Sandy!).

So what, you may ask, is someone with an avowed skepticism of the contest culture doing hosting and judging them?  Simply put, I feel that, at this time, my participation helps to ensure that at least some students feel the benefits that I believe are available from contest and try to see that at least some of the excesses are avoided.  At this time, I think I can do good from the inside.

I waited a couple of weeks before writing this post, partly because I didn’t have time to sit down and write it, and partly becuase I wanted to reflect on my experiences with contest season (I’m not judging any other contests this year, so my part is finished).  I’m going to start with what, admittedly, is the less-natural stance for me:  what is good about music contests?

First, in my list of pros, I need to say that solo & ensemble contest is a great invention.  It gets students to discover the joys of small-group music-making, requires them to be independent musicians, gives them projects to be acheived (usually) on their own, makes them interact with adults who aren’t their teachers (such as accompanists or judges), helps them build leadership skills and in general makes them think about many of the things that their music teacher thinks about for them in a large-ensemble setting.  As a student, I looked forward to solo & ensemble contest every year, and as a teacher, I have frequently required my students to participate.  As a high school band director, I was able to assign all my students to an ensemble and provide them with time to rehearse, while I floated from group to group.  We had a recital just before the deadline for solo & ensemble contest that was their goal for the purposes of the class, and I then left to each group the decision of whether or not to participate in the contest.  This gave students many of the benefits without some of the drawbacks.

Solo & ensemble contest is an important counterpoint to the large-group contests because if it weren’t there, an entire set of skills might not get taught while teachers were busy preparing their bands, choirs and orchestras.  I am an unabashed fan and promoter of solo & ensemble contest, and if the rest of the contest establishment were to disappear I would argue to save this portion.

So what’s good about large-group contest?  I have always been wary of students getting everything they know about any subject from only one person–people are human, and they forget the things they learned in college or simply focus on one pet peeve to the exclusion of other things.  Preparing a program as well as it can be prepared by the students and teacher in question, and then having three experts make comments is a really great check on what the teacher is doing, and may remind a teacher of things he or she had not emphasized.

In a way, large-group contest is like an annual physical for a music program.  If all the components–teacher, administration, students–are in place, a group will probably do well.  If one of those is dysfunctional in some way, it will show in the contest ratings.

Large-group contest gives teachers and students a goal, and a way to gauge their progress.  It provides a life for the ensemble outside of the school, and just as athletic teams have home and away games, contest allows band, choir and orchestra students to test themselves.

In the states where I have been involved with contest, Ohio, Georgia and Oklahoma, as in many others, the music played at contest is to be chosen from a prescribed list, compiled by highly experienced experts in the field.  Having to prepare at least one program’s worth of music deemed to be worthy by experts is good for students in that it gives teachers a strong incentive to not pander to students and audiences by choosing only light, popular music and to explore more artful styles.

The sight-reading component of large-group contest is perhaps the strongest litmus test for whether a music teacher is really teaching music.  I don’t know what the point of having band, choir or orchestra in a school is if all students are able to do at the end is remember the great times they had and (hopefully) how good some of that music was.  As my undergraduate advisor, Gerald Doan, used to say, we don’t give students their music at graduation.  They only take with them the skills, physical and mental, that we’ve taught them.  Sight-reading components check to see if these skills are being taught in some way.

So, what are the drawbacks to contest, then?  For the most part, I will try to present what I feel these are in answer to each of the above points.

A major problem with solo & ensemble is that teachers frequently are unable to allot sufficient time to help their students prepare.  Of course, in well-off schools, or schools where music is taken seriously, this is less of a problem, because students have access to private instruction.  The result is that many students arrive at solo & ensemble contest unprepared or with little musical understanding beyond notes and rhythms.  In Ohio, where scales and rudiments are required at solo & ensemble contest, every year one could hear students in the warm-up room cramming their required scales at the last moment, which was certainly not the intent of that requirement.

Scheduling of solo & ensemble contest is critical–to have it the same day as large-group contest is less than desireable, but in areas like Western Oklahoma this is the norm.  Here at OPSU, we are one of two logical places to host such a contest in our area, and on the instrumental side, neither contest is large enough on its own to justify paying for judges.  Together, the two contests are economically efficient, and so we had them both on the same day.  The result is that most schools, wanting to disrupt their school day as little as possible and save on transportation costs, bring their students to both contests on the same day at the same location.  The large-group contest inevitably overshadows solo & ensemble in the experience of many teachers and students.

If it is good for a program and a teacher to get comments from outside sources, are there other, less stressful, more reaslistic ways to get these?  In the 21st-century, there are.  It would be a simple thing to send high-quality audio and video to a judge, who can then watch or listen multiple times.  At many schools, it would even be possible to do this in real-time with immediate feedback through VOIP or videoconferencing.  It would be a simple thing for a judge to come to various schools for a residency of a few days (maybe even every other year) to not only hear the ensemble perform but also to work with the group in a rehearsal setting and bring the sight-reading music along.  This would be a far more robust educational experience than being herded onto a stage in a strange building, playing to a mostly empty hall and then being herded off.  If we’re going to solicit comments, it should be done in a meaningful way.

And then there is the rating:  the number (because everyone is most worried about the composite score, not its components) that will determine many a teacher’s self-esteem for the next year, until they have a chance to get a new number.  The number that may determine whether that teacher is asked to continue in his or her position for another year. 

If large-group contest is like a physical for a program, does it make sense to only look in the program’s left ear and take its rectal temperature?  And then average those two results?  The form of rating used in most states for large-group contests was once referred to as the “Olympic” rating, because the highest and lowest scores are dropped to determine the overall score for the concert program.  There is a major difference between most school music contests and the Olympics, though.  Namely, in the Olympics, judges are comparing athletes to one another to determine a ranking.  In school music contests, each performance is allegedly judged on its own merit, and first-place, second-place, etc. are not awarded (with the exception of some marching band contests, which are not my particular area of expertise).  Why are we rating musical groups using a system that has its origins in ranking athletes, with their much more objectively qualified performances?

If one were to compare professional orchestras, the merits of each could be argued endlessly–how does Chicago’s brass compare to Cleveland’s strings or Los Angeles’ innovative programming?  No two ensembles will ever be alike, and this is even more true in the secondary school world, where every teaching situation and every social situation is a little bit different.  To attempt to listen to a 35-piece middle school band playing John Edmondson and an 80-piece high school band playing Percy Grainger and make the same sorts of musical evaluations in both cases is nearly absurd.

Ratings as I know them in the states where I have taught and judged seem completely unreliable, and worse, not at all helpful to the educational experience.  I would argue for one of two ratings systems.  The first would to simply adopt the system used in Alaska in the mid-1990s:  ensembles could receive a rating of “1” or a rating of “comments only.”  This allowed truly excellent work to be recognized while emphasizing the underlying instructional aim of the experience.  A more preferable alternative would be to bring the “captioning” system widely used in marching band contest into the concert hall, and make scores more statistically reliable by making each component a mathematical part of the final rating.  In this way, teachers and administrators could better evaluate the success of a program by comparing results from year to year, and identify specific areas for improvement.  An administrator would be able to see, for example, whether problems in an underperforming band are instructional (e.g., students aren’t playing rhythms correctly, a possible teacher shortcoming) or systemic (e.g., tone quality is poor, possibly because sufficient budget hasn’t been allotted to maintain and replace instruments).

As a composer, I am generally appalled by the repertoire choices made for contest.  The contest format encourages teachers to choose safe, unimaginative, formulaic repertoire that generally lies at the lower end of their students’ technical and musical abilities.  This type of music does not inspire, does not educate beyond the realm of motor skills, and does not truly represent any recognizable historical or contemporary style beyond “contest music.”

In my experience  judging and managing, a look at the scores of the “marches” that teachers choose for concert band contest is a case in point.  Historically, most marches (of which Sousa, Alford and King are all outstanding examples) are written to a very specific form, and have certain rhythmic, metric and harmonic expectations.  It is possible to make the argument that a part of a student’s education in band should be to learn to deal with this style of composition.  The “marches” chosen for contest, though, are often marches in name and tempo only, simply being compositions in duple time and at a fast walking tempo.  The chosen meter is usually 2/4 or 4/4, despite most historical marches being written in “cut time” or 6/8.  Absent are the characteristic form, the expected key change to the subdominant (or any key change), and, more importantly, the rhythmic vitality combined with genuine melodic appeal that make pieces like Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” an intergal part of our American heritage.  Not every band can play Sousa’s work, truthfully, but the chosen pieces are not even way-stations on the road to that level of performance.  They are all too often instead souless, styleless, pointless exercises in quarter-notes and eighth-notes, which then proceed to be played as such.

While the prescribed “list” of compositions for contest can help to ensure that a basic standard of musical quality is in place (or not), it also encourages composers to continue to write and publishers to publish the sort of formulaic drivel described above.  There is good music for young bands, but precious little of it seems to appear at contest.  It is in this arena that a switch to evaluation by clinician, as suggested above, might have a meaningful impact.  Students must learn to make music, not just to play the contest selections (or the selections for their concert at school, for that matter).  My experience over the last two decades is that students are more likely to remember playing good music as well as they are able than to remember playing bad music perfectly.  And some of the music is so bad that it will never sound good.

This post has gone far too long, but a few words about sight-reading.  After solo & ensemble, this is the next most important type of contest, because it caters also to what should be the underlying goal of music contest, and music education generally:  to create adults who are able to pursue music on their own terms after graduation, either professionally or on an amateur basis.  Students who can sight-read and play in small groups will be able to do this.  The fact that a sight-reading contest exists is a crucial accomplishment, and I haven’t quite determined how the experience could be improved–possibly by having a full panel of judges for sight-reading instead of one, as is usually the case.  Possibly by having the same judges hear sight-reading and concert performances.

Music contests, then, to me, are a two-edged sword with great possible benefits, but the potential to harm the field of music education as well.  My advice to music teachers and adminstrators is to have an open and honest conversation about the goals of their music programs, and then decide whether or not music contests, especially large-group contests, really and truly further those goals.

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.

Musicircus

Friday, October 31st, 2008

I had no idea what to expect tonight at the Musicircus–the last time I participated in a similar event was in the Spring of 1995 at the University of Cincinnati, and tonight’s event was heavily modelled on that experience.  That concert was all new music, while tonight was much more eclectic.

I hope all the performers and the audience are as pleased as I am with the results.  Turning about 30 small  (and not-so-small) pieces into an hour-long celebration of music and the joy that it can bring was a very healthy activity for all of us, I think.  It was refreshing to see audience members I had never seen before along with many of our faithful fans, as well.

Organizing this kind of thing means that someone–tonight, me–has to lose the sense of spontaneity and discovery of the event.  It takes a lot of preparation to be so random.  All the same, there were some wonderful “moments:”

About a third of the way into Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge, Krista Margrave and Melody Gum started an a capella version of “I’ll Fly Away.”

Kevin Coons’ fantastic vibraphone solo growing out of the texture of the evening.

The minute of silence–it was randomly chosen, but it came at just the right place in the hour to give some relief.

All the performances were fantastic, and it seemed like everyone had a good time… and I dare say John Cage made a few converts this evening.