Posts Tagged ‘Five Rhythmic Etudes’

Symphony: The First Rehearsal

Tuesday, August 26th, 2025

An old piece of advice given to composers is to not attend the first rehearsal of your piece. I think I first heard this in graduate school, when I had written Five Rhythmic Etudes for The Ohio State University Symphony Orchestra, and Dr. Marshall Haddock was fairly clear that coming to the first rehearsal–as I gladly would have–would be a bad idea.

The performers and conductor just need a chance to figure out the big questions, to answer those questions in their own way, and to, honestly, make a mess. Composers can be insecure, and might panic at the sound of musicians–even good ones–sight-reading their way through the music that the composer has labored over, seemingly ignoring the details painstakingly put into the score one at a time, but also at the same time missing the very obvious big picture.

So, I suppose one drawback of writing a symphony for the orchestra that you conduct is that you must, of course, be present at the first rehearsal.

For my Symphony in G, “Doxology,” that was yesterday evening. Over the summer months, as it got closer, I became anxious about putting this music before a group–the Lakeland Civic Orchestra–that has grown to be my most cherished musical collaboration over the last thirteen years. We have come a long way, and had some great moments, and they have been patient with me as I’ve grown as a conductor and musician, forgiving my missteps and tolerating my preferences and foibles. I, in return, have tried to give them the experience they are looking for: meaningful music, played as well as we can, with opportunities for growth, and for community.

Putting this work in front of them was an exercise in mutual trust: I trust the orchestra to do their best with what I’m offering, and the orchestra trusts to put them in a situation in which they can be proud of the result.

It was the first rehearsal of the semester, so we began with a fair amount of housekeeping and preliminaries: announcements, passing out music, collecting information. It was like any other first rehearsal of the term. By 7:50, it was time to make music, and we turned to the first movement.

I had long thought about how to start this rehearsal. For better or worse, I decided that the orchestra should hear it as our audience will hear it: from start to finish, and so we began at the beginning. With a word to the violins about performing their natural harmonics, we dove in. We had a few absences last night, but a satisfying chunk of the orchestra was present, and reading overall went very well.

I think the first movement is far and away the most challenging–we took the faster sections under tempo, and it will take some work, but the music was, to my ear, mostly recognizable, and for large stretches, we stayed together. It still took about 25 minutes to get through the movement (about double the calculated time), after some starting and stopping, but I’m confident that it will arrive if not at my marked tempi, at least close. I will admit to being one of the weak links: the changing meter at this speed is going to be something that I need practice with before I can truly lead it with confidence.

We continued through the next three movements, with the members of the orchestra surprising me with their persistence, diligence, and willingness to go forward: again, this is trust between us, and it is working. Whatever concerns I might have had about a disastrous first rehearsal proved unfounded: we moved slowly, and at times haltingly, but no more than with any other reading session. I tried not to get bogged down in explanations, although the aleatoric section in the second movement took some time, but with positive results. All told, it was a successful and satisfying hour spent getting a first overview of the piece: I didn’t stop to rehearse or correct; only when necessary to regroup. I have my marching orders for the next few weeks of rehearsals, skipping next Monday for Labor Day.

My overwhelming emotion about last night is gratitude. I’ve asked 50 people to volunteer to follow my compositional whims, and they’ve accepted, so far. I’m grateful that God has put my life in such a way to make the Lakeland Civic Orchestra a part of it, and that the members of the orchestra share my vision for what a community orchestra can be. It has made my job at Lakeland a job that I can’t imagine leaving willingly, no matter how many sections of Popular Music I have to teach online.

After we played the piece, I waxed poetic about how I felt about the group: I think I truly would rather have them premiere this piece than a professional orchestra made of strangers. A performance by the Cleveland Orchestra or the Cincinnati Symphony might be good for my reputation in the wider world, but it would in many ways ring hollow: strangers would be paid to play just another work, with rehearsals governed as much by the clock. The result might be closer to perfection than what we will attain at Lakeland this fall, but it wouldn’t be nearly as personal, nearly as meaningful.

And it was a relief: this piece I have worked at for six years was not an exercise in futility. It’s a piece we can play, and there isn’t any reason to rethink the program for November 9–which is fortunate, because the news is starting to be out there. Last week in the State of the College talk, Lakeland’s president Dr. Sunil Ahuja, who has been supportive of the Civic Music Program, mentioned both the program and the fact that I was writing a piece. People are talking, at least in my little world.

Last night, one musician asked if anyone had played my symphony before, and, since we had just finished our reading, I responded, “you have.” With that, I have not only written a symphony, it has been performed, and for perhaps its most important audience, the people who I wrote it for, the Lakeland Civic Orchestra.

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I am a symphonist

Tuesday, July 8th, 2025

In 2019, I decided to write a symphony. I have written that symphony.

Over the next few months until the premiere, I want to blog about it, so here’s the first of a series of posts.

This was something I’d been thinking about for a long time, since the 1990s when I first started to figure out what a symphony was beyond a name that some classical pieces had. I considered naming the orchestra piece that I wrote at the conclusion of my doctorate “symphony,” but in 2006, I didn’t feel like those sketches were getting much of anywhere. I’m embarrassed to say that even as a doctoral student, my approach was usually to just sit down at the computer, open Sibelius, and start at the beginning, assuming that the ending would take care of itself. I knew that there was more to the writing process from my time writing for English classes, and I had a sense that there was a certain amount of pre-writing that could be done, but it didn’t seem like pre-writing was something I could have brought to a weekly composition lesson: I needed drafts, and so pre-writing tended to be something that happened in my head, not something worked out on paper or the computer screen. I could have learned from my study of computer music and synthesis about the importance of pre-writing: using MaxMSP or some other tool to build a virtual instrument and the workspace to use it in are certainly a form of pre-writing. I did produce an orchestral piece in 2006, Five Rhythmic Etudes, but those five pieces are distinctly not a symphony, and they are studies more than they are fully fledged movements. I stand by them: they work well enough and have a certain appeal: they just aren’t a symphony.

And so I began in 2019 with a clear idea, and a timeline. I wanted this to be a 45th birthday present to myself, and I knew that I worked best with a deadline, so I decided to commission myself with a formal agreement. In the spot describing the work, I wrote:

a symphony for full orchestra in four movements of 30-40 minutes’ duration based on the Doxology (“Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow”)

Commissioning Agreement, May 29, 2019

This idea had been bouncing around my head for at least a couple of years at this point. We had attended Shoregate United Methodist Church, and on most Sundays, after the offering was collected, we would sing #96 in the United Methodist Hymnal, a song I had known all the way back to my childhood. The idea was one movement for each line of the four-line hymn, resulting in the classic plan of the symphony, with the hymn and the ideas behind it serving as a unifying element.

The timeline called for a performance in November 2021, and by the end of 2019, I had planned, sketched, and mostly drafted the first two movements. I felt well on track to complete the work, even if things were moving a little more slowly than I wanted them to. I had moved quickly through the first movement, and got to something I liked, if it wasn’t perfect. I celebrated my “golden spike moment” in a blog post in October 2019. The second movement seemed trickier: I was trying out a very different language than the first movement, and I wasn’t quite as sure that where it was taking me was the right direction. Then I made the mistake of going back to look at the first movement again, and was immediately convinced that it was a disaster. I declared in a second blog post in November that I was “in a stall,” and I wasn’t sure how to proceed.

I probably don’t need to detail what was going on in the world in late 2019, but suffice to say we were starting to hear about a new respiratory virus in China, even as the Democrats were attempting their first impeachment of President Trump, which sucked up all the news about the threat to world health. In those days, I was still active on social media, especially Twitter, which was good in terms of maintaining connections, but not always in terms of those connections being healthy. I’ve written about this before as well. I stopped composing the symphony for the remainder of the year, which led to further breaks: I have a tendency to slow down in the winter months this way that I’ve documented on this blog many times over. The second movement was planned and sketched, but the full draft remained somewhat incomplete: connected to itself at times by tenuous single threads, and yet I let it be, planning to return in the summer.

But as 2020 became the COVID year, I found myself teaching completely online, including my private trombone students, and with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra on indefinite hiatus. Without an orchestra, it made little sense to work on a symphony, and I was already spending far too much time at the computer just to complete my teaching work. I was also helping Melia and Noah adjust to virtual schooling and supporting Becky in her work, since she was brought back to her job in retail as soon as it was deemed possible. We were lucky in our COVID experience: we didn’t get sick, and no one close to us died. Our livelihoods were never seriously in question, and lockdown and the summer after were honestly wonderful family times in many ways.

When Fall 2020 rolled around, there were decisions to be made about how the ensembles at Lakeland would function. Full in-person rehearsals were deemed impossible and unsafe, and the result was two virtual concerts–one each semester of 2020-2021. Better than nothing, but not ideal, and certainly not the place for a 40-minute symphony. Between the two concerts, there were about 30 minutes of orchestra music, with each person recording their parts independently, and then stitched together Zoom-style.

I stopped composing completely at first, and then in Summer 2020 began to write a few things, but not the symphony. I didn’t know what to do with it, and resolved to come back to it, even though it meant reconfiguring the timeline and missing the deadline. I didn’t know if the Lakeland Civic Orchestra would ever return to what it had been in March 2020, or when we might meet in person again. That turned out to not be until Fall 2021, and over the next few years, we worked to get back to where we had been in 2020: it wasn’t always easy, but the hiatus really brought a renewed sense of purpose and community and an understanding of how precious our Monday night rehearsals are.

We also aren’t quite the same orchestra as we were in 2019. Musicians come and go all the time, but we had more than a few who ended up leaving permanently, some of whom were long-time stalwarts who had been with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra longer than me. One, tubist Ken Hughes, passed away as we were preparing to return to in-person performance, and there is more than one passage in the first two movements that I wrote with him in mind. We’ve found the successors we needed, but not their replacements.

In Fall 2024, we were back in full swing, and I think our 2024-2025 season saw us back to the place we could have been in Fall 2020: good-sized sections, relatively few ringers (which the dean likes), going after challenging repertoire. It also saw Lakeland in a difficult moment, with budget cuts, declining enrollment, and a new college president whose stated goal was to balance our budget and right-size the college. I wasn’t sure what this would mean for the music program, although we lost our Art Gallery and our Civic Theater program early on in the process. I decided that if I were going to write a symphony for the Lakeland Civic Orchestra it had better be sooner, not later.

I pulled out my old sketches to remind myself of how I had been proceeding. The kernel of the third movement had been in my mind for a while: I often remember Russel Mikkelson’s dictum that “composers are like poker players who like to show you their cards at the beginning of the hand,” and the third movement behaves that way: three notes, from the bassline of the third line of the hymn, repeated. As for the first two movements, I took Nico Muhly’s suggestion and made a one-page picture of the piece, lining up sections of the music with the structure provided by the hymn tune and its bassline, while also planning out a six-minute scherzo. By the end of September, there was a continuous sketch, and by the end of October, a draft for orchestra.

In some ways, it was going back to the way I composed in 2019: I had used Muhly’s one-page idea for the first time in Channels, the Pierrot-ensemble piece I wrote for Margaret Brouwer’s Blue Streak Ensemble, and having a sense of the ending when I was at the beginning, or even the freedom to begin in the middle has been very helpful. It seems utterly naive of me now to have thought it might work otherwise for a big piece.

Then, my usual winter-into-spring down time. I worked on a few small pieces and some arranging work, but also had a teaching schedule at Lakeland that didn’t have me in the classroom: a full slate on online classes, which hadn’t happened since COVID. I felt disconnected from the College and the things–bad for many of my coworkers–that were, usually of necessity, happening there. Unlike the lockdown, I was still on campus for office hours and the occasional meeting. As I type this, I haven’t been in a classroom since December 2024, and it feels strange and wrong. I am slated to be teaching in-person in Fall 2025, but I wonder if I will ever be back to being a mostly in-person teacher.

This symphony has been an act of discipline, but also an act of faith and an act of worship. I am almost certain that I have faced spiritual warfare types of challenges on the way: the fear of COVID that led me to put all my composing on pause in favor of extra sleep for my immune system; the uncertainty of whether there would be a good moment to program this piece; the doubts as to whether this piece would be too explicitly Christian for some members of the orchestra to bear; the self-doubt and hesitancy to bring it to completion. The last year has been no exception, and the route of attack was through my son, whose social and academic struggles led him to some desperate decisions, although thankfully not irreversible ones, that have had our family in a fair amount of turmoil and worry. I will perhaps detail these at a later time, but it took enormous resolve to come back for the fourth movement.

I worried about the Christian theme of this piece, intended as it is for an orchestra sponsored by a public institution. We have done plenty of music on Christian themes over the years, of course, and a certain amount of Jewish music as well, plus music inspired by pagan mythology. The Doxology is an invitation to praise and a hymn of praise, and is nearly as ecumenical as a Christian hymn can be: if you acknowledge God, you acknowledge that He is worthy of our praise. But the last line, “Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” marks it as specifically Christian.

There are, of course, versions of the hymn text that tone down its Trinitarianism, and they usually center on changes to the last line. I rejected these in the end, because it would be dishonest to pretend that it wasn’t the text we sang every Sunday at Shoregate that was the inspiration for this music. It would be bringing a lie into this call to praise and community that I was working on, and would only deepen the imperfection of what could only be an imperfect work from an imperfect composer. The text that stands is Thomas Ken’s 1674 lines:

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;

Praise him, all creatures here below;

Praise him above, ye heavenly host;

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

United Methodist Hymnal, #96.

I made my Muhly-diagram of the fourth movement in December 2024, but didn’t return to the music until April 2025 and completed the sketch on April 10. In that week, on April 8, there was one beautiful hour of creative flow. We had been attending Willoughby Bible Church since the new year, and Noah had an activity there. Normally, I bring a book or my phone, but I wanted to make some headway on my sketching. I let myself into the sanctuary and helped myself to the baby grand piano. The setting, the instrument, or just my preparation for the moment led me through a large chunk of the fourth movement, sketching development that I would eventually score in a flugelhorn solo with accompaniment. I was sure at that moment that I would finish the piece.

With four complete movements in hand, I returned to my drafts to turn them into full orchestra scores. My drafts had one staff for each type of instrument, plus notes on percussion, so it was a matter of adding staves–moving wood, as I like to think of it. There was still plenty of creative work: the matter of fleshing out the second movement, and making some decisions that I hoped would make the first movement more practical for the performers. I have long gotten out of the habit of writing notes only with no dynamics in the first draft, but there will still many decisions to be made in that department as well, along with decisions about bowings and other articulations. May was a busy month with online teaching as classes wrapped up, but by the end of the month, I had full scores for three movements, with the fourth following in June.

When to call it done? June 12, 2025 is plausible, and on that day, I exported MIDI files from Sibelius, converted them to mp3s in Audacity, burned them to a CD, and took the long way to pick my daughter up at daycamp while I listened to all thirty-six minutes in a row to make sure it was good.

But that still wasn’t the day: someone could take the score I completed at that moment and create materials for performance, but as I am not rich or famous, that someone needed to be me. I took another week to create staves for the individual parts, plus some staves that would make a more plausible MIDI playback than the way the parts would need to look in the first and second movements. The third week of June was editing the scores of the individual movements, and editing the parts lasted into July. I exported the final PDF file–Percussion 2–on July 4, 2025, just before Becky and I went to pick up Noah and Melia from a week at church camp.

I have written a symphony.

It took a little more than six years, although a lot of other things happened in between: a pandemic, a lockdown, an election, an insurrection, two wars, another election, my son’s middle school years, my daughter’s elementary school years, a change of careers for my wife, my forty-fourth through forty-ninth birthdays, my father’s dementia diagnosis, my brother becoming a citizen of another country, two Summer Olympic Games, many changes in my job, my concept of who I am, and my concept of what the world is. There is no static, single person that wrote this piece, and no single moment that it depicts, but I believe that it expresses values and ideas that are at the core of my being.

I have written a symphony. I didn’t know how to write a symphony until I wrote one, and if I had known just what it would take, and how long it would be until I could say it, I might not have started in the first place, but it was time then, and over the next few months, it will be time to let others hear it.

I have written a symphony: S.D.G.

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The Symphony: A Golden Spike Moment

Sunday, October 20th, 2019

In May 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, working from both ends simultaneously, with a golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah. This morning, I had my own Golden Spike Moment as I completed the first rough draft of the first movement of my first symphony.

I decided to write a symphony earlier this year, from an inspiration I had several years ago. The hymn “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,” which our church sings to the tune Old Hundredth nearly every Sunday as the Doxology, struck me one Sunday as an interesting possibility, and each Sunday, as we sang it again, I was pulled closer to it, thinking about what an extended meditation on that hymn might be like. While it isn’t perfectly ecumenical, it is a broad acknowledgement of a Creator God who loves us and wants us to be happy.

Earlier this year, I was in a difficult place creatively. My mid-winter depressive tendencies seemed to strike especially hard, and must difficultly, I had only one small project with a specific deadline (a piece that I was very happy with as it turned out). Despite a promising start to 2019 in terms of performances, nothing specific loomed on the horizon either, and creatively, I felt stuck, with no specific reason to continue. I even failed to complete another piece in time for the call for scores for which I envisioned it, which turned out to be a real missed opportunity. I was wondering if I had a future as a composer. This doldrum lasted well into the summer, and a fanfare commission which should have been done in a matter of weeks dragged on, actually interfering with the symphony project. Part of me was wondering if I had a future as a composer at all.

For several years, I have been telling myself that I would write a symphony for 2021, the year I turn 45: my last attempt was a false start when I was composing my doctoral graduation piece at age 30–that piece ended up being Five Rhythmic Etudes, and the tale is cautionary, because despite a strong premiere of the outer movements, I have never heard the complete piece. Would a full-scale symphony find a place on anyone’s program? As the director of the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, I knew that if I tailored the work to their strengths, we could perform it.

In May of this year, I cast the die: doubling down on my uncertainty, I wrote a commissioning agreement, as I usually do for my compositions, only this time, I commissioned myself, for a forty-minute symphony based on Old Hundredth to be delivered in time for a November 2021 performance. The goal seemed far enough away to be possible, and I didn’t tell anyone at first. If this is my final work as a composer, then I have accomplished most of what I hoped I would do when I started writing music: I have dreamed of composing a symphony for about 30 years now.

The next step was to take the large goal and set smaller ones:

Date Goal
September 1, 2019 Planning and Sketching Completed
November 1, 2019 1st Movement Short Score
January 1, 2020 2nd Movement Short Score
April 1, 2020 3rd Movement Short Score
July 1, 2020 4th Movement Short Score
September 1, 2020 1st Movement Orchestrated
November 1, 2020 2nd Movement Orchestrated
January 1, 2021 3rd Movement Orchestrated
March 1, 2021 4th Movement Orchestrated
June 1, 2021 Full Score Finalized
August 1, 2021 Parts to Orchestra
o/a November 7, 2021 Premiere Performance

This in hand, I relaxed, and here was a mistake. My depression continued into the summer, in part because a course I had planned to teach was cancelled for low enrollment, and I just wasn’t putting the time in. I was staying up late at night and sleeping through my early-morning composing sessions, finding it difficult to get back on track. A week turned into a month, and by August 15, I had nothing sketched. I also had a fanfare for the Lakeland Civic Band that was still undone. With the start of classes at Lakeland, however, I had an incentive to reset my sleep schedule, and I got back to work. By early September, the fanfare, Mysterious Marvels, was completed, and I turned my attention to the symphony.

I began with the chorale, thinking that each phrase could be expanded into one of the four movements of the standard form. I examined the harmonizations from several hymnals, and settled on the one in use in my current church, No. 95 in the United Methodist Hymnal. In mid-September, I made a few sketches, and then created this overall plan:

The one-page outline of the first movement of my symphony.

The one-page outline of the first movement of my symphony.

The date, September 19, is somewhat later than I had hoped, but I was on my way. On the back of this page, I wrote:

What makes music “symphonic?”

  • “combining of tones”–whole is greater than sum of parts
  • development–motivic, thematic
  • explanation of a musical thesis
  • timbral variety and contrast
  • block scoring
  • weight and depth of emotional impact
  • breadth of expression and variety of means of expression
  • public, community-oriented statement meant for a broad audience

What do I want from this symphony?

  • summation of my work thus far (but do I break new ground here?)
  • statement about who I am now
  • cohesive, unified design (Panufnik, Lutoslawski)
  • playable, enjoyable for musician and listener
  • praise to God: four movements based on Old Hundredth, but is that
    • structural
    • motivic
    • more explicit?
  • but also ecumenical–invitation to praise and community, but faith is private

I began sketching on paper–a technique I have started to rely on increasingly over the last couple of years, and with the sketches I had created ahead of the one-page outline, I began to develop a plan that expressed the outline. It was only a single line of music in places, but by the end of September, it was continuous music from beginning to end of the movement. I then began to put ideas into the computer–still using Sibelius 6–and flesh them out as I described my process: a short score, with one staff for every instrument. As it happened, I started scoring the end of the movement first, from “D1” in my outline, and when I reached the end, I went back to the beginning, and so today, I reached D1 again, and drove the Golden Spike with a staccato D for low strings, oboe, and bassoon. A gentle hammer blow, since gold is soft.

This project has invigorated me: I have my usual fall energy for it, and the music has flowed easily. My years of composing have led to a workflow that I feel I can rely on: I don’t wait on the muse for inspiration–I sit down and write when it is time, and it is now time. With a movement under my belt, I am confident that two years from now, we will be rehearsing for a premiere.

And so today, I listened to my entire draft of the first movement, about 11 minutes of music. I will tweak it a little, and then lay it aside while I compose the rest of the symphony. Last week, my wife asked if she could hear it, and I had to respond that it was not yet ready–when she wakes up, I’ll tell her that it is today, because I have driven the golden spike.

 

 

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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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Symphony on the Brain

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Every so often, I go through symphony envy…

I’m older than Beethoven was when he wrote his first symphony, but younger than Brahms by the time he finished his initial contribution to the genre, so maybe it’s just a part of the phase of life I’m in now–a desire to work on big, meaningful projects that really define who I am as a musician and a human being.

It might be that I’ve been running across symphony references–today is Phillip Glass’ birthday, and the American Composer’s Orchestra is giving the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in New York (I won’t be there… we have band rehearsal in Oklahoma).  Additionally, my facebook friend David Sartor, whose music I have been admiring of late, posted that he has begun working on a Symphony No. 1, despite not having a commission, because he feels like he needs to do that.  David is somewhat older and more established as a composer than I am, but I understand the desire to tackle this genre, whether the results are immediately wanted or not.  A respondent to David’s facebook post said that if he wrote his symphony for band instead of orchestra, he’d have plenty of opportunities for performance, which is probably true.  Last, I just finished reading Nicholas Tawa’s new book The Great American Symphony.  As I read about some pieces that I’ve loved for years and some that are unfamiliar to me, I came to realize what an American thing it actually is to write a symphony.

So, first, Phillip Glass.  I’ve come to the conclusion that the minimalist label might  be incorrect for Glass’s music–his textures are reminiscent of true minimalism, of course, but the structures of his music are not, even in pieces like Wichita Sutra Vortex.  Unlike Reich or Riley, they are meditative, but not entrancing.  A thought, and I will have to think more about it later.  Happy Birthday!  and congrats on your premiere tonight, Mr. Glass.

As a performer who has played orchestrally but whose main experience is in band, I wonder if my desire to write a symphony for orchestra, like David Sartor’s, is not a little bit misplaced, or in my case, even a form of betrayal.  I have spent my professional life promoting the idea that bands can, should and must play serious original music–like the symphonies for band by Hindemith, Persichetti and Gould–I even wrote my DMA document on a symphony for band (by Donald McGinnis), but I want my first symphony to be for orchestra.

When I wrote my biggest orchestra piece to date, Five Rhythmic Etudes, I had just turned thirty and initially started sketching a symphony–unlike many composers, I have only even made a halting attempt once!  The piece turned into something else, and I can see now that I wasn’t ready to write a symphony.  If a great college or military band came to me tomorrow with a commission for a symphony, I would probably accept it–all the while wishing the piece was for orchestra.  Am I being a traitor to the very movement that has allowed me to participate fully in serious music as a professional?  I’ve written some band music over the years–and some of my best pieces are for band–but I’m still not ready to completely admit that I am a “band composer.”  As many doors as that might open, it certainly seems to slam others shut.  Of course, writing a symphony could have precisely the same effect.

That said, I’m excited about my major project for the first part of the year, a suite for strings.  Alongside, I’m cohosting an SCI conference, so I’ll be professionally busy for quite a bit of the year, but 2013 is wide open–if any conductors or patrons are reading this, I’m want to write a symphony, and I won’t do it without a commission: I don’t write anything unless there is a firm promise of a performance.  Listen to my music and see what you think, and you know where to find me.

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Mahler–Symphony No. 3, 5th movement

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

After the premiere of my Five Rhythmic Etudes for orchestra in 2007, a person whose opinion I trust came up to me and told me that the first movement was a tiny masterpiece.  I don’t know whether the rest of the world would agree, but it certainly felt good to hear it.  This movement feels much the same.  One reason I’ve chosen to study Mahler’s symphonies is because of their sprawling, rambling scope, similar to novels by Tolstoy.  This movement, though, is focused and concentrated in the manner of a tiny masterpiece.

Mahler’s text is from the venerable Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and as I mentioned in my previous post on the fourth movement, it seems to balance Nietzsche’s text.  The resources are somewhat different–children’s and women’s choruses and an orchestra without violins.  The music is wholly different in mood.  Where the fourth movement is solemn and seems to suggest a deliberate mode of expression, this fifth movement is joyful and exuberant.  The folk poetry of Wunderhorn recieves an simple, folk-like setting, as though we should know this song already.

A first for Mahler (at least in the symphonies) is the use of voices as a timbral resource rather than as pure textual exposition.  Throughout, the words “bimm, bamm,” to be performed “as the sound of a bell,” work in this fashion, but at other moments, the the voices perform similar roles, most strikingly in the highest women’s voices in mm. 96-99, where a melisma on the word “Stadt” contributes to the overall texture.

To break up the folk-like, sing-song approach to the text, Mahler frequently avoids strict hypermeter, with many three-bar phrases, and often constructing four-bar phrases in a 3+1 kind of structure (as in mm.13-16 and 96-99).  Another common hypermetrical structure here is groups of four bars plus two bars.  These asymmetries seem to break up the piece, giving it the same sophistication as other of Mahler’s movements.

Beyond the wonderful use of treble voices, the orchestration is fantastic.  The absence of violins (Brahms did this before, of course) immediately shifts the emphasis to the winds, with wonderful effects.  The bassoons and contrabassoons are featured in a way that hasn’t happened earlier in the piece, and is quite refreshing–by this time, it is necessary to exploit the orchestral palette a little bit to help maintain interest.  Measures 65-83 are an essentially instrumental treatment (the voices are treated timbrally) of the material, and work in the kind of developmental way that vocal writing doesn’t always permit.  While the shape of the movement is relatively small, the scoring isn’t.

The placement of this movement within the symphony is important.  Does the five-movement second part balance the gigantic single-movement first part?  We seem to contrast unity with variety, relatively organic form with a more sectional group of forms–a minuet, a scherzo, a recitative and a chorus, followed by the sixth movement.  Mahler’s world is fully articulated, as rich and as full as the natural world, compunded by the depth and variety of the creative world.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 2, First Movement

Monday, September 14th, 2009

To the next piece, then.

In some ways, the Second feels much more like Mahler than the First–a focus more on motive than on theme, on counterpoint over homophony.  As well as Mahler seems to have opened up a world in the “Titan,” in “Resurrection,” we begin in that world, as though we have lived there all along.  Where the First grew slowly out of stillness, the Second begins on the dominant pitch as well, but begins with an agitated, urgent feeling–brought on by tremolo in the strings instead of harmonics.  Instead of the gently half-floating, half-falling fourths-based line in long notes, we here get an ascending, scale based line in short note values that propels us forward into the first movement.  We are in the thick of the piece before we realize it. 

This outburst in the low strings has something in common with much of the material of the movement–it acts like many a Bach fugal subject in that it outlines an octave which will later be filled by the voice in which it appears.   Again, as in Bach, the motive undergoes a type of fortspinnung, or spinning-out.  In general, a very different treatment than much of the material in the First symphony.

Beginning in bar 18, the woodwinds enter with another octave-filling melody, this also exposing the half-plus-dotted-quarter-plus-eighth rhythm that dominates much of the melodic material of the movement. 

At the first climax of the movement, bar 38-41, we see the third crucial motive of this movement, a contrapuntal device, if such can be a motive.  Two scales are placed in contrary motion.  To any student of tonal theory or 16th-century counterpoint, this compositional device may seem completely obvious–or simply correct writing–but compared to the language of the First Symphony, Mahler’s emphasis on scalar contrary motion is a defining characteristic.  The extensive use of pedal point in the earlier work is replaced here generally by a greater contrapuntal awareness and specifically by this device.

Rehearsal 3 has the music in B major, by direct modulation, with yet another octave-filling melody.  I have been pressuring myself to be more sparing–nay, frugal–with motivic and thematic material, where Mahler seems profligate in his introduction of new themes.  However, they are often at least partly related to each other, and, additionally, to craft a movement lasting nearly half an hour (in my Bernstein-NY Phil recording), much raw material is required. 

With the material exposed, at rehearsal 4, we have a return to the opening of the piece, but, curiously, without the very first C-B-C-D-Eb.  Rather, we hear the second “lick,” following which Mahler gets more quickly to business.  The end of a group of themes, then, now followed by a transition?  Or the repeat of an “exposition?”  A major question, since I am teaching Forms and Analysis this semester, is how well, if at all, Mahler conforms to the classical forms, sonata-allegro, in particular.  I have long felt that sonata-allegro form is but one way to achieve  the exposition-development-recapitulation plan of a musical composition; for the untrained listener, the satisfaction lies less in the return of the tonic than in the restatement of the beginning in some way; a melodic affirmation that the piece has come full circle.

At m. 97, the basses give an ostinato motive that bears striking resemblance to a similar moment in the First (the first movement).  While that melody had a rising contour, this one falls.  Mahler characterized this movement as being a funeral march for the hero of the “Titan,” and here is a very specific link between the two. 

A few measures earlier is the motive of the scales by contrary motion, appearing here in a transitional passage, but more often used in the run-up to a climactic moment.  The hero descends to the grave, and ascends to heaven simultaneously.  As Oscar Hammerstein wrote, “passions that thrill…are the passions that kill.”  Schopenauer, Wagner, Mahler, and fifty years later, Broadway.

Rehearsal 8, measure 129, gives a subsidiary motive, again filling an octave, but, rarely for this piece, from the top down instead of from the bottom up.   It feels a borrowing from Wagner’s Ring.  It creates a particularly Wagnerian moment later in the piece (before rehearsal 23, in a “recapitultion” or coda–I’m not sure which). 

The first (and only) time I heard this piece in concert, I was startled by Mahler’s use of doubled English horn and bass clarinet (m. 151ff), and have since stolen that scoring in my own piece for orchestra, Five Rhythmic Etudes.  What I did not remember is the return of the same material for trumpet and trombone, (mm. 262ff).  Again, one is struck by repetition.  A few years later, Schoenberg would attempt to banish repetition from his work, and we have been living to an extent under this stricture ever since (his one-act opera Erwartung contains almost no motivic repetition in more than forty-five minutes of music).  Is a large-scale work such as this dependent on repetition to be successful?  It is everywhere–on the beat level, the measure level, the phrase level and the sectional level, both exact and varied.

On a related matter, I’m fascinated by Mahler’s “preview technique.”  In the First Symphony, a large swath of the first movement reappears in the finale.  I’m fairly sure that the first movement is not previewing the last movement.  But in m. 270 of the present movement, the horns give a chorale melody that reappears nearly half an hour later in the finale.  It leads here to one of the very characteristic (in both rhythm and melody) themes of the first movement, where in the finale, it leads to the key melody of that movement.  This is not simply a compositional technique–mark that there is none of the craft here of a Bach contrapunctus–but rather a psychological device and a feeling of having been given a taste of things to come, a look into the ultimate direction of the piece, and since the subject of the first movement is death, and the subject of the last is, unabashedly, resurrection, we are here meant to understand that even in death there is life.

Measure 329 sees a final eruption of the opening material–more fully-scored, more determined than ever.  This leads to what feels like a recapitulation, and the major-key theme–first heard at rehearsal 3 in E major, now in A major (the key relation hearkens to sonata-allegro)–almost evaporates into the end of the movement.   Beginning in measure 384, Mahler introduces a shifting major-minor feeling that brings to mind the key motive of the Sixth Symphony–the instrumental piece most associated with death in Mahler’s catalog.  The piece could have ended with a whimper on a major note, but this rocking back and forth allows the funeral march to fade into the distance.  Are we left standing at the hero’s grave?  The music unravels amid reminders of the material it was made of, last tastes of the world we knew.

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