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.