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his child wails, unable to look away.
that tiny hand still outstretched
grasping at the air
where his father's hand once was.
The innocent woman becomes a wild animal
projecting her pain in all directions.
She sirens at the milky white windshield
that now nearly touches her white knuckles.
What a peaceful look
on half of his face.
The teeming masses remain
absorbed in their own affairs.
Do they even care?
Do they even know
of this demonstration
of fragility?
Our small group takes a silent communion
in those few eternal seconds.
Disbelief. horror.
The tangible shroud of innocence
has been lifted.
It's existence has but fleetingly shown itself
on the face of that child
and in his tiny outstretched hand.
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| I was just telling maggie that I had no idea anyone even read this blog. I don't quite know what to think about the fact that so many people had even the slightest inclination to read my infrequent ramblings about writing music.
anyway.
So the past few weeks have consisted of extracting and formatting parts for my wind ensemble piece. I now have most of the 50 or so parts finished, but I can't help but think that I'll need to make changes and then redo many of those parts. Oh well. It feels good just to be at this stage in my work. I'm really excited to have it performed, but I'm also a little nervous about how the first rehearsal is going to turn out. For the most part, it's pretty straight forward, but there are some things that will likely take some explanation and good old fashioned wood-shedding.
My biggest concern though, is the sheer size and complexity of my gestures and shifts in color. It's an 8 or 9 min. piece and there are really only three sections to it. That's not three larger formal divisions that contain several smaller statements, but three sections that take a few mins to unfold. That puts a lot of pressure on my content and the way that I grow it. In many cases, I wouldn't be too worried about it because I could rely, to some small degree, on the MIDI approximation and its representation of harmonic progress and timing. However, this piece was just too much to make any sense from a MIDI playback. So, other than what I've tried banging out on a piano, I haven't actually heard anything from the piece. I hope I can trust my own imagination. It sounds great in my head.
As far as explaining what the piece means to me on an emotional level...
I think I'll have to try and put that in another blog. I'm still having a tough time sorting that out. It really is a representation of some things that I feel very deeply, but I just don't know how to put it into words and get others to understand.
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| Well,
It's been a good while since I've written anything here. I really should keep up with this thing. I've finished my Wind Ensemble piece some time ago. I think it turned out pretty well. It won me a thousand bucks and a performance guarantee in the fall. I'm pretty excited about that. The cash is cool, but the performance is worth way more than that to me. To have spent the better part of a year on a piece and not have it performed would be devistating. I am a little nervous about how it's going to turn out though. It's a pretty complicated piece as far as color and texture go. I just hope that my orchestration skills are up to par. Oh yeah...I've decided to title this piece "The Garden of Innocence and Indulgence". This seemed to work a little better for me than the garden of earthly delights. Though the Bosch painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights" was the original inspiration for the piece, it is no longer a reflection of it. I think I'll post another blog later concerning what this piece means to me and how I hope others percieve it.
My tuba quartet "Take This Hammer" just seems to keep going and going. A few weeks ago it was performed at a coffe shop/bar where it was very well recieved. It's been performed maybe 15 times since I wrote it last summer. I've been waiting on a publisher who had expressed interest in it, but I haven't heard from him in a while. I can't believe how big of a hit this piece has been. Carter has told me several time that this is the best tuba quartet ever written and he would even consider writing one himself to compete with mine. (Though I doubt that he was considering writing a tuba quartet in the first place) Brandon Vaccarro even said that this was the caliber fo piece that can make a career. The best response that I got was at the Pendulum showcase concert. Not only was the performance great, but the audience was very receptive. I talked to several people who didn't even know that such an ensemble existed and after hearing my piece, they wanted to hear more. The director of the concert series even indicated that she would like book the quartet for a full recital.
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| Well, things have been happening despite my blog's latest gap.
I have my Wind Ensemble piece mostly finished, though I have decided to put it on the shelf for a while to gain some perspective and devote some time to other projects.
Push for percussion quartet and piano was performed last Feb. and was very well recieved. The performers asked me to write two more movements and I fully intend to do so.
Right now, I'm working on a Tuba-Euphonium quartet titled Take This Hammer for the international tuba and euphonium conference coming up this weekend. I've based the piece on prison works songs of the south and the result has been even better than I expected. As a reference, I've been listening to field recordings made by musicologists during the 30's and 40's and I have to say that this whole genre of music is quite fascinating. In western society, we consider music to be on a sort of pedistal where patrons attend concerts and quietly observe professionals. In the tradition of west african music however, music plays an important role in everyday life. There are songs for many occasions and most of them play a utilitarian role. Workers sing songs to keep up a rhythm in order to make their work more efficient and to stave off boredom and fatigue. This tradition carried over into the americas as Africans were brought over as slaves to work on plantations. The big difference though was that now music kept workers together at a steady pace in order to prevent individuals from being singled out for working too slow and suffering severe punishment.
The thing that appealed to me about this genre in connection with the tuba quartet was the blue collar role that tubas and euphoniums often play within larger ensembles. They don't often get the glory that traditional solo instruments do, however their role is vitally important to the rest of the group.
Working with this quartet has been a wonderful experience. I've never seen a chamber ensemble work so hard in preperation for a performace. They are all perceptive, sensative, talented, and expressive musicians with technical ability that most wouldn't believe. What's most impressive though is their ability to work together toward a single goal. They're all great musicians, but they don't let their egos get in the way of their work. Not one of them vais for attention or struggles to shine above the rest. They have a job to do and they know that total cooperation and cohesivness is the way to get that job done.
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| We have liftoff! I have fully orchestrated the first minute and a half of my winds piece and I think I'm well on my way to getting the rest of the first section nailed down. I have strayed a bit from my original short score, but I had to make some allowances for my early short-sightedness. Most of these changes include harmonic rhythm and a shifting pitch center to keep the melodic material fresh. I also extended the opening gesture by about 20 seconds.
I met with the sax professor here at CU a couple of weeks ago. We talked a little about extended technique for the sax and a lot about 70's jazz/rock fusion. We made an appointment for the following week to go over some Brecker transcriptions and so he could bring in his alto and tenor to play a few things for me. At our appointment I decided that the best route for me would be to write for solo tenor with a jazz mouthpiece. He also gave me a couple of sheets of his own system of alternate fingerings to be used for timbre trills. I guess I had it in my mind that I was going to have to come up with a solid extended technique notation system for all of the crazy crap that was planning on. Now I think that I'm going to leave a lot more up to the performer by just suggesting a style and only using a few standard extended techniques that are fairly prevalent in jazz from the 70's like timbre trills, growls and altissimo. It's important to me to make this an outstanding, wild and reckless solo while still maintaining some degree of accessibility to most upper level college players.
I've also been pretty lucky that Dan is staying in town over the break. He's agreed to meet with me a few times to go over my progress. It also doesn't hurt my motivation to know that I have to present my new material every week. | | |
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