composer's notebook
essays & criticism on musical matters
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Tuesday, September 18, 2007
If Hemingway jumped off a bridge...
We live in an era where I (and one or two others) mourn the loss of the great Aztec Publishing on W.52nd Street, purveyors of the Best Manuscript Paper Ever (O you green 16-stave 17x11! I should have stocked up!), so if you are wonky like me you now have to order your manuscript paper from Los Angeles. But if you are anybody else (read, sane) you simply make your own paper (that is, if you even still use manuscript paper), custom to whatever your needs are, with a printer and any half-decent copying software. Although, I maintain it is not the same thing. Nope.
But if you do enjoy the Old School of pre-staved heavy-weighted manuscript-paper luvin', you'll dig my new crush, the Moleskin Pocket Music Notebook. This little beaut is compact, organized, and sexy. I've been putting my sketches in it since they arrived, and I love this thing. I bought two. For someone who is constantly riffling through countless loose pages of manuscript paper looking for that one snippet I thought I got down -- I know it's here somewhere -- is it on this page? The back of this one? ... this sucker is awesome. Now I just flip through the little book.
Plus, with the Moleskin label, I can pretend I'm artsy and wear a beret without irony.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Long Title, Long Tail
If you take a gander at the upcoming performance calendar, you'll see that one particular piece is the unqualified star this year. That would be the one with the long title, and there's no use pretending that its spike in performance life is due to anything other than Maestro Clary's gorgeous (and high-profile) performance with The Florida State University's extraordinary Wind Orchestra at the CBDNA Conference in Ann Arbor last Spring. I could count the scheduled performances for you (several planned-but-not-yet-confirmed performances are not in the online calendar yet) but I think it's more fun to let you peruse yourself. Let's just say it's more performances in one season of any single piece I've ever had, ever. In fact, several are on the same day, creating stereo As the scent spring rain...'s across the land, more than once. That's a lot of bi-tonality...
I thought it might be interesting to give a bit of composer-insight into how the piece came about - stuff you wouldn't necessarily find in the program notes. It started life as a simple song, for voice and piano, written for the incomparable Hila Plitmann, for a recital at Juilliard. Hila had given me the Hebrew text (a language I can read, but don't understand ... don't ask, it has to do with modern American Reform Judaism education) along with a transliteration, and her own poetic translation. I set it as best I could, and we were all (thankfully) pleased with how it turned out. The performance of the song itself was perfect and absolutely lovely of course, and Hila even performed it a few more times over the years, and that was that.
But I kept thinking of the little piece on and off--something about it bothered me. I suppose I thought it wanted to be something larger. Either a song-cycle with many more songs, or something else. And then, one summer while visiting my wife for a week in Cooperstown NY while she was working at Glimmerglass, I pulled the song out of my portfolio while sitting outside in the glorious Cooperstown surroundings, and thought now was as good a time as any to do something with the piece. While the birds tweeted and the picturesque Lake Otsego burbled, I sat at a picnic table and started re-working the piece, sans commission or any idea of when it might be premiered or performed, into its current form. It was, if I remember correctly, quick work, moving along at what is for me a furious pace. I'm almost positive I had the bulk of the thing finished before we headed back downstate.
When I had it copied, I wasn't sure what I had, or how well it would go over. The language of it makes it a tricky piece, with many exposed, close & crunchy harmonies, and intonation problems waiting to happen. It's also kind of a delicate, intimate piece - two adjectives I would hesitate to put alongside "band". But I made some calls, I sent some e-mails, and I sent the score to a few conductors -- at this point, all friends of friends in the Wind Ensemble World...no one I really knew. Eventually the intrepid Scott Stewart at Emory University was intrigued enough by the score to give the official premiere, and we were off. It was slow at first, and the ensembles who took it on generally didn't like it. For a few years, I believed I had a Clunker, and seriously considered just putting it in a drawer. But after a short-list of performances, I came to the realization that it was actually my most difficult piece, requiring a subtlety of musicality to which no other work of mine comes close. But as more ensembles played it, I feel like we all kind of slowly figured out how to perform the work, and the performances got better, and more informed. Yet I remained hesitant to promote the piece too much because I still didn't quite know what it was. Every once in a while, though, an ensemble would perform it, and I would be pleased, but always a little surprised that they wanted to take it on.
But it was never anything like this. This is an explosion. And all of these programmed performances are by ensembles and conductors that we can safely call the Best of the Best--they are sure to all be fantastic. I can't wait to hear every single one of these (and several of them I'll be there to hear in person).
Oh yeah, you know I'll be buying Maestro Clary's martinis the next time I see him.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Home Sweet Beat
A good piece in today's paper (I'm pretty sure it does not require the TimesSelect subscription) about the glory days and subsequent gentrification of my East Village neighborhood, brings up everything I've been thinking about and working on for the last few months. The multimedia attached to the article includes a fascinating mp3 walking tour with amazing facts I never knew about points of interest I walk past every day, as well as a wonderful 10 minute video tour, which pretty much crystallizes why I wanted to write this piece I've been working on.
Walking around the tattered remnants of Beat Culture every day in the 'hood, I think of these guys and their art and poetry and music constantly. A piece had to come at some point. And fortunately it's a big one. 16 ensembles, in a consortium organized and cajoled by Jeff Gershman at Texas A&M-Commerce have commissioned a large movement I'm tentatively calling My Hands Are A City, titled after a Gregory Corso poem. This will eventually be a separately-performable movement in a large-scale work, probably 3 movements - all of it an expansion on the themes (both poetic and musical) I touch on in the overture The Rivers of Bowery.
In addition to the daily reminders of the now-gone-forever culture you can see in the above NYTimes video, I've been inundating myself with fun primary source research as I write the piece, which of course has been a genuine pleasure. So far I've read John Clellon Holmes's seminal Beat novel Go, Holmes's 1950's essays and newspaper articles about his friends, a pile of Corso and Ginsberg and Kerouac poetry, a very fun biographical overview of the time by Leslie MacAdams called The Birth of The Cool, as well as re-reading the glorious On the Road. I've inundated my ears with hours of Charlie Parker (his apartment was 4 blocks away from mine) and Miles Davis and Lester Young, as well as studied transcriptions of their solos. I unearthed the fabulous Beat-filled and Amram-scored short by Robert Frank, Pull My Daisy, and stared for hours at the glorious photos in Frank's 1958 book The Americans.
I really can't get enough, and so whenever I sit down to compose, I wonder how this stuff actually translates into the notes I'm writing. I honestly have no idea. I'm pretty sure none of it will come out specifically in the music, but it all swims in my brain nonetheless as I write. And yet I'm still clueless as to what the aural effect of this barrage of sensory information will actually be. I am not Charlie Parker (that is both very sad, and a good thing), so the piece ultimately wants to sound like Newman -- and those two things are so dissimilar it's been very interesting to reconcile them. Still, if enough bee-bop genius soaks in my head, maybe something half-decent will come out the other side.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
In the can
Some fun but blurry pics of yesterday's The Vinyl Six recording session are online. I like the piece very much, and we got a bunch of really terrific takes. It's pretty thrilling to hear the fantastic chamber players of Avian Music play the piece as if they've been living with and performing it for years (they premiered the work a year and a half ago). It's a nice contrast to the frantic and just-learned-this performances composers usually enjoy. Avian director Peter Flint plans a CD of rock-inspired chamber works, for release probably in 2008. I voted for the title "RockBird".
Saturday, September 08, 2007
not writing, riding
Tomorrow I'll be twittering from 6am-5pm from the NYC Century Bike Tour, where I'll be huffing and puffing my way around the entire city for the 2nd consecutive year, on my sturdy, hip, yet quite pokey Jack. Sure all the other riders will be blowing past me on their $2000 composite road bikes, but at least I won't be changing my tubes every time I hit one of those famous (and inevitable) NYC potholes.
Biking is my meditation. I actually get a lot of composing done while riding. Considering I'll be doing 100 miles of it tomorrow, while I'm at it I might as well finish up that one-act opera I never got around to completing in 1993...