new music!

This will be premiered on April 8 as part of the “First Monday” Concert series presented by Saint Ann’s School and featuring Saint Ann’s faculty and alumnae/i.

back

I had almost forgotten I had this blog. No, really I hadn’t. But since I just put up a new website I thought I’d reactivate the blogging side of me a bit too. The new site is a vast improvement, design-wise, over my old one. I had long been dissatisfied with Earthlink’s design resources and had been searching out alternatives. But not until I was alerted to cargocollective.com did I find a really good, super low-cost solution.

I am hard at work on completing the music for my performance on the final concert of the MUSIC WITH A VIEW Festival at the Flea Theater. The awesome Kathy Supové (www.supové.com) curates this two-week-long festival of new music performed by emerging and mid-career musicians. I am honored to be a participant and am excited about the new work. I am also using processors to alter the live piano sound, a first for me. I presented part of the music at a First Monday concert at Saint Ann’s about a month ago, and am getting used to working with the amazing sounds that these little machines help me produce.

The concert is April 3. It is free. Come to the Flea Theater, 41 White Street in Tribeca. Seating is limited. I am the final act, preceded by Jiri Kadabirek and Sidney Schamberg, and I am looking forward to it immensely.

revision

I am loathe to revise old pieces. So loathe am I that I even shun editing scores of recent vintage after the first performance. THE SPACE BETWEEN needs a thorough going-over before I can send scores out to potential performers. Yet somehow, even when I have the time, I procrastinate. I used to explain this by saying that any piece is a reflection of the particular time that I wrote it, and thus revision goes against what I believe, that a piece reflects a moment/period/stage. But this is bullsh*t at least on some levels. So now I just need a pep talk, or better yet, I should hire some young composer to take on the job. He/she might learn something useful in the process, or at the very least get to know a new piece and make money at the same time!

check it out…

MonadnockMusic just posted a video recording of the premiere of my setting of Richard Wilbur’s THEN, for soprano Ilana Davidson, flutist Laura Gilbert, violist Jonathan Bagg, and cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer. Check it out. It’s on the “recordings and video” page.

long time…

It’s been a while since I have posted. This is due partly to my insane busy-ness. The end of the school year brought a slew of concerts, and I was also finishing my Monadnock commission. I am very happy with the piece, which is not typical of me. Usually by the time I finish a piece I am utterly over it, and need to separate myself. The only problem is that I am still editing the score and it is work that I don’t like very much. But I must be patient.

I think the reason that THEN was so absorbing to write, that I became entirely obsessed at the expense of virtually everything including eating and sleeping, was that the poem stunned me. I loved it the first time I read it, but when I knew it, when it played over and over again, I was in its thrall. And in a case like this the music is so clear to me, and all I need to do is put everything in its proper place. I feel as though the music has been given to me, and all I must do is translate it into notation.

I am also thrilled to be working with Ilana Davidson, extraordinary singer, and with Laura Gilbert, the greatest flutist I know, and Jonathan Bagg, superb violist, and a cellist, Rafael Popper-Keizer, whom I don’t know, but if this group wants him that tells me all I need to know. I am looking forward to rehearsing with Ilana next month after I return from Germany, she from Aspen, and before she heads up to New Hampshire. So now I can kick back just a little and start planning the saxophone quartet.

So I am reading and drawing and going to the gym and riding my bike and playing with my pets and having a calm content time. This was an extraordinarily hectic and tense year on many levels, and I am glad to see the summer arrive. BTW, while editing today I was listening to my esteemed friend and wonderful composer Alex Gardner’s LUMINOSO. It is gorgeous, as the title would suggest. Thanks, Alex.

dead…

I have a few external hard drives. On them I store old scores, new scores, backups of all kinds of files.  This morning, looking for some scores of some old arrangements I did for Auréole, I plugged my trusty old Toshiba.  I heard the sound of little birds calling, and they sounded weak and sad. I realized that it was not a bird, nor birds, but the hard drive. It would not boot. I could not peer into its contents. How many things are stored in there? What might I have lost? I will never know, until I go looking for that one thing, and I can’t find it, and only then I will know that it is on that dead drive, the one that sang a sad song as it failed. Poignant, yes. Frustrating, yes. Technology is a blessing and curse.

duel/dual

I have just received another commission.  We are still working out the details, but the project is a saxophone quartet for the Mana Quartet. They heard FIELD MUSIC: ASH in Columbus, Georgia (of all places; I had no idea my piece was going to such places, places I have never been).  I have wanted to write a sax quartet for a long time now, and was in the early stages of a project many years ago for a quartet that disbanded before anything got off the ground. So when this opportunity presented itself–this past week when I received an email from one of the players–I was glad.

The timetable will present an interesting challenge.  THEN needs to be complete by June at the latest.  The quartet needs to be ready for a fall tour and recording, which means I need to finish it by early August, I think.  While I usually work on more than one project at a time, the projects tend to be at very different stages.  In this case I will have to take on the two projects simultaneously.  This will require me to be quite clear and precise in my concepts.  Or maybe both pieces will end up being about the same thing.  I often feel with late Beethoven in particular that all his works are exposing the same miraculous complexity and paradox of human experience, both individual and collective, as if perhaps mankind itself has a soul and Beethoven desperately burrows into its core to find eternity.

Now of course it is pure hubris to put myself on the level of Beethoven, and it is not my intention.  But I feel a deep connection with Beethoven, especially the late works.  In these works Beethoven creates entire worlds, ideal worlds.  These worlds surpass our human limitations; they aspire to some kind of exaltation that transcends performance.  His deafness enabled him to leave the real world of sound behind and live inside his music in a way that might have been impossible if he actually had heard how badly his late works must have been performed at their inception.

When I answer the question of why I compose — which is not a question I usually like to answer — if I am being honest I have to say that I write music for the same reason I paint paintings: to create an ideal world, using a language which I hope comes from somewhere deep inside myself, so deep that it evades my own consciousness most of the time.  Since I was a small child I was inventing worlds for myself: a language, a world that I copiously illustrated (my siblings can vouch for this) populated by birds rather than people. I was obsessed with birds as a kid. And to this day my dreams in which I myself am a bird are profoundly exhilarating.  Odd then that I am terrified of heights.

decided

I decided on the poem I will set for my next piece. I was commissioned by the Monadnock Festival to set a poem by Richard Wilbur. They are commissioning a few composers to set his poetry; I think two of the others are Melinda Wagner and Eric Moe.  I had been trying to select from among three poems that I liked, but the one I picked seems to have to most perfect combination of qualities and is just truly beautiful.  It is called “Then” and was written in 1950. There is something elegaic about it. And it is serene. And even though I am still neurotic and somewhat tortured, I feel serene much of the time. Lucky me!

Here is just a taste:

Then when the ample season

Warmed us, waned and went,

We gave to the leaves no graves,

To the robin gone no name, (…)

I am scoring this for soprano, alto flute and viola, so it can work as a companion to my “Hommage à B.B.”

reflection

I have now had two weeks to think about how the premiere of THE SPACE BETWEEN turned out. I was impressed with the chorus’s energy and commitment to performing a new work. I was very happy with the fact that liked the piece so much, since they felt their hard work was worthwhile and memorable. I have decided to make very few revisions. There is the “murmuring” section of the first main movement (the piece is cast in an introit and postlude flanking three main movements) that I have simplified, although I may change it yet again and have the more difficult material handled by soloists. There is the possibility of removing the barlines from the third movement and having it structured along a “time line” with cues for entrances coming from the conductor. Next time it is performed I think I would want to amplify the two cellos. But the heart of the piece came through thoroughly, and I was moved by the response of the audience. I hope that I did the poetry justice; I feel that the proportions and pacing of the piece came off beautifully. Of course every composer holds an idealized performance of a piece, and reality is almost never equal to that. But I am grateful to have had the opportunity to write a large-scale piece that seems destined to have a life beyond the first two performances.

Limbo

I am between compositions. In a few weeks THE SPACE BETWEEN will be premiered. I am proofreading the parts for the umpteenth time, still catching little niggling errors, mostly in the “typesetting;” a dynamic needs a little nudge; a slur needs reshaping. I don’t really let myself judge the piece. I just look at its pages, shuffle them neatly into a pile, and pat them gently. Soon I will start the Richard Wilbur setting, but right now I can’t seem to focus on it. Rather I am thinking about chords. I can’t make up my mind. I think I have been letting them win out over color, and it is time to shake things up a bit.

FRISS will be performed in North Carolina in the first week in February, but I will be lying on the beach in Rincon, PR, for my first semi-tropical vacation in nine years.  I had fun going over the guitar part in order to answer a few questions from Matt Slotkin, who will be playing the piece for the first time. Brave man. It is too hard. I should simplify.

I am also working slowly through the PIANO SONATA No. 1, creating a Finale™ file from the manuscript score. In working on this I am so tempted to change the voicings of chords. But for a few special cases I leave it be. I wrote it almost twenty years ago. I am a different person now, and to alter it would make it reflect someone other than the composer, and I can’t allow that.