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“Ring out the old . . .”

“It's the most Janus-like time of the year.”
“It’s the most Janus-like time of the year.”

It’s been a good year for composition. It hasn’t been such a good year for blogging, so it’s time to highlight the best of 2012 and the opportunities coming in 2013. I’ll start in this post with 2012.

Second Performances

My biggest milestone this year was finally having pieces enter performers’ regular repertoire. I wrote “Icarus and Daedalus” in February for Arianna Tieghi, who since performed it twice this summer.

“night flocks of angels trumpet” was an excerpt from A Field Guide to Natural History that I arranged for violinist Katie Jensen, who performed it earlier this month. It’s my favorite movement from an otherwise long, difficult, and unusual quartet (read “unlikely to be performed”). Field Guide was performed twice in 2011 in its original form, and now with this arrangement for violin and piano, I hope the music will have a continued life. (Violinists, I will soon post an excerpt from the performance. Seriously. Check it out: it’s really pretty.)

Finally, “fangled contraption” continues to be my surprise hit. It was performed only once in 2012 but already has 5 performances scheduled for 2013 by the AWEA Duo, at which point it will have been performed 10 times. Sure, the New York Times won’t be picking up the story any time soon, but it’s sure cool (and reassuring) to see my music starting to have a life among performers.

Master of Music

In other significant news, in April I finished my MM in Composition at Brigham Young University. Seven years of study later, my time as a BYU student is finally over. Studying at BYU gave me exceptional performance and teaching opportunities and honed both my musical perceptions and my ability to articulate them. Perhaps in another post, I’ll give more highlights.

Since then I haven’t really gone anywhere. I still work for the College of Fine Arts and Communications as an editor. But being on campus doesn’t feel the same when you’re staff. Considering the lack of finals (or any assignments), great checkout priveldges at the library, employee discounts at the Bookstore, etc., it’s better.

highSCORE Festival

Over the summer, I attended the highSCORE Festival in Italy, where I made some good friends, heard their great music, and got to have a new string quartet performed. I also got to have some inspiring lessons from Amy Beth Kirsten and Dmitri Tymoczko.

Collaborations with Neil Thornock

Some of the most fun I had this year was in collaborating with Neil Thornock. Dr. Thornock was my composition teacher for part of my undergrad and much of my grad work. He’s also a great organist and carillonneur. In January, he commissioned me to write “Marginalia” for organ, which was premiered on a Salty Cricket concert in March. Later in the summer, I wrote “Under an Orange Sky,” which we recorded in November.

All in all, 2012 was a good year for me. I was able to work with some great performers, expand my network, and grow as a composer. Stay tuned for what’s coming in 2013.

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.

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.

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