Blog | Joseph Sowa

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

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.

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.)

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.”

ImagePierreBoulez-CliveBarda-DGG2 — 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.”

A Few of My Favorite Things

When people ask, I often hem and haw about my favorite this or that. I have many movies, books, songs, and so on that I like, but I can rarely rank them.

It’s not a fruit, but of everything mentioned in this post, panettone is my most favorite.

This week, though, I found a clearly rank-able category: My four most favorite fruits are

Watermelon,
Grapes,
Clementines, and
Canned apricots,

with apples and pears receiving honorable mention.

To all those who have bemoaned my inability to pick favorites, there you have it.

P.S.—I also love panettone. It has fruit in it . . .

Patting Your Head . . .

Today I wrote music . . . while listening to other music. Though a first for me, this isn’t too unusual. One of my friends routinely writes music at concerts; my teacher admitted to writing one of his best pieces will at a friend’s recital; and I’ve even heard rumors that Luciano Berio wrote his Folk Songs while watching TV.

Gonzo and Fozzie demonstrate their skills at patting their heads and rubbing their stomachs in the dark room scene of The Great Muppet Caper.

Yet up until now, the idea of writing while listening to something else seemed weird to me, like simultaneously patting your head and rubbing your stomach. How could you write music and listen to different music at the same time? Writers certainly can’t do it. Imagine trying to write an essay while simultaneously reading Dickens. Though artists look at external objects all the time while they’re painting and drawing, they usually look at their subject, not, say, at a Jackson Pollack while painting a landscape. Why then does composition allow this unique multitasking?

I think it has something to do with the way our minds process music. Everyone is familiar with what it’s like to get songs stuck in their head. To non-musicians, it seems natural that composing an extension of this process. Composers simply listen to the music inside their heads and write it down. While many composers do say they write that way, if taking dictation from their earworms were all they were doing, it would seem to be as difficult for a composer to write music while listening to it as it would be for a writer to write while reading.

Instead, as I was composing today, I noticed that I was using multiple facilities. With one part of my brain and with my body I was processing the music I was listening to, and with another part of my brain, I was composing. The part that was composing wasn’t imagining sounds aurally but by feel. It was paying attention to what the harmonic and rhythmic relationships felt like rather than what they sounded like. After this experience, I happened to run into my aforementioned friend who confirmed that he experienced simultaneous listening and writing the same way.

What does this all mean? I’m not quite sure yet, only that composing is now more mysterious tonight than it was when I woke up this morning.

A Good Summer for Reading, part 2

29 August 2010
by Joseph Sowa

As promised, in this entry I’ll finish off the survey of books I’ve read this summer. I’ve had a few good ones sneak in toward the end, and I’m excited to tell you about them.

The very first book I read this summer was C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces. The book takes place in pre-Christian Europe and is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. A few months later, I picked up another book by Lewis, this time his classic The Great Divorce. As a Christian, I found the book to be a moving and insightful fictionalization of people’s reactions to grace. Though I enjoyed both, Till We Have Faces had a stronger impact on me and, of the two, has a more universal message.

Growing up, I had the complete Sherlock Holmes short stories, read them, loved them. Incidentally, from this memory, I decided the new movie didn’t look a thing like the books I loved, so I still haven’t seen it. I did, however, read a couple of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels this summer: first A Study in Scarlet then The Hound of the Baskervilles. Though it was fun learning where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson came from and how they met, I found the first book to be uneven. The second book, was fantastic. In it, Doyle tells the story of a crime eerie enough to be suspenseful, but not so much to be creepy. (I find the bizarre fascinating, but I can’t stand the viscerally creepy.)

Overall, I’d say that my favorites from the summer were Till We Have Faces, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Ender’s Game. Tomorrow, a new semester begins, and with it, I will sadly no longer have time to read three or four novels a month.

Pre-composition and Football

Whenever people find out I’m a composer, they first ask, “What kind of music do you write?” for which I have yet to come up with a good answer. “Instrumental” and “classical-ish” are my usual responses. The next comment they make is often “I could never write music.”

From what I can tell, many people are under the impression that music just “happens,” like falling in love Disney-style or catching a cold. Zapped by inspiration or transported by emotion, the composer pours out his soul over the keyboard, and soon a new piece of music is born. Not so. For all you who feel they could never write music, I hope to demystify the process somewhat. And to help you understand this, let’s talk about football.

Football play diagram — A football team would never dream of walking onto the field and hoping that winning plays would just “come to them.” (Image from directsnapfootball.com)

Next Saturday, BYU will kick off its football season against Washington in what will likely be an emotional rematch, after an excessive celebration call lost Washington the game two years ago. (I’m excited for this year’s game and season!) Now, no one expects that either team will show up on the field without any preparation, physical or strategic. Particularly with strategy, the last thing a football team would dream of doing would be walking onto the field and hoping that winning plays would just “come to them.” So, plays are created and drilled in advance. Their application in the game is flexible, but their existence allows both teams to better meet the demands they’ll face.

Likewise, when I begin a piece, I have dozens of options about how to organize the melodies in the piece—when to present which one, for how long, in what key, and so on. Awareness of all these options means I can’t just plop down at the piano and let the music mystically “flow through me.” Like a football team preparing for a game, I have to make many decisions in advance. Though my compositional “game plans” are often technical (and thus obtuse to most people), there’s nothing mystical about them. After establishing the piece’s rhetorical situation and my performers’ abilities, I identify the technical means suited the situation (the length of the piece, its textures, harmonies, etc.) and choose from among them.

Once made, these decisions—my pre-compositional game plan—give me the tools necessary to fill the needs of the music I write. If I become puzzled about a particular melody or harmony, my game plan will suggest ways to resolve the conundrum. Sometimes it works the other way, too, and melodies suggest ways of enriching the game plan. Again, this is like football. Having planned plays can answer the question of how to get out of tight spots, but observing what the other team is doing—for instance, always throwing to the left or something—can also suggest ways of enriching a team’s strategy.

The moral of the story is, if you understand how the creative process works in football, you understand pretty well by analogy how it works in music. Or at least how it works for me.

Bad Tie Day

My Dad’s in town this week, and it being summer, we wanted to go swimming. Only thing is, he didn’t bring a swim suit, so he, my siblings, and I all went shopping for one. Three stores later, he found a simple red one.

In the process of looking for said swim wear, my brothers and I got distracted by the tie sections in Ross and TJ Maxx. We all served missions, and after two years during which the tie you wear is your only outlet for expressing personality, you get a taste for ties. Naturally, then, we were curious about what was in fashion these days.

Were we ever surprised: the ties were hideous. And it wasn’t just a few. It was most of them. They were the kind of ties you’d dig up at a secondhand store—only these were new. While I could show you many examples of the awfulness, I thought I’d limit it to three runners up and the hands-down winner.

First runner-up (left): This beauty chalks its hideousness up to an awkward pattern and color. Instead of being a classy diagonal stripe tie, it tries to be multiple diagonal stripe ties—all in the same tie. To add to its gauche, the monochromatic shadings of purple and gray are more drab and nausea-inducing than they are subtle and refined.

Second runner-up (right): Speaking of nausea-inducing, this blue and pink fish-scale-esque tie is downright dizzy-ing. Which way is the pattern going? What exactly is the shape of those scales and what’s with the black dots at the end of them? Its attempt to replicate the fish-inspired aesthetics of Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao museum simply crashes and burns.

Third runners-up (left and right): Admittedly, ugly fish tie was hard to beat, but we found a challenger in this retro-styled Pierre Cardin. Of all the ties we found, this one screamed “thrift store escapee.” Here was a tie so plain ugly that in any Mormon mission it would have become a posterity tie.

. . . then we found its siblings. Apparently, having one “sweet spirit” of a tie in gold isn’t enough—it also needs to exist in pink and purple. It was as if Pierre Cardin took a cue from the ice climbers in Smash Brothers. And while this discovery seemed to be top off the day, nothing could have prepared us for what we would see next.

Grand prize: These days, the skinny black tie is coming back into fashion, and I can respect that. A good, skinny black tie projects “smooth” and “hip.” At first glance, the tie to the right fits the bill, yet on closer inspection, it has so many things going wrong.

While the photo to the left makes it look normal, when I first saw it, I was baffled. It looked like a cross between a belt, a table cloth, and a bicycle inner tube. The thing was made out of a single sheet of vinyl. It didn’t sit flat and felt slippery under your hands. It was, in a word, repulsive.

Now none of us were sure what caused this recent bout of senseless neck ware design. All we could conclude was that right now is not a good time to buy ties. Gentlemen—consider yourselves warned.

Book of Imaginary Beings

I received word just yesterday that my proposal to write a piece for Eric Hansen, Skyler Murray, and Scott Holden—all fabulous musicians—was accepted by the Barlow Endowment, who awarded me a grant to write a 15–20 minute piece for bass, saxophone, and piano. Seeing how the endowment has given grants to a couple dozen Pulitzer Prize winning composers, in addition to commissioning a Pulitzer Prize winning piece, this commission is kind of a big deal. It’s also my first. So between all these things, I’m pretty excited.

“So what,” you may ask, “are you thinking of doing in this new piece?”

Good question. Though I don’t yet have any specific musical ideas, I have already identified what expressive resources the instruments offer. (This is how I start every piece I write, by exploring what the instruments can do.) Though I’ve written before for sax and piano, I haven’t written anything for solo bass. In studying what it can do, I was surprised to discover that, as a solo instrument, it has a strong, articulate tenor range. If that sounds surprising, go listen to the Bach Cello Suites transcribed for solo bass, in which the instrument sounds like big, resonant cello. I’m eager to explore the possibilities here.

In addition to determining my expressive resources, I’ve also begun to get a sense for the piece’s shape and feel. It’ll be in five to seven short movements, each with a different character, though all meditating on change, loss, surprise, and imagination. And unlike my orchestra piece, this time I already have a title in mind: “Book of Imaginary Beings,” after the book by Borges (with which, apart from having the same title, it will have no relation).

So now, with a commission behind these preliminaries, I’m excited to get started!

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