Posts Tagged ‘performances’

Late Night Ramblings of an Absentee Blogger

Tuesday, June 18th, 2024

So, yeah… seven months has been a blur, and I don’t exactly know what happened to the first half of 2024. I certainly haven’t been blogging, and I mostly, until the last week or so, haven’t been composing.

So… it’s a hot night and it’s pushing 3am, and I already did some composing, so it must be the perfect time to blog.

Here’s why I haven’t been:

Spring 2024 was not my favorite semester at work. The inevitable happened in a long slide that reached a tipping point during the pandemic: I taught only one in-person class (plus orchestra) at Lakeland, and the rest of my full-time load was online and administrative.

I would say that I don’t know how I felt about that… but I know exactly how I felt about it, and it’s the same way that I feel about Slipknot.

I’ve been teaching online in one way or another almost all of my college teaching career. It has never not been a challenge. It has never not been frustrating for me, and certainly for my students. I like to think that I’ve gotten better at it, but it did not feel that way this last year, and it especially didn’t feel that way this Spring. I will spare my readers all the gory details of student underacheivement and the resulting instructor soul-searching and course revision: suffice to say that I’m trying some new things this summer (I’m a week into that term), and we’ll see how that goes.

But on top of that, work this Spring was all staring at the computer, implementing my planned course, seeing what students did (or didn’t) do, and putting in my rubric scores and comments.

Of course, having had all the screen time I could handle in my 9-5 work day, I just wasn’t all that keen about opening up good old Sibelius 6 and moving notes around. I gave up my 6 to 7am composition time during COVID, and I have to say, I never really got back into that groove. It’s too easy to stay up late with Becky, then read for a while and even with the best of intentions, not be energized to get out of bed with the first alarm, especially on those winter mornings. (Ahh… give me some winter mornings right now, please as we deal with the first heat wave of the summer).

So, the last couple of years, I’ve tried a different plan: get the kids on the school bus at 7:45am, have a shower by 8:15 or so, and have most of an hour before I needed to get to Lakeland. This broke down last Spring as well, as out of the shower crept later and later, and answering email took up most of the time leftover.

At one time Fridays were a time I could devote to composition, but between the demands of the online classes and Friday laundry day, that time slipped away from me.

But all excuses: because if I had really wanted to blog or compose, I would have found them time.

I haven’t been all that busy… I just haven’t wanted to.

I completed two pieces in the first three months of 2024: a one-minute fanfare for the Cleveland Composers Guild collaboration with Factory Seconds Brass Trio, and my usual contribution to the Guild’s Junior Concert, a piece for a young pianist about dragons. Nice little pieces, neither of which took much more than a few hours, total, to come up with. Then, not much of anything, when I should have been writing a trumpet piece for Matthew Swihart–I got the first two minutes in, but I couldn’t get back into it.

I missed the deadline, which was May 1.

I got a start on it over winter break, then set it aside, telling myself there was Spring Break, then telling myself there was the whole month of April, and then telling myself there was no way it would get finished in April, and sending Matt an email explaining myself.

Meanwhile, it was a fairly good Spring for performances, which was heartening: Composers Guild in January, April, and May–a total of four premieres; a fantastic trip with Becky to Williamsburg, Virginia for the William & Mary band to play Mysterious Marvels; my first performance in Nebraska, of I Live With the Fiction that I Never Get Mad by Andrew White; the premiere of my string piece for the Wake Forest Youth Orchestra; a second performance of my cello piece at Dennison University… I mean… not bad at all, really. Makes one feel like a real composer, as usual.

It’d be nice to have more of that–as always, it ebbs and flows, and lately it’s been an ebb. The News page on the old website is looking pretty thin, but I can only blame my slump as a composer for it.

But only now, a month after my mostly-online Spring, am I starting to get back to writing music. My summer section of Popular Music is small, and leaves time for writing, and Becky is home for the summer, so there is some coverage for me, and the kids don’t need me to be right downstairs with them anymore, and we’re not doing swimming lessons–I miss the poolside reading time, though. I find myself thinking about projects again that might work–would this person collaborate, or how could I make this happen.

In the last week, I took my SATB choral piece Christmas Eve and turned it into something that the Lakeland Civic Flute Choir can use, and I’ve started cutting down my organ cycle Seven Last Words into a suite that I can submit for the Guild’s collaboration with the American Guild of Organists–I’m trying to compress it to about 25% of its original size, and it’s been interesting to revisit that piece. Next up is the trumpet piece–I watched this video from my former student and collaborator Maria Finkelmeier, who wasn’t a composer when I first met her, but has now really taken the ball and run with it: one of her suggestions really hit me as a solution to this trumpet quandary, and we’ll see where it takes me.

And from there?

  • I listened to the symphony again last week. I think I still want to finish it.
  • I want to write a piece about the eclipse in April–I don’t care how cliche that sounds.
  • Some reading I did led me to a musical motive that I want to carry around and think about and make into the kernel of a piece.
  • Again, thinking about collaborators to approach.

And I’ve been tromboning again. This spring I had eight students in my studio–more than ever, and Wednesdays at the Fine Arts Association got long, but having some older students in the mix has been good as well. On top of that, fellow Guild member Cara Haxo has written me a trombone and piano piece, and we’re wrapping it up and starting to think about performances. It’s good to have different gears to switch into.

Not long ago, Becky remarked that I didn’t seem to be as interested in composition as I once was. I’m not sure that was quite correct: it’s just easy to get away from something that isn’t your job and that takes you away from other commitments. And I think I did need a break–more screen time wasn’t the answer this term. But my past experience has taught me two things: 1) that a week or so of being back at it doesn’t mean that I’m permanently back at it, and 2) it will be there when I’m ready to come back to it, even if there are long stretches where I can just think about it.

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Being a “Real Composer”

Saturday, August 31st, 2013

2012-2013 was a surprisingly good season for my music–about 20 performances, all told, in a variety of places and venues, with a nice balance between premieres (Lady Glides on the Moon, Nod a Don, Le Voyage Dans La Lune and my Suite for String Orchestra) and second, third and later performances.  Some were simple–me playing Twenty Views of the Trombone at a John Cage Musicircus event at MOCA Cleveland, while others were more elaborate.  Some involved my making them happen (performances of my Piano Sonata and Moriarty’s Necktie at the SCI Region VI conference at West Texas A&M, a conference I cohosted), and others happened all by themselves (Selena Adams’ performance of South Africa on her DMA recital at the University of Colorado, right before winning a gig with the US Army Field Band.  In all, a very good year for my music, and 2013-2014 is shaping up as well, although not quite as spectacularly, but with an early start, a repeat performance of Lady Glides at the Parma Music Festival/SCI Region I conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which, with a little luck, might lead to more, as always.

It makes me feel like a “real composer,” I’ve felt, along with acceptance into the Cleveland Composers Guild, for which one is elected, not simply enrolled.  March and April, in particular, felt very busy, and this fall, there will be a day (September 29) where my music is played at the same time in two cities (Dallas and Cleveland).  Another milestone is that many of these performances are happening without my being present, or even involved other than selling a copy of the sheet music through my website.  This is a big deal.  South Africa continues to be my “greatest hit,” which surprises me at times, but I’m also gratified by that fact.  I’ll be looking for a couple more sales of that piece as horn students begin to program their recitals for this year.

Going forward, the big challenge, I think, is to continue to get my music out there and build my reputation as a composer.  I have a sense that I need to become a “Cleveland composer,” which is a tougher nut, in some ways, than composing was in the Oklahoma Panhandle.   There are areas in which I’d like to see growth in myself as a composer over the next few years–handling larger forms, dealing with complexity, exploring percussion, working toward a greater depth of emotional expression in my work.  Over the summer, I had lunch with Donald Harris, my graduate advisor, and he stated that I was growing in interesting directions.  Another of my teachers, Tom Wells, heard my piece in New Hampshire and stated that he was proud of me as a student.  To have my teachers–themselves distinguished and experienced composers–feel that I have done good things years after my time with them is a good thing.

Being at Lakeland, where my tenure is not bound up in producing new compositions or having as many performances as possible, gives me the freedom to pursue projects at my own pace, and not to feel like I need to take pieces on, write another book, or submit to every conference of SCI or CMS.  Composition can be more artful now and not a part of my family’s livelihood.  My one composition student, young Cooper Wood, has been quite an inspiration this year as well, and as he enters high school, I’m hopeful that our work together will benefit both of us.

It is impossible to be without disappointments as well.  I still feel that Moriarty’s Necktie is a very good piece, possibly my best, but it has now been through the cycle of awards for band composition (Revelli, Beeler, Ostwold, etc.) without being recognized.  There will be more band music from my pen, of course.  One also does not apply to conferences and festivals without rejections; more rejections than acceptances, naturally.  While each of these hurts, my faith in my work is undiminished, and I will continue to write and submit.  I’ve been diligently informing ASCAP of all my performances, and applied for the Plus Award for the first time this year–between ASCAP and the website, it would be nice to see some monetary return, if only to cover costs, but I feel that that is probably still at least a couple of years off.

It isn’t about the money, though.  On the other hand, in our culture, money means that someone, somehow, values my music in important ways.  Money is the reason I haven’t pursued my dream project–a symphony for orchestra.  Not that I require an enormous payment, but at this point in my career, I can’t write a piece that won’t have a prospect of a performance, and so my Great American Symphony waits for a commitment.

Onward, then, into another year of being a Real Composer.

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