Grab your blankie, light a scented candle, and lower yourself into a nice hot soapy bath in order to create the exactly-calibrated ambience for listening to the amazing Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra play the first airing of Blow It Up, Start Again at The Midwest Clinic last month.

Oh. Wait. I’m sorry. Those pre-listening preparations are for my 1982 George Winston Winter record. What I meant to say was: throw yourself into your leather club clothes and hottest piercings. ‘Cause it is ON.

Thank you, ChiYSO!

I get the question about process quite a bit, and though I’ve fine-tuned my answer over the years, I’m never really satisfied with it. But I am pretty consistent in explaining the beginnings of a project as usually meaning a few (or, more likely, far too many) weeks of “research”. What research means is up to you. It can range from score study and listening, to strolling through MoMA, to reading novels and watching movies. Yeah, I know. But it really does all count toward The Greater Good. My accountant says so.

Some months ago, while attempting to wrap my brain around what in the name of Kwisatz Haderach I was going to do for this short piece I was writing for the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, I hit a wall. So, to the scores! In the past this meant a trip to the Performing Arts Library (even in grad school I went there – the score shelves were actually far deeper than Juilliard’s), as well as visits to some old favorites on my bookshelf. But this time I needed to get some fresh John Adams in front of my eyes. (Who doesn’t?) The Adams scores on my shelf are already pretty much memorized, and I remembered being floored by one scene in Doctor Atomic when I saw it last year. At the End of Act I, Oppenheimer sings this stunning solo aria that I just had to hear again. You’d think, before a commercial recording came out (truth be told there is a DVD you can get, and some of it is on YouTube, but these little truthy factoids defeat my point so just please keep bearing with me) this would be impossible, or at least, near-impossible, as long as you have an In at Boosey. But it’s not. I just logged into our (well, Better Half’s–it was her Christmas present last year) Metropolitan Opera “Met Player” subscription, and fired up the HD broadcast of Doctor Atomic. There, at #21, is the aria, “Batter My Heart”. Which incidentally is absolutely one of the more important opera arias written in the last quarter-century. Gorgeous, and heartbreaking, and perfect.

Then I had a thought. Boosey & Hawkes recently started an online perusal score library (with a VERY slick interface, I must say), probably in response to the (also very cool, just not as Adobe Flash-y) online perusal scores Schirmer put up, what, about a year or two ago. And there it was. The entire opera score. I flipped through to the end of Act I in one tab, clicked play on the MetPlayer in another tab, and then, just like that, I was listening and following score to a (basically) unrecorded opera written only a few years ago. For those of us who remember rifling through card catalogs to find anything written after 1975, this is an amazing, amazing thing.

As far as this new orchestra piece was going, the ocean of source material was of course spreading far wider than Mr. Adams. I was also listening to quite a lot of funk (again), and lots of the wuub-wuub-wuub bass-heavy “dubstep” all you kids look like you’re Doing The Robot to. In the past, this would have meant spending a fortune on CDs, or, more recently, spending a smaller fortune on iTunes. Or if you’re feeling poor, suffering through far too much crappola on TheYouTube. But then I started playing around with a Spotify subscription. Which turns out, is basically like having a massive library in your lap. So then that Tower of Power track you’d really rather just hear once thank you very much and no thanks I don’t need to own it forever and ever is right there, ready to stream. Of course, this kind of thing has been around for a while. But now the database is stunningly large, the quality is consistent, and it’s legal.

This works for that so-called classical music, too. Try what I did. Download the William Schuman Symphony scores from the Schirmer site, stream Gerard Schwartz’s new Naxos recordings of them, or hell, Bernstein’s old live recordings from the 60′s on Spotify, and take yourself to Bill Schuman School. I’ve totally gone there there myself. Got the framed diploma.

I do so love the Aeron Chairs at the Performing Arts Library, but, it’s awfully nice not to have to bother with the 1 train. True, you really can’t replicate the experience of turning the pages of a hefty 12×18 5lb mamma-jamma of a score in an empty hall at the dress rehearsal, but in a pinch, the combination of these fancy space-age resources packs a considerable wallop. When this “research” coalesced into Blow It Up, Start Again (premiering next month in Chicago), the pile of scores and CDs used was almost entirely virtual.

It’s a bonanza out there. I ask you: when Google is showing you Vermeers in high def, and I can follow score while listening to Birtwistle’s Night’s Black Bird, all while my kid is asleep in the next room, can the Kwisatz Haderach really be far behind?

One of my summer projects, a new quartet for my favorite American Music Chamber Band, The Avian Orchestra, is finishing up with all the usual score-editing and parts-making hooplah. The piece, titled These Inflected Tentacles, is for marimba, piano, violin, and cello, and should weigh in at about 10 minutes or so. Here below, to “excite acid secretion”¹, is the program note I just wrote:

In 1875 Charles Darwin published his book Insectivorous Plants, in which he documents the discovery, dissection, and subjection of various meat-eating flora to 19th-century experimentation ranging from the curious to the cruel and unusual. The book documents a lifetime of indefatigable dedication to the Scientific Method, but one cannot help smile at the man’s poking and prodding, dipping and burning. In four short movements, the quartet quotes Darwin recording his observations as he gleefully drops bits of meat, eggs, glass, hair, and anything else he can think of on his plants. Just to see what happens.

These Inflected Tentacles was commissioned by The Avian Orchestra for their 2011 program on botany, “Vegetative States”.

Drosera rotundifolia from Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants. (1875, p.10)

The movements are:

i. “The tentacles were as usual rendered of a very bright red, with the glands almost white like porcelain, yet tinged with pink.”

ii. “when the glands of the disc have bits of meat given them, they transmit a motor impulse to the exterior tentacles”

iii. “Falling drops of water do not cause inflection.”

iv. “a live insect is more efficient than a dead one”

My good friends from Avian, Peter Flint and the amazing players who brought you The Vinyl Six, will premiere the piece in Delaware and New York later this month, in concerts where we will all eat bugs.²

¹ Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants (1875, p.297)
² We won’t. I don’t think.

Last week, The 2011 World Youth Wind Orchestra Project in Schladming, Austria, high atop the Österreichische Alpen, gave the Continental European Premiere of Avenue X, under the baton of the glorious Verena Mösenbichler-Bryant. Little Austrian Vögels just hooked me up with the recording from the first performance, and it is SO VERY GROOVY. Click to enjoy the Hotness:

I’ll keep this simple.

People. I give you the Texas State Wind Ensemble, conducted by my friend Dr. Rodney Schueller, playing Symphony No. 1, My Hands Are a City at the 2011 CBDNA National Conference in Seattle last month. It’s wonderful:

Composers wait years for live recordings like this, where the excitement of the performance is actually captured in the audio. My sincere thanks again to Rod, Caroline Beatty, and the musicians of this fantastic ensemble, who worked tirelessly all year to make the piece come alive.

One of the three original pieces I wrote last year (there were a couple of arrangements in there, too) was Stereo Action, a percussion nonet commissioned by a consortium of ensembles led by Brian Zator, at Texas A&M University-Commerce. The title is also a straightforward explanation of the percussion battery, where most of the instruments are doubled, one on each side:

You can see there’s a piano (also a percussion instrument, one nearly forgets) in the middle of the setup, that nearly every percussionist plays at some point.  They walk over, plink a chord or drum inside, and walk (well, run) back to their station. Brian and His Boys premiered the 10′ work at the 2010 PASIC in November, and it went a little something like this:

Something’s weird about this piece, right? Sounds dated maybe? The (hopefully non-essential) program note reveals all of course, but I’ll sum it up by saying that the whole effort is an overblown homage to the marvelous band leaders, arrangers, and composers of the 1960′s Swingin’ Bachelor-Pad sound, and their awesome, awesome, hyper-panned stereo records. Masters like:

Enoch Light

Esquivel

Bernie Green

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

and Dick Schory.

But the king of all Swanky Swing, was Marty Gold.

Some years ago when I was asking around after Esquivel recordings, someone (I forget who) asked me if I had heard any Marty Gold. I hadn’t, but my father-in-law, a serious record collector, hooked me up, and I became forever peeved that I was stuck the era in which I live. The musical sophistication, the classiness wrapped up with insane goofiness…just to be that skilled at arranging so as to consistently embed those wonderful sounds into the records…let’s just say I simply wish to go back in time and be Marty Gold. With my piece I know I didn’t do the stuff even a fraction of the justice it deserves, but one can only try.

Relatedly, this past February I received a surprise e-mail by a woman named Debbie Cavalier. I trust she won’t mind my reprinting some of it here:

Hi Jonathan,

I just watched/listened to your Stereo Action performance online and thought it was great. Marty Gold was my grandfather. He passed away three weeks ago at age 95. Here is a blog post I wrote about him that I thought might be of interest to you.

Marty Gold, My Inspiration

I really enjoyed reading that essay, especially perusing all the family photos. Debbie and I had some correspondence after that, and the exchange made me realize that I had yet to write about how wonderful all this stuff is, and in particular how awesome and inspiring Marty Gold was.

For some easy online Marty Gold listening, check out these likely illegal online tracks. And then go search out some of his hard-to-find reissued records reprinted on CDs. They’re Totally Atomic.

After sending Vivid Geography out the door to the Japanese commissioners and the University of Houston (who will perform the U.S. Premiere this Fall) a couple of weeks ago, I restarted the task of piecing together all that had fallen to the floor in the three months I had my Finishing the Hat blinders on. Correspondence, phone calls, rentals, etc… as I’ve mentioned before, I can apparently do only two things at the same time, and at all times one of them has to be “Be With Family”. So “Writing” was quickly replaced with “Business”, and we’re off to the races again, with notebook entries and return phone calls.

And travel. Tomorrow I leave for Seattle for the CBDNA National Conference, where Rod Schueller‘s Texas State Wind Ensemble will play the bejeezus out of Symphony No. 1, My Hands Are a City, and where I can also enjoy many new pieces by colleagues and close friends. The Texas State ensemble burned the place down when they played the first movement at TMEA last month, so needless to say, I am looking forward to this. In anticipation, I sent out a nifty new issue of Ye Ol’ Newsletter.

There was a time not long ago when I thought I would be flying directly from Seattle to Tokyo, for the premiere of Vivid Geography at the 2011 Japan Wind Ensemble Conductors Conference in Kawasaki City. Even before the terrible earthquake these plans fell through due to scheduling, but unsurprisingly, the entire festival was recently canceled. I have a special place in my heart for Japan, having traveled there to be the composer-in-residence at the 2008 Conference in Kurashiki, and having spent many fun times with the wonderful musicians and characters from Tokyo Kosei, so the news from that country these past couple of weeks has simply made me feel ill with helplessness and worry. Those fantastic people though, they do soldier on…the e-mails that have been coming in have contained lots of business-as-usual, and the next commissioner to tackle this huge new piece, the Nagoya Academic Winds, will go on as scheduled next month.

And the piece is huge. Weighing in at 15′, a full twice as much as originally planned, the thing morphed very quickly into a major, massive project. I learned long ago that a piece turns out waaay better if you simply let it “go” where it “wants” to go (whatever that means, but I suspect you understand), and not force the work into the box you had hoped it would initially fit. And so it’s now a major big piece, for 20 players and SSA chorus, incorporating an eclectic ensemble of instruments designed as a kind of cross between a sinfonietta, a new music group, and a wind ensemble; including woodwinds, saxophones, brass, mallets, and strings. I’m pleased to think that it achieves the specific sound I was after: a sort of Downtown Romanticism.

I suspect I’ll be pocketing the above Ism for future use. I should grab the URL while I can.

Scale Shift by Marcella Durand, on its way to becoming Travel (or possibly Spectrum, or perhaps Vivid Geography) for SSA chorus and chamber orchestra. Japanese Premiere March 29 in Kawasaki City at the 2011 Japan Wind Ensemble Conductors Conference, and the American Premiere Fall 2011 in Texas, by the U.S. commissioner University of Houston, with the chorus and instrumentalists of the Moores School of Music, conducted by David Bertman.

Dear Directors and Conductors,

Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra and the 2011 Japan Wind Ensemble Conductors Conference is looking for a U.S. commissioning partner, for a piece for women’s chorus and chamber orchestra, premiering in Kawasaki City Japan on March 27, 2011. The work will set the text of contemporary New York City poet Marcella Durand.

I’m thinking eight or nine minutes, and the planned instrumentation is:

flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon
soprano sax, alto sax, tenor sax, baritone sax
horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba
vibraphone, marimba, percussion
SSA chorus
violin, viola, cello, bass

One on a part, so, 19 players, plus the SSA chorus. I love this instrumentation. Looks like spicy chocolate to me.

If you’ve got a wind ensemble with a regular contrabass player (and a collaborating-relationship with a chorus), this means you’d only have to arrange for 3 extra string parts.

If you’ve got a chorus, this is an ensemble of 19 players, which could come from an orchestra or wind program. I will also be making a version with piano, both for rehearsal and performance.

If you’ve got a sinfonietta or new music ensemble-type thing, I’d think the challenge would be the chorus and the saxophones, but if you can get a Torke Four Proverbs performance together, you’ll probably also be able swing this.

I don’t have a title yet, mostly because I’m leaning heavily toward one particular Durand poem, but very well might change my mind at the last minute and choose another. The language and rhythm in all her stuff consistently resonates with me, so it’s quite difficult to choose the exact right one for this project. I actually met Marcella in our neighborhood, through our kids, who are playground friends. After seeing her only in the rather blindingly distracting & unconducive-to adult-conversation context of toddler birthday parties and play-dates, I stumbled upon one of her poems in The Nation. a few months ago. When I started thinking about this piece, I made an enjoyable project of looking at more of her work, which is chunky with poetics and evocatively fractured in a style that seems to suit exactly the harmonic and rhythmic language I’ll be going for with the piece.

Contact me if you’re interested in partnering with JWECC, and sharing worldwide premieres with Tokyo Kosei. The U.S. Premiere could be scheduled for anytime this Spring, or into Fall 2011.

Poetically yours,
JN

Time-management here is fixed. There are exactly three things I can be doing in any given period:

1) Compose
2) Maintain my publishing/composer “business”
3) Be with my family

#1 is a bit more than just the actual time it takes to write; it’s inclusive of the months of research and Thinking About a Piece that happens before any actual notes are written. And when it gets into full swing, the mono-tasking is so severe, I can barely be coherent on the phone. So I usually don’t answer it.

#2 has the snarky quotes because, well, it is just me here–it’s not like I’ve got an administrative staff, or a bank account or anything (I use a shoebox). But the modern composer (and probably less-modern one, for that matter) must book gigs rehearsing the music and teaching, and the self-publisher must run his/her own rental library and/or storefront (fulfilling rental orders, shipping scores, sending invoices, filling out W9s till the cows come home), as well as a maintain a promotion department (sending mailings, writing newsletters, printing perusal scores, and saliently, updating these notebook pages).

#3 is a catch-all for the juggling act that is the Modern Marriage slash Parenting of a Three-point-five-year-old. It’s made up of preschool pickups, soccer practices, chicken finger suppers, and the precious solo time with Better Half that comes sometime in between bath/bedtime and the moment we collapse from exhaustion.

The thing is, I am only able to accomplish two out any of these three things in any given time period. And since #3 is, of course, non-negotiable, that means that #s 1 and 2 simply can’t happen at the same time. Like a physical law preventing two objects from occupying the same space at the same time, if I’m writing this week, I simply cannot fulfill a rental order. Or return an e-mail. Or send a score to someone who is considering performing a piece. Because the brainspace that is left over after #1 takes its rightful share goes directly to #3. And thanks to the algebraic Property of Equality the reverse is true; if I’m frantically filling the (now overdue) rental orders and returning weeks-old phone calls, there’s no way any writing is getting done. Because Team Newman is going to The Dinosaur Museum together (see #3), and there’s No Freaking Way I’m missing that.

With that in mind, the OK Feel Good Music Promo Department has been non-functional this Fall, and a quick-and-dirty roundup is in order. Since the last notebook posting the following excitements (in the first and second categories) have happened: IU-Purdue’s Chad Nicholson interviewed me for his fun “Wind Bands of Every Flavor” podcast, I finished a new work which premiered with hooplah last week at the Percussive Arts Society International Conference, and I traveled to residencies at Texas State University (Rod Schueller, Symphony No. 1, My Hands Are a City), University of Oklahoma (Bill Wakefield, Across the groaning continent), and Florida State University (Richard Clary, De Profundis). Tree was performed in Chicago, The Rivers of Bowery in Boston, and Sowing Useful Truths in Miami. I’ve also started work on a piece for women’s chorus and chamber orchestra, for a premiere in late March in Kawasaki City, Japan.

With respect to Category The Third, we are now marginally closer to deciding in what order to rank elementary school choices for the Board of Ed’s District 1 Lottery (alternately titled “Shoot me now”). Also, I discovered my Inner Soccer Dad.

I can also now highly recommend the new David Mitchell and Jonathan Franzen novels. I’m thinking those significantly ate into #1.

No one particularly cares about how I manage my time, as long as whatever is needed from me gets to whoever needs it, before they get in trouble for not having it. But knowledge is power, and Knowing My Limits is the new Getting Things Done.