composer's notebook
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Thursday, April 28, 2005
Old Home, Pt. 1
The weirdness level on this one is off the charts ... How about this for going back to your roots:
I'll be guest conducting the band at my alma mater, Wyoming Valley West High School, in Plymouth PA. Thaaat's right. On Friday I'll be workshopping with the students, visiting with old friends and faculty, and rehearsing Moon by Night for Sunday afternoon's concert. It gets better, though ... the band is now under the direction of Andy Kolojejchick, an old chum from my days at WVW (the star saxophonist at the time), so whoever said you can't go home again was certainly not talking about my activities this weekend.
Leaving aside the odd sensation that even before I go, I can picture that band room (I must prepare myself for it looking smaller), my anticipation of the experience is, so far, eerily similar to that age-old adolescent nightmare we all know so well... (I was naked! In front of the whole school!)
You would think that to make the experience complete all I would have to do is don my old uniform and pick up the trombone, but in fact, I think all that will be necessary would be for me to lose all confidence in myself, develop searing and awkward crushes on inappropriate girls, and just generally act sullen and annoyingly smug. Only then will the magical transportation back to 1987 be complete...
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Pulp Non-fiction
As one of the last 3 remaining (and unapologetically pretentious) non-online-version readers of the physicalized newpaper, complete with oils and ink, my complaints likely bear little weight. In the past I've been supportive (up to a point) about recent section re-designs, but fooling with my Circuits section—People, the Troublemaker Estate has gone too far. Geeks who still read the paper on paper unite! What used to be a luscious Thursday section, complete with wonky articles on fun techie gizmos and website reviews, is now relegated to a miniscule 3 pages in the middle of the Thursday Business Section. Up to just a couple of weeks ago, Thursdays were a real treat—it was Circuits day, and I would buy the paper (get out the green, an actual full dollar is required these days), and like the Funnies Ritual of my youth, force myself to read the actual news sections while saving the delicious best for last. (Aside to non-New Yorkers: there are no funnies in the NYT. A tragedy to be sure, but I'm here to tell you that you sort of get used to it. For the comics one is forced to pick up the two tabloid-format options, a choice ranging from the Silly to the Sublimely Ridiculous. And even though I feel dirty after I peruse it, The Evil One Cursed be He unfortunately does put out the most entertaining sports section in town.)
So why not read the Circuits section, or the entire paper online, for free, like everyone else? Well I have complaints (of course). The newspaper is a visual experience best served open and wide. Where the articles are located on the page indicates their importance, and there is a lattice-like hierarchy (as opposed to the online version, which is a top-down hierarchy) ... I can't see the breadth and scope of each article at a glance ... Scanning for articles of interest in the online layout doesn't always work for me—I often feel like I'm missing something. And let's not forget the oft-apt adage, You Can't Take It With You (with a cup of coffee)...
So let's look at what has replaced Circuits. Why, a Thursday Styles section! Jeans, floss, and silicone implants. Far be it from me to compare the worthiness of one frivolous non-news section with another, but is this what Times readers yearn for more of? Is there really not enough Style disseminated on Sundays, when we all peruse the section for pictures of drunken wealthy dowagers posing with B-list celebrities, and wedding announcements worthy of ridicule? Understandably, the subscriber hordes probably also never hankered for a weekly review of the latest first-person-massacre video game either, but what about MY needs? We've got serious geeky energy to sublimate here: where my vocation is Real Person's hobby, my hobby is Sensible Person's vocation, that is, all things techie.
To be fair, this morning's face of frozen horror softened a bit as I got to the end of the Thursday Style section where I came upon the photo essay featuring the expressive "L" train, and what all the hipsters on their way to and from Williamsburg were wearing. The art of Genuinely Cool makes me smile, but it doesn't make up for the loss. Now for my geekout I'll have to resort to blogs and such. The upside is perhaps I'll be dressed more fashionably while I read them.
Auction
What's that? You say you live in the NYC-area and you want to buy a digital piano? That's so funny. It just so happens that I put one up for sale just now. And via a fun (read "multi-million-dollar juggernaut corporation") auction, to boot...
Alas, it's time to move her into better hands. Succeeded (but never replaced) by the one-two combo punch of the shiny Kawai and bite-sized O2, my sturdy and true Roland needs a new home. I see her in a Brooklyn studio, occasionally gigging with her new master at hipster clubs...
Friday, April 15, 2005
Acoustica
Yesterday I heard the preliminary mixes of the two Aphex Twin (aka Richard D. James, freaky prince of electronica) arrangements I did for Alarm Will Sound, NY's own fab chamber orchestra, conducted by the indefatigable Alan Pierson, and WOW do they sound terrific. I was always pretty jazzed about this project, which took up a fair amount of my summer last year, but now after hearing the close-to-final product, I'm very excited about the CD's release this summer.
The project itself is a full CD of arrangements of Aphex Twin tunes, from various albums, but I believe the bulk of them are off of James's excellent record, Drukqs. Drukqs has a sort of schizophrenic quality to it: the cuts are generally either wildly complicated rhythmically, so much so you can almost see his sequencer smoking at the end of each track, or subtle and ambient, often with some wonderfully-manipulated samples of prepared pianos. Each track title on Drukqs is more unpronounceable than the next, reportedly fitting his character (our friend and colleague Steven Bryant once mentioned that RDJ lives in a medieval castle and owns a tank).
AWS is in residence at Dickinson College this year, and when I went down there for the recording sessions I got a chance to hear several of the other arrangements, and was floored with their quality and creativity. There was one track off of Drukqs that I was possibly going to arrange, titled Omgyjya-Switch (pronounce that), which upon first listening with an ear of possibly transcribing it, I instantly developed an ulcer. It took me about 16 listens before I even found the pulse. Another arranger grabbed the tune before I said yes, so I was spared, but he did such an amazing job of it that it hardly matters, incorporating 2 traps into the transcriptions to solve the problem of the impossible drum tracks, and somehow deciphering the monster-counterpoint. I know I could not have done even remotely as well with it, but I'm still haunted by my initial fear, and deep down I regret not attacking the challenge.
That being said, the two tracks I did do were off of The Richard D. James Album, and were challenging in very different ways. Fingerbib was a study in synth pads, de-tuning and heavy, wet reverb, all of which somehow got transcribed into an arrangement for standard chamber orchestra. And Logon Rock Witch, a bizarre and eyebrow-raising track, juxtaposes the ramblings of what seems to be a drunken organist with the silliness of the most frivolous percussion toys you can think of. Flexatones, coffee-cans, jew's harp, slide whistles, it's all in there, and I ended up arranging the organ music into the ensemble, with octave doublings galore, and notated wrong notes and rhythms. These two arrangements took me 2 solid months to do, my hair greyed significantly, and they were only about 3-4 minutes each.
AWS has performed some of the arrangements (including Fingerbib) live, both at Dickinson at last year's Bang on a Can Marathon, but there will be a big premiere of all of them on a full concert, at the Lincoln Center Festival this summer, timed with the release of the CD (this entry's title provides an unsubtle clue as to the record's title), which will be on the Cantaloupe Label. I will go, in my club clothes, pretending I'm cool enough to be there...
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Hyper-blog
A freshly-tuned piano has my attention at the moment, so I've been playing this and that, but very shortly I will be returning to the most pressing of April's Gigs. The other one will hopefully continue practicing patience while I minister to "hyper-pianos" and such, ostensibly due tomorrow.
And as MEW and MJS and I attended the Adam Guettel/Craig Lucas musical effort, The Light in the Piazza last night, there will be a review posted fairly soon.
Monday, April 11, 2005
Thunk
The marimba is probably my favorite percussion instrument, no doubt due to the special quality of its lower octaves. Low marimba is a color that cannot be replicated in any other way (unlike the upper octaves, which sound basically just like a xylophone, or at least serve the same purpose orchestrationally), and that very uniqueness made it all the more difficult to go through the Avenue X score today and revise the marimba part, cutting off the low F-to-A-flats like I was lopping off the toes of some monster under the bed. This of course was all due to my willful negligence, assuming everybody and their dog had a marimba that went down into the nether-regions of the "Great-C" these days, but it turns out I was just plain greedy, and therefore proved wrong. The A2 holds as the standard, no matter how hard I pretend it is otherwise. I should have paid closer attention to the red notes in Sibelius as I copied in the music (that would be the software yelling at me, "out of range! out of range!") but I've grown accustomed to blissfully ignoring that program's warnings about ranges, likening its assumptions about what various instruments can and cannot play to the rantings of an elderly curmudgeon ("But you can't do that...You just can't DO that!").
The good news is that after revising the part I decided that I have probably been overplaying my grief and stressing way too much about it. It'll be fine, and the revisions will most likely sound just as good as if not better than the original part with those low F's and A-flats. So maybe next time when it turns out that I can't, in fact, DO that, I might actually heed the warnings.
But then again, probably not. I still say Sibelius doesn't know what the heck it's talking about. You should see what it thinks the range of a violin is...
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Csus/D
Yesterday's gift to myself after the Mets' fifth crushing loss in a row was a trip up to midtown's famous Colony Music, where I blitzed through the madhouse, quickly and single-mindedly buying the songbooks for Jason Robert Brown's The Last 5 Years, and Songs for a new world. I've been a fan of Brown's for years, ever since I saw Lincoln Center's Parade production, and though I follow and enjoy everything the annoyingly-photogenic Adam Guettel does (looking forward to seeing The Light in the Piazza later this week), and to a slightly lesser extent the excellent songwriting of Jenny Giering and Stephen Schwartz, Brown is far and away my favorite of the current bunch of young New York-based writers of theater-songs.
My unabashed admission to this somewhat-shielded love for theater and cabaret songwriting might raise an eyebrow or two, but it goes back a long way, and I'm just plain tired of hiding it. My own music, much of it instrumental, has precious few hints of the melodist struggling to get out, but since I'm carefully working on building a distinct stylistic merge of the rhythmic drive and shiny harmonic progressions of these contemporary dramatic songs I love, with the dense counterpoint and wide color palette of what I consider is the most interesting and exciting contemporary concert music, it may take a while more for this particular influence to show on my sleeve. The closest I've ever come across to this ideal were a few marvelous little dramatic songs by Michael Torke, which expertly mesh his concert-music harmonic style with the melodic craft of a contemporary cabaret song.
What I really enjoy about Brown's songs is the near-constant rhythmic propulsion, in that almost every song has a subtle rock groove—not the cheesy rock of, say, any song from Jesus Christ Superstar, but a groove sustained by a genuine feeling that bass-supported syncopation is buried deep into Brown's psyche, and in this respect I find a kindred spirit. Now that you can probably see the proof of in (forgive me) my particular pudding.
But it is his harmonic ear which not only is my main reason for studying his songs, but also stymies me as a composer in much of his music, in that in most cases I wouldn't even know where to begin to write chords like that. That "musical theater" sound we all know (and granted only some love) comes from those happy major-7 chords, those add9s and root-over-IVs... In contrast, Brown's progressions have always struck my ear as very fresh-sounding, and as I play through these songs, singing like a idiot as I sustain the fantasy that I'm a rock pianist, the harmonies are chunkier, more blues based, than the standard schmaltz. And in contrast to the usual theater fare of arpeggiation + doubling the melody, Brown's accompaniments resemble the piano part of Billy Joel song more than anything else, what with the pulsed full chord 'comping and syncopated bass lines. To that end, his harmonies add a lot of 7's and 9's in the bass, plenty of chromatic passing chords (mostly of the blue notes), and a lot of V-IV cadences, much like the 80's pop songs Brown (and I) grew up with.
And, of course, his melodic ear is top-drawer; every tune is solid and straightforward, but always with a nasty hook that keeps you humming—of course, this is the holy grail of writing for the theater, or for that matter, for a small, dark and smoky room with a 2-drink minimum.
So as the Mets just beat the pants off of Atlanta, I no longer immediately need the easy solace I find in these 9-chords. So now I'l play through these songs just for the fun of diving in to see how these suckers tick...
Friday, April 08, 2005
it doesn't suck
Better late and good, than on-time and sucky, I think I've heard. AVENUE X, the much-discussed concept, and now my most recent (yet embarrassingly overdue) effort for winds, is finally in rehearsals. It was a squeaker, definitely, as when all was said and done, it was basically a month late. I've been 3 weeks late before, but never a full month. Something about going into that next time-measurement category that forces the guilt to rise in my gullet. It was the insertion of THE RIVERS OF BOWERY (now officially dubbed "ThROB", all credit and blame to JB) into the writing schedule which just killed me, and threw a nasty wrench into the proceedings. Doing those two pieces back-to-back also went to town on my decaying body ... the countless hours at coffee shops and computer-time logged allowed that old and festering workstation-related shoulder/back injury to creep back into the game: a microtrauma in my left shoulder causing me no end in slight discomfort. Composing: a dangerous sport. And I'm only 32.
This all accounts for the two-month lag in postings, of course. Though several large engraving jobs (Yeah, I still do them ... the phone still rings so I still say yes), a kitchen renovation, and a stressful CBDNA Conference all happening simultaneously were also partly to blame. Of course, at this point I'm reminded of the great contrabassist Eugene Levinson, who when told that a student wouldn't be making his master class at Juilliard because he was "too busy", narrowed his eyes and menacingly, yet silkily, whispered in his thick Russian accent, "You tell him, we are all busy." So I do not at all beg for sympathy. But, in fact, it had gotten so bad that I realized around mid-March that I hadn't had so much as a weekend off since the beginning of December. So that settled it. Better Half and I fled town and headed north as soon as the plate was cleared. And that left AVE X flouncing around in cyberspace, waiting for the consortium to download the parts and start the read-downs.
There have been a few snags, of course: I mistakenly left out pg. 3 of the Horn 2 part, that kind of thing. I can deal with that stuff easily. But most recently I found out that none of the commissioners have marimbas that go down to F2, and the piece is in F. I have a more difficult time with those issues. Yet we march on. La la la I'm not listening. Well, I am listening, but I'm not ashamed to say that I'm secretly hoping that all of Eastern Illinois' marimbas grow 2 bars over the weekend...
All that being said, I believe this is one of my better efforts for younger wind groups, as the list of who I ripped off on this one is probably the most eclectic yet, and that makes me chuckle. I spent time happily transcribing Terence Blanchard's pentatonic blues tunes, Evanescence distorted guitar rhythms, Prince bass licks, and Poison power-chords, among others. So I'm looking forward to premiere week and hearing a piece that after I got through messing with it, will sound absolutely nothing like those people I just listed. Mostly because of the lack of electric guitars and amplifiers, but it's not through lack of trying...