Posts Tagged ‘Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’

Symphony: Not Influences?

Friday, October 24th, 2025

Rehearsal Update:

Monday was our third-to-last rehearsal, and things are going well. Over the last two weeks, I’ve chosen two movements to rehearse and two to run-through: I firmly believe that a once-a-week group like ours needs to play most of the notes at every rehearsal whenever possible. The first movement is by far the toughest, and for us would be a challenging piece if it weren’t followed by four more. I feel like the fourth movement has gotten short shrift: maybe it can get a little love in our last two rehearsals… but we also have other priorities to get ready for the concert, so time will be of the essence.

I also came to the realization that we will likely need to run if not the whole piece, large swathes of it in our warm-up rehearsal on the day of. This is a little daunting, as endurance for all of us is a concern. Hopefully those who need to can mark a little.

The Not Influences?

Looking over my two posts on the influences on my symphony, I noticed some prominent names and pieces left off. That’s not to say that these composers and works haven’t been important to me at some point in the past, or that they didn’t influence me subconsciously, but they didn’t come to mind when I made my list the first time.

Haydn and Mozart

I mean, sure, the symphony as a genre exists in large part because these two got ahold of it and began to write pieces (sometimes) that would transcend mere entertainment. But were they at the forefront of my mind during this process? No. That said, the first time I tried to analyze an entire symphony movement, it was the first movement of Mozart’s 40th (and it was mostly Roman numeral analysis, which probably missed the point entirely). Haydn is even less on my radar, although his 88th symphony has long been my go-to “listen to a whole symphony” in music appreciation class (although, to be fair, I haven’t done that activity in few years). This was less because I was inspired by the piece than because it was part of the textbook I was using two textbooks ago (I still haven’t found a music appreciation book that I’m completely satisfied with, which could be the subject of a different post).

It’s hard to find anything to argue about with the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, which I suppose is a good thing in some ways, but any message they hope to communicate doesn’t seem to come through. It may be the historical distance, which in turn is a philosophical distance.

Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies are absolute warhorses, and of course I’m familiar with them. Tchaikovsky’s Fourth was one of the first orchestral scores I ever studied beyond excerpts in orchestration books, back in high school when I was writing my first orchestral piece, the trombone concerto with string orchestra that was my senior thesis (interesting story that one). His Fifth was one of the first symphonies I got to play, during my year in the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra, and the Sixth… well, I have yet to dig into the Sixth. I also conducted Tchaikovsky’s Second with Lakeland back in 2017, although we ended up cutting the scherzo, because the piece was just too much to squeeze into the rehearsal time for one of our spring semester concerts–I learned from that experience and programmed my symphony in the fall, when we have only one on-campus concert and so more rehearsal to devote to it.

I certainly could have listed Tchaikovsky among my influences, most evident in parts of the last movement that may seem to borrow in approach from the last movement of the Fifth, but his work was simply not at the front of my mind as I worked. Where Copland’s Third was a “time to beat,” that simply wasn’t the case here.

Bruckner

My first encounter with Bruckner was in recordings from the public library as a high school student, particularly a sprawling performance of the Eighth Symphony that stretched across two CDs. I remember playing the finale before school one morning, and having those pounding rhythms following me around from class to class all day. In college, I had to prepare the Fourth for ensemble auditions one year, but other than transcriptions of the Adagio of the Seventh, I’ve never performed Bruckner’s music. I first heard his work live in a performance of the Seventh by the Cincinnati Symphony which also happened to be my brother’s first non-young-people’s orchestra concert. His response was, “It was awesome, but I had no idea it would be so long.” For a time in my mid-20s, I was most enamored with Bruckner’s Fifth, and in my early 30s made a transcription for concert band of his motet Locus Iste that worked musically, but had to abandon the composer’s dynamic plan.

Which about sums it up. Like Tchaikovsky, there is probably some un-spoken influence on my work, but no conscious imitation or inspiration. I didn’t imitate Bruckner’s scoring (soooo much tremolo strings!) or his grandiose architecture (the cliche of the cathedral should go here), but the spinning out of the melody in the first movement of my symphony has something Brucknerian about it.

Mahler

I admire Mahler; I appreciate him; I struggle to understand his work; but I am not a “Mahler nut.” I’ve spent time with his music, but only once as a performer: when I led the Lakeland Civic Orchestra in the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. As a trombonist, I wrestled with the solo from the Third Symphony, and studied the Fifth Symphony in preparation for auditions. The symphonies do not reward the casual sort of listening that I did as a beginning classical music fan: lots of listening to CDs while I did homework, or catching things on the radio in the car. Despite my best efforts, I have yet to hear the Eighth or Ninth in concert, but my checklist is otherwise complete, at least for the completed works. I also wrote a paper on the Tenth and its process of completion after the composer’s death that was, for me at least, enlightening about the process of writing pieces: Mahler’s short-score to full-score approach is essentially my own. Then, of course, in the early days of this blog, I worked my way through the nine completed symphonies, analyzing them for form and orchestration, and writing about them movement by movement. This was a follow-up to a similar project for Beethoven’s piano sonatas that I settled on as a project that would be a bridge between graduate school and whatever would come next: if I had ended up working at Starbucks, I would at least have a reason to keep my head in music.

But direct influence of Mahler on my work? Perhaps in the finale, when I bring in the flugelhorn, and certainly there has to be some connection between my sense of orchestration and Mahler’s. And then, the significance of the chorale–the basis for the entire piece, the masked versions of it that appear from time to time, and complete statement of it. In the second movement, there is the self-quotation that we find so often in Mahler as well. But again, my goal wasn’t the same as Mahler’s: he means the symphony to contain the world, and I don’t see that as a meaningful or even possible outcome. There is a statement in my piece, but it doesn’t wrap around all of existence.

Shostakovich

My first encounter with Shostakovich was, as is so often the case, with his Fifth, famously played ridiculously fast by Leonard Bernstein to fit onto an LP. Next came the Seventh, with its paralyzingly long march, and luckily, when I heard Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra for the first time, I got the joke. Then, in the summer before college, I got to know the First as I prepared for seating auditions. The Cincinnati Symphony played Shostakovich well and often when I was there–the Fifth, the Sixth, the Eighth–but he wasn’t a regular in Columbus when I lived there, and I’ve only heard the Eighth here in Cleveland. Has he perhaps fallen out of favor in this country?

That said, the influence of Shostakovich in my music is fairly clear even if I didn’t specifically have his work in mind as I wrote. But, there is a scale in his music that I don’t come to, and of course, like Mahler, I have much less of the tension of being an outsider or a dissident in my life and thus in my work. I want to make a statement, but I don’t intend to shock or to hide my intentions. To the extent that there is a hidden idea, it is more like Elgar’s Enigma: can the listener find the chorale that they know is supposed to be there (or, for the listener who doesn’t know the idea behind the work coming in, would it be evident and would the statement of the chorale seem inevitable)?

Maslanka

Other than conducting Rollo Takes a Walk many years ago as a band director, I have very little experience of the music of David Maslanka, something I mean to rectify. Maslanka was mostly a band composer, and mostly wrote pieces that require a strong college-level band or wind ensemble. I listened to the retirement concert of Dr. Mallory Thompson last year. I never worked closely with Dr. Thompson, but she spent a year at CCM when I was there, and I played in Michael Colgrass’ Winds of Nagual under her baton, which was a formative experience in important ways. Dr. Thompson had a strong connection with Maslanka’s music, and included the Fourth Symphony in her final concert as director of bands at Northwestern University. I enjoyed listening to the piece, and was then surprised to hear “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow” in a complete statement, right in the middle. I wasn’t stealing Maslanka’s idea–but I knew that I couldn’t possibly be the first person to incorporate “my hymn” into a larger instrumental piece. That said, I think it works pretty well.

Come to the concert on November 9, and see how you think my approach stands up.

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Posted in Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Composing, Mahler symphonies, Personal Reflections, Symphony in G, "Doxology", Uncategorized | No Comments »

The Symphony: Influences (1)

Saturday, September 13th, 2025

This post is one of a series explaining and exploring the process and documenting the premiere of my Symphony in G, “Doxology.” My influences have been many and wide-ranging, so there will be two posts about them.

No creative work springs ex nihilo from a human mind, and for thirty-odd years, since my days exploring classical music four CDs at a time from the public library, I have been thinking about the genre of the symphony, listening to its most famous examples (and some less-famous), talking about it with people interested and not, and pondering what my contribution to the genre might be.

To say that I, like Newton, have stood on the shoulders of giants is an understatement, and while this new work is in many ways the finest I have been able to make in the times and circumstances I have lived, there are also many works that it fails to compare to. I don’t know that I can say that this is a work, or that I am a composer, that pushes the art form forward: it pushes my art forward in important ways, but I don’t expect to be included in future music appreciation courses.

Nonetheless, the symphonist must decide just what a symphony is, and what it means to write one. My solution is certainly not the only answer, or necessarily a correct answer in everyone’s eyes. It is, of course, shaped by my decades of listening, analysis, and conducting, and often by the music that I considered during the six years my symphony was a work-in-progress.

What follows, then, is a shortlist of symphonies–and symphonists–that were in my mind before and during those years. The creative DNA of my symphony can be found in these works.

Brahms

The four symphonies of Johannes Brahms loom large over any latter-day symphonist, or should. In the early days of this blog, I spent eighteen months working through Mahler’s nine numbered symphonies, and while I learned a great deal from the experience, Brahms’ works have been and remain more foundational. As sprawling and wonderful as Mahler’s works are, they aren’t on this list of significant influences, and I will have to think more about why that is: I suspect it is because of their deeply personal language that demands public expression of what for me is a more private experience.

Brahms’ First Symphony was one of the first symphonies that I played, with Peter Wilson and the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra. The trombone part is crucial, but limited to the final movement, but even so, I relished exploring this work–when we began it, I hadn’t even realized that Brahms wrote symphonies, only that he was The Lullaby Guy. I’ve always felt a kinship with Brahms’ process of this piece, which gestated over a long time–decades–as the composer worried about how he would stack up to what came before.

In preparation for that youth orchestra audition, I purchased a CD reissue of George Szell’s 1966 recording of Brahms’ First with the Cleveland Orchestra. I first heard it live in 1993 in Youth Orchestra rehearsal and the same year as an audience member at a concert of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra: I remember Alessandro Sicilliani’s shockingly fast opening tempo in the first movement, which was unconventional, but I rather liked it.

Later, Brahms’ Second Symphony was the audition repertoire for my first year of college, and I discovered its finale, one of my favorite symphonic movements. The Third and Fourth are just as wonderful in their own ways, as well. I often tell my music appreciation students to take a rainy afternoon and listen to all four Brahms symphonies and know that they will have spent their time wisely.

Beethoven

Like Brahms, I too have had to consider the legacy of Beethoven as I have considered the symphony. As a trombonist, I’m sidelined from six of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, but as a conductor, I have been able to lead the Lakeland Civic Orchestra in four of them: the Fifth, Eighth, First, and Second. I’m not completely sure which of the bunch I heard first in performance–I think it was probably the Fourth and the Seventh with the Dresden Staatskapelle, on tour in Columbus under Giuseppe Sinopoli in 1993 or 1994. By that point, I had become obsessed with Toscanini’s renderings of the cycle with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, which to this day are my go-to recordings, in the rerelease by RCA Victor on CD. I remember a few weeks in the winter of my first year of college when I would slip up to my dorm room after lunch for a daily dose of Beethoven. I would put one of those five CDs in my player and hear a movement or so.

My symphony, of course, takes the four-movement plan that Beethoven (mostly) followed. He didn’t invent that plan, but the influence of his works makes anything else seem a little bit suspect (although the symphony-in-one-movement has enormous appeal for me as well). Like Brahms, the centrality of motivic development–and the ability to leave that technique aside at times–is important in my work. I often turn to George Grove’s book on Beethoven’s symphonies, and I remember my first reading of it realizing that Beethoven’s obsession with fugato technique was perhaps not to my liking: I once used it quite a bit in my work, but it came to seem obvious.

And then there’s that First Symphony, the harbinger of great things to come. Grove points out that, while it is good enough, if it were from the pen of a composer who didn’t go on to bigger and better things, it would be completely forgotten. We only know it because it’s by Beethoven. But in 2006, when I was thirty, I made one of my more serious abortive attempts at writing a symphony because that’s how old Beethoven was when he wrote his first–I figured it might be time, but, of course, it wasn’t.

Aaron Copland: Symphony No. 3

On the day I finished creating the instrumental parts for my symphony, July 4, 2025, Becky and I got in the car to pick up Noah and Melia from church camp. The local classical radio station, WCLV, was playing American music as befit the day, and the second movement of Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony came on. I said to Becky that this was music that I had considered a “mark to beat” as I composed, and if any one composition deserves that distinction, it is this. My professional bio for a long time said that I wanted to compose the Great American Symphony, but with his Third, Copland beat me to it by seventy-five years. The recording you’ll find in my collection is on a 1996 Chandos disc featuring Neeme Jarvi leading the Detroit Symphony Orchestra–an ensemble that looms large in my understanding of the symphony. I first heard the piece live in a 2013 performance by Marin Alsop with the Cleveland Orchestra. Copland’s Third is broad, accessible, and unapologetic. It articulates and sums up, to me, much of what audiences have come to love about its composer’s music: lyricism, thrilling scoring, rhythmic vitality. I admire the work’s honesty and its direct appeal. As I wrote a piece about faith, based on a call to praise that is also a statement of faith, Copland’s Third stood as a model for the kind of community truth-telling and celebration that the Doxology also represents. The Fanfare for the Common Man, the basis for the fourth movement of Copland’s piece, appears in a guise and fashion that in some ways supersedes the original–although that piece has been a personal touchstone longer than I have been interested in the form of the symphony as well. My own quotation of Old Hundredth in the fourth movement of my symphony, while different in execution, is inspired by Copland’s self-quotation.

Andrzej Panufnik: Sinfonia Votiva (Symphony No. 8)

Back when I was an avid purchaser of CDs through the mail via the BMG Record Club, a recording of Roger Sessions’ Concerto for Orchestra caught my eye, and on the same disc was this symphony by a Polish composer I had never heard of. I can’t say that I was particularly struck by the music or that it became something I listened to regularly, or that I was inspired to listen to the rest of Panufnik’s oeuvre. But something that did stick with me was the diagram plotting out the entire structure of the 22-minute work, included in the liner notes (and pictured in the video linked above). I was a graduate student in composition at the time, and I was struggling with how to develop larger forms. As tempting as it was to sit down at the computer and begin putting notes in to the score, I was coming to see that, as with writing words, pre-writing is an essential part of composition. Fifteen and twenty years later, I would develop my own diagrams for my Symphony in G, and take a single page–in this case, an existing hymn–as my overarching structure.

The result is, I think, as with Panufnik, a work that balances expression with structure, which is something that I find particularly symphonic. While some composers aspire to formal or structural freedom, and many listeners claim to relish it, the truth is that the vast majority of successful works are built around relatively simple approaches and structures. I’ve referred elsewhere in this blog to my favor for Nico Muhly’s “one-page sketch” for a work, and now I realize that Panufnik’s work led me to this idea several years earlier than Muhly’s music even appeared on my radar (I completed graduate school around the time Muhly started to develop an international reputation).

I’m also intrigued that the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned this work for its centennial in 1982. I’ve always had an interest in these big anniversary celebrations, both because I was born in the midst of one (the United States Bicentennial) and, musically, because I attended the premieres of many of the fanfares written for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for their centennial in 1994-1995. I love the idea of marking these milestones, especially with music. I wrote my own piece, The Lovely Soul of Lakeland, for the Lakeland Civic Orchestra to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of our sponsoring institution, Lakeland Community College in 2017, and I can only hope that I will be around for the 100th birthday of the Lakeland Civic Orchestra in the late 2030s.

Alan Hovhaness: Symphony No. 2, Op. 132, “Mysterious Mountain”

I first encountered the music of Alan Hovhaness driving myself home from high school one afternoon, when WOSU (89.7FM) would usually play a symphonic work during the 3pm hour. The choice that day was Hovhaness’ Symphony No. 50, “Mt. St. Helens,” and as I drove, the still, quiet second movement, describing Spirit Lake before the eruption gave way to the final movement, “Volcano,” with its two sharp bass drum strokes exploding into chaos. I was fascinated by the topic of this symphony: although I was young, I was fascinated by the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens that inspired Hovhaness when it happened, which led to my parents subscribing to National Geographic, whose 1981 issue with the volcano on the cover I thoroughly wore out. This was the 1993 recording by Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony.

I explored Hovhaness and his music more deeply through the 1990s and into the 2000s. In college, I studied his Symphony No. 4, written for winds, and looked into his other band music while also keeping an eye out for those elusive recordings–there are many released originally on LP that hadn’t been re-released on CD, and many works that have never been recorded at all from this prolific composer. When I was a high school band director, I programmed The Prayer of St. Gregory the year Hovhaness died, 2000. My first suite for string orchestra was an homage to three composers whose music was an inspiration to me in my early years: in between movements celebrating Philip Glass and Jean Sibelius is a Meditation in Memoriam Maestro Hovhaness. I haven’t had a chance to return to his music as a conductor, but if I did, it would likely be his Symphony No. 2.

I first heard “Mysterious Mountain” in the 1990s, on a concert with the Cincinnati Symphony. It didn’t make the same immediate impression that “Mt. St. Helens” made–it’s just a different kind of piece, and really, more in line with the composer’s personality. On repeated listening, my esteem for the work grew, and I now think it one of the finest American symphonies. I admire its sincerity, its craft, and its succinctness.

There is the first group of my symphonic influences. Look for a second post shortly, along with more updates on the rehearsal process in the run-up to the premiere of my Symphony in G, “Doxology” with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra on Sunday, November 9 at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio. Information and tickets here.

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Back with Beowulf

Sunday, October 9th, 2022

A few weeks back, I had an exchange with my Lakeland colleague Natalie Hopper after reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf over the summer. I immediately thought, “hey, this would make a good blog post,” after not posting anything since March. So I jumped over to the old website, and quickly discovered that there was A Problem, and I was unable to log in. Fast forward eight crazy weeks of teaching and parenting, and I was able to get things worked out with my hosting service, so now I give you my take on Beowulf, translation, transcription, and arranging.

In music, we have something similar to translation, namely arranging or transcribing music originally for one ensemble to be playable by a different ensemble, say, taking a piece written for organ and turning into something for concert band. It’s been done throughout the ages, by just about everyone: Bach reworked his own music, along with music by people like Vivaldi, into new combinations, and Beethoven actually paid a good number of his bills during the economic inflation of the Napoleonic Wars with arrangements of all sorts of folksongs. If you’re learning to orchestrate, making arrangements and transcriptions is a time-honored way of doing it. Some of the first orchestra music I ever had performed was an assignment for an undergraduate class to arrange a Bach keyboard fugue for the students we had available in the class.

I actually came to composition through arranging and transcribing other people’s music, mostly for the students I was teaching when I was a K-12 teacher… the list of composers I’ve arranged is long and distinguished, and includes the Gypsy Kings, K.C. and JoJo, the Beatles, Bach (of course), the Moody Blues, Dave Brubeck, Debussy, Schubert. I lived in Macon, Georgia for a while, and I knew the personnel manager with the Macon Symphony Orchestra, which led to doing some arranging for them, including a whole evening of Otis Redding songs for rock band and orchestra, with Otis Redding’s grandson as the vocalist. That one paid for Becky’s and my honeymoon. By that point, I had also started composing: it isn’t a big stretch from having to come up with an intro, an outro, or a transition, to writing a piece “based on” an existing tune, to just writing a whole new “freely composed” piece. 

I completely get Heaney’s moment of discovering one little nugget and then working out the rest: that’s pretty much my experience much of the time. “Oh, this line would be great for clarinet,” or “I can hear this combination here in the accompaniment.” Then, there’s a certain about of just workmanship that happens, what my dad’s woodcarving teacher used to call “moving wood.” Inevitably, there are the places where things don’t quite line up, and you have to get clever and creative. Music notation software makes the process so much more bearable… I don’t think I would be a composer if I had to do everything by hand.

I guess another equivalent in writing would be rehashing old stories. I took a creative writing course in college, and the prof had us take one of the stories we admired from our anthology and type a few pages into the computer just to see how it looked… many of my classmates realized that their writing was far too small compared to that year’s Best American Short Stories (especially the frat boy who wrote a four-page ripoff of Reservoir Dogs). He also had us attempt a style copy: mine was Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” We were on quarters, so all this, plus writing our stories, plus critiquing our classmates’ work fit into 10 weeks!

I had a big arranging moment this summer: The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performed my arrangement of Florence Price’s Adoration, which was originally for organ. This is the composer equivalent to starting for the Guardians (having an original work performed by them would be like starting for the Yankees or Red Sox). At any rate, it’s The Show. A conductor I’ve worked with (as arranger and composer) hired me to create two versions of the piece during the lockdown: one for ten musicians, and another for small orchestra. Then, he was named the Cincinnati Symphony’s diversity fellow, and he called me up for a third, new arrangement, “worthy of the Cincinnati Symphony.” I was able to write for a larger orchestra (really, I could have gone as big as I wanted, but I fit my requirements to the other music on the concert) and also write with a full-time professional group in mind. It was actually quite a lot of pressure to make sure absolutely everything was right—there’s no time to figure out how to fix something that isn’t working, because rehearsal on this relatively simple piece consisted of a couple of run-throughs in the two days before the concert: that’s all they needed, and their time is collectively worth about $1000 a minute. This is an extremely savvy group who has played everything​ worth playing, along with tons of arrangements for pops concerts: they would know immediately if I had screwed up or if I was worth their time, and not just by the sound, but by the look of the printed parts I was providing. So that’s how I spent my Spring Break last year.

In June, the kids and I drove down to Cincinnati to hear the thing: because of copyright laws and union rules, I wouldn’t be getting a copy of the recording (this annoys the crap out of composers, but it’s for everyone’s own good). So we had to be there, and they did comp our tickets. This wasn’t a subscription concert—it was at a great big megachurch in the suburbs as part of the orchestra’s community outreach program. The results of my work and the CSO’s playing were splendid: all the effects I had hoped for were there, and they all made sense, and I think I did justice to the composer’s intentions (Florence Price’s story is heartbreaking, as shouldn’t be a surprise for an African-American woman who died in the 1950s). My kids were amazed, and they proceeded to tell everyone around us that I was behind that music. Overall a good weekend. Since then, I’ve sold that sheet music three times, which is selling like hotcakes for me, to orchestras in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Mankato, Minnesota—another conductor has picked up the piece and programmed it this fall, and I hope Antoine finds space to use it again.

I went to college at the University of Cincinnati, and my trombone teacher was the principal trombonist for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (he’s long-retired now). I’ve probably heard that orchestra in concert more times than any other, so their sound and their approach is basically what I hear when I compose or play trombone. It awes me to think that something I arranged is now in their library, waiting for the next time they need it. I haven’t seen my royalty statement for it yet, but I think it will probably be a chunk…

So, I guess I’m back now.

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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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