Year: 2011

Countdown to San Francisco: 5 days

Nine days and four rehearsals later, A Field Guide to Natural History is coming together. On Thursday, it was decided that I would conduct; on Friday, we cut out two more movements; yesterday, we had our first uninterrupted run through; and today, we began to work in earnest on expressive details. Tomorrow will be our last rehearsal in Provo.

The crew at rehearsal for Eric Hansen’s recital (left to right): Eric Hansen, Scott Holden, David Kjar, Ron Brough.

As I expected, the guys have done a great job pulling the piece together. I’m also excited for the other pieces on the program. Eric wrote a great one for himself, Dave, and Ron (on bass, clarinet, and marimba respectively), and Dave brought a cool jazz tune of his. All together, Eric’s put together a great recital.

Funny story about the rehearsals: I hadn’t conducted instrumentalists for years, so I was a bit nervous about the undertaking. Last night, I told this to a friend, who was surprised I wasn’t immediately confident at conducting my own piece. “After all,” she said, “you wrote it.”

Her logic reminded me of the time in sixth grade when I wrote this tie fighter video game in QBasic. The premise was simple: You’re a tie fighter at the top of the screen. You had to hit the x-wings and a-wings flying and shooting at you before they reached you. I installed it on a computer in my classroom, where, to my teacher’s dismay, it became quite popular. After a few weeks, people were surprised I didn’t have the high score: “After all, you wrote it.”

“But writing it doesn’t mean I’m good at it,” I protested.

Some things never change.

Countdown to San Francisco: 14 days

About a year ago, Eric Hansen and I talked about my writing him a chamber piece with the tentative title Book of Imaginary Beings. One year and a Barlow commission later, we held our first rehearsal of the piece—now titled A Field Guide to Natural History—in E251 of the Harris Fine Arts Center. The piece premieres two weeks from today at the 2011 convention of the International Society of Bassists in San Francisco.

Before I report on the awesome work Eric Hansen and the gang are up to, I thought I’d post some facts on the work itself and the compositional process.

By the numbers—

  • 4 composers with whom I had lessons about the piece: Julian Anderson, Mark Applebaum, Stephen Jones, and Neil Thornock
  • 4 parts, namely saxophone, bass, piano, and percussion
  • 8 months, the time I spent working on it
  • 9 “deleted scenes”—or rather, movements that didn’t make the final cut
  • 10 movements in its final version
  • 13 percussion instruments used, namely agogo bells, 2 bongos, glockenspiel, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, 3 tom-toms, triangle, vibraphone, and 2 wood blocks
  • 20 minutes, the approximate duration of the piece
  • 31 pages, the length of the score
  • 43, the number of alternate titles I tried
The cover image for the score comes from E.H. Aitken’s 1905 book, A Naturalist on the Prowl.

More Trivia—

  • The saxophone part was intended for Skyler Murray, who had asked me to write a piece for him after hearing my Clarinet Sonata. When Bill Gates nabbed Skyler for a summer internship, Dave Kjar jumped in to play the part instead.
  • The eight months it took to write Field Guide are the longest uninterrupted stretch of time I’ve spent on a single composition. Although my Clarinet Sonata took longer, I took breaks between writing its movements whereas I didn’t in writing Field Guide.
  • To date, this has been my most difficult piece for me to write. Part of the challenge stemmed from the ensemble. Although sax, bass, piano, and percussion lend themselves well to jazz writing, in a more classical context, these instruments are an unwieldy combination just to create a sense of ensemble unity. The combination also doesn’t do well with a linear musical narrative (e.g., Mozart), so instead I had to fill the twenty minute span with nearly fifty jump cuts between blocks of material (e.g., Stravinsky).

To be continued . . .

‘Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars’ Named Finalist in National Competition

I just got word that “Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars” was distinguished as a finalist in the 2011 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. Though it’s not an official award, being a finalist is no mean feat considering there were nearly 750 entries this year, so all in all, I’m pleased with the result.

In case you haven’t heard the piece yet, you can check it out here.

Twice in One Night

In case you haven’t been following my concert schedule (though that’s silly—of course you have!), the next six days will feature four performances of my music, including one night, Friday, when I have two performances. If you’re here in Utah, you have no excuse not to see one of these shows. They’re going to be great! So . . .

Tonight and Tomorrow (March 31 and April 1), BYU’s Contemporary Dance Theatre is putting on its “New Works New Voices” concert featuring choreography by Annie Garlick to my recent piano trio, “Gorre and Daphetid.” She’s created a powerful dance, “Reaching the Threshold,” that responds to the sadness of when one is helpless while loved ones suffer. The rest of the evening will be fabulous as well. Show starts at 7.30 pm at the BYU Richards Building Dance Studio Theatre. Tickets are $6; you can order them here. Also check out the article in the Daily Herald.

. . . But, as promised, there’s more!

Tomorrow and Tuesday (April 1 and April 5), Tara Hill and Mark Witmer will be premiering the first movement of my Clarinet Sonata. Tomorrow night’s performance is part of Tara’s senior recital. She’s assembled an exciting program that, in addition to my piece, features composers as far flung as Max Bruch, Elliott Carter, and Bela Kovacs. The concert starts at 9.30 pm in BYU’s Madsen Recital Hal, leaving you plenty of time to see “New Works New Voices” beforehand. Oh, and it’s free.

Finally, for those who will miss this weekend’s performances, as stated Tara Hill and Mark Witmer will be reprising their performance for the BYU Student Composers Recital on April 5. The concert starts at 7.30, is free, and will be followed by refreshments and witty banter.

I hope you all can make it to at least one of these concerts to see some really great music and dance!

Latest News: London, Reading Session, Premiere

I

The past few weeks have been an exciting time for me. At the end of February I took a trip out to London to check out music schools. While there I was fortunate to meet many wonderful professors at King’s College London, the Guildhall School, the Royal College of Music, and the Royal Academy of Music. Between the time I spent, the warm greetings I received, and what I heard of the music making at these schools, I got some very favorable impressions of all of them. Moral of the story: if they’ll have me, none of you readers of my blog (all three or four of you) need be surprised if I end up in London soon.

The Philharmonia in action
The Philharmonia in action

I also got to catch a concert of the Philharmonia perform Debussey’s La Mer and Ravel’s La Valse. Sitting in that concert, I realized that I’d never actually heard a world class orchestra perform before. The difference between them and what I have heard was phenomenal. (And to think it was just a routine, season concert.)

II

In other news, my piano trio “Gorre and Daphetid” was read and recorded by Curtis Macomber, Chris Finckel, and Stephen Gosling while I was away in London, and the recording was a wonderful “welcome home” present. I had written the piece in collaboration with my dancer friend, Anne Garlick, for a performance in April. Stay tuned for more news as the premiere of her choreography approaches! In the mean time, you can listen to the music and read more about it.

Update: I just found out the dates for the dance concert: Thursday, March 31 and Friday, April 1.

III

The premiere of my organ piece, “In and Through All Things,” is coming up at the end of March. If any of you happen to be in Moscow (Russia—not Idaho) then, I encourage you to go. Doug Bush is a fabulous organist, and I expect the premiere and the concert to be wonderful.

Returning to the Violin

So I’ve recently started work on a violin concerto for my friend Jared Starr. I grew up playing violin, and though I never progressed passed an intermediate level, writing a concerto for the instrument feels like a kind of homecoming to me. Here’s a video of David Oistrakh playing Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto, my favorite as a teenager. (For the record, other favorites of mine include those by Barber, Berg, Bolcom, Korngold, Ligeti, Mendelssohn, Rosza, and Williams.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFy5VsLOum0

Two Conflicting Views on Influence

A few months ago, I watched School of Rock for the first time. In the movie, Jack Black’s character explains to the school children, “The first thing you do when you start a band is talk about your influences. That’s how you figure out what kind of band you want to be.”

Pierre Boulez

Things aren’t as simple in the contemporary music world. In one corner, we have the ever pugnacious Pierre Boulez: “All kinds of references, for me are absolutely useless. If I want to be myself, I don’t need references. I want to be myself. Period.”

In the other corner, Alexander Goehr: “Early on I was influenced by something that Boulez said to me, which had an enormous effect on me in an exactly inverse way to what he intended. He was looking at a piece of mine, and he pointed out that at one point I’d reached a kind of dominant seventh, which, he said, created a false kind of tonal anticipation. Because of the wrong accidentals, I’d not realized this. . . . You come across such moments coincidentally, in the part-writing, and I’ve always regarded them as God’s gifts. If I hear a quote from the Ring, or Janáček, I don’t want to cut it out, as Boulez does: no, I want to keep it, and develop it.”

These divergent attitudes give a good overview of a persistent artistic question: Does being original mean doing things no one has done before? Or is the Preacher right that “there is no new thing under the sun,” thus making originality the way an artist makes old things new?

To me, the devotion of composers such as Pierre Boulez and Morton Feldman to stylistic purity strikes me as misplaced. Despite their claims to the contrary, I’m skeptical that non-referentiality is even possible. I think Harrison Birtwistle said it best, “After all, we all come from somewhere: we don’t invent it for ourselves; we don’t come from the moon.”

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