The Crossing – It is Time
March 12 2011 ➝ Vocal Works | Recordings
On March 29th, The Crossing will release their newest album on Navona Records entitled, "It is time." The recording features my piece, Breath, with poetry by Philip Levine. The Crossing commissioned the work last year and gave it an incredible premiere last summer. The Crossing lend their brilliant musicianship to several other new works: the compositions of David Shapiro, Kile Smith, Frank Havrøy, Erhard Karkoschka and Kristen Broberg. Click the CD to order.
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Breath
July 17 2010 ➝ Vocal Works
Today, The Crossing will premiere my newest choral piece. They commissioned the work as part of the Levine Project, scores based on the poetry of Philip Levine. The rehearsal process has been the best I've experienced up to this point. Donald Nally is quite the phenomenal conductor, and has an incredible set of ears. His choir is a great joy to work with; it is customary that this sort of thing usually requires a bit of tweaking to get right, and it's not taken that much tweaking. So either, I've finally cracked the bolt on clear notation, or the choir is just absurdly brilliant (methinks it's the latter). This is a really long work (for choir), 15 minutes, and it's acapella, which is extra-special-taxing. I tried to keep the ranges for the singers pretty easy, to accommodate the length of the work. Furthermore, it's a conducting challenge due to a consistent shifting of meter.
At the outset of the composition of this piece I decided to use Levine's syllabic meter as the meter for the piece. It has a rolling quality, and I thought it would impose a nice variant on the musicality of the work if it followed Levine's prose rather than getting locked into a 4/4 or 3/4 or something like it. In the text below, the line is written with the number of syllables in parenthesis at the end of the line:
Who hears the humming (5)
of rocks at great height, (5)
the long steady drone (5)
of granite holding together, (8)
the strumming of obsidian (8)
to itself? (3)
So my meter for the setting of this first complete thought is 5/8 - 5/8 - 5/8 - 4/4 - 4/4 - 3/8. And this repeats until we reach the final word: "itself". Needless to say, it requires a lot of the musicians to count in a constantly shifting tempo and still bring out a musical performance. (And The Crossing does splendidly). Here is one full round of the pattern: Breath Ex.1
The other thing you'll notice about this example is that there's an eighth note "motor" underlying the material. When I chose this poem there was a sound of river water and wind running through my mind – thus the watery flow through the piece.
It's in 3 large sections, following Levine's stanzas. The first is about the awe of nature, both as a part of it, and as a witness. The second section explores darkness and loss: Breath Ex. 2
Last night
the fire died into itself
black stick by stick
and the dark came out
of my eyes flooding
everything.
The poet has a nightmare about his wife, where she is the sole living being amongst her "country people". The musical material begins with strong rising and falling gestures, like being caught in a wave of fear. And the choir breaks into aleatory at the end of the phrases. Upon the dream taking hold, there is a superimposition of meter (on top of Levine's meter) – a rocking or lulling 3/4. The poet wakes, and is reminded of his love and the comfort in loving his wife.
The final stanza is the classic summation of the two previous explorations. The poet ruminates on nature and its grandiose power, and how we rest in it. The musical material returns from the first section of the piece. The final emotional space is of tenderness. The poet offers almond blossoms to his wife, and offers his breath to the world. Breath Ex. 3
I give
the world my worn-out breath
on an old tune, I give
it all I have
and take it back again.
At the outset of the composition of this piece I decided to use Levine's syllabic meter as the meter for the piece. It has a rolling quality, and I thought it would impose a nice variant on the musicality of the work if it followed Levine's prose rather than getting locked into a 4/4 or 3/4 or something like it. In the text below, the line is written with the number of syllables in parenthesis at the end of the line:
Who hears the humming (5)
of rocks at great height, (5)
the long steady drone (5)
of granite holding together, (8)
the strumming of obsidian (8)
to itself? (3)
So my meter for the setting of this first complete thought is 5/8 - 5/8 - 5/8 - 4/4 - 4/4 - 3/8. And this repeats until we reach the final word: "itself". Needless to say, it requires a lot of the musicians to count in a constantly shifting tempo and still bring out a musical performance. (And The Crossing does splendidly). Here is one full round of the pattern: Breath Ex.1
The other thing you'll notice about this example is that there's an eighth note "motor" underlying the material. When I chose this poem there was a sound of river water and wind running through my mind – thus the watery flow through the piece.
It's in 3 large sections, following Levine's stanzas. The first is about the awe of nature, both as a part of it, and as a witness. The second section explores darkness and loss: Breath Ex. 2
Last night
the fire died into itself
black stick by stick
and the dark came out
of my eyes flooding
everything.
The poet has a nightmare about his wife, where she is the sole living being amongst her "country people". The musical material begins with strong rising and falling gestures, like being caught in a wave of fear. And the choir breaks into aleatory at the end of the phrases. Upon the dream taking hold, there is a superimposition of meter (on top of Levine's meter) – a rocking or lulling 3/4. The poet wakes, and is reminded of his love and the comfort in loving his wife.
The final stanza is the classic summation of the two previous explorations. The poet ruminates on nature and its grandiose power, and how we rest in it. The musical material returns from the first section of the piece. The final emotional space is of tenderness. The poet offers almond blossoms to his wife, and offers his breath to the world. Breath Ex. 3
I give
the world my worn-out breath
on an old tune, I give
it all I have
and take it back again.
Sympho: Tweetheart
May 19 2010 ➝ Large Ensemble
I'm currently flying over the Midwest in a heap of metal... It still amazes me that these things work. I'm headed to New York for this year's Sympho concert; it's my third year working with Paul Haas and SymphoNYC and I'm thrilled to be trying out some new things. The concert explores a life of love—love of all sorts. Love of a mother, a lover, of country, of loss, of love itself... Furthermore we asked our audience to submit the best love songs of all time and Grayson Sanders, Wynne Bennett and I wrote arrangements of those bits of gushy wonderfulness.
For my part, I chose to arrange At Last; you know, the Etta James tune that Beyonce performed at our president's inauguration, and Christina Aguilera performed regularly during one of her tours. That song that gets hollered through a Martini laden mic at karaoke — just about every torch singer on the planet has done it. It's one of those tunes that everyone knows, even if they don't know: they know. And that sort of cultural saturation is the beauty of the "standard." We've all got some emotional history with the song, and it makes for a richer, more saturated, communal experience.
In my years as a jazz pianist I'm sure I've played this tune hundreds of times and it's been requested three times that. And for that reason, I tried to avoid all the pitfalls associated with well known material. I can count on the audience singing along, or the mental vinyl spinning with the original recording. So I didn't want to obscure the melody. And due to the fact that it is nestled between the quartet from Verdi's Rigoletto and an amazing aria by Monteverdi, it seemed most fitting to take advantage of it's placement. And so, it became a mashup of sorts. I ended up quoting Verdi's quartet throughout the piece, as a kind of memory that forces it's way into the sentiment. This is all achieved through some laptop sampling and creative pitch shifting. When the bridge hits, the arrangement weasels it's way out of the Verdi and the final recap of the tune is just plain big: With the classic 12/8 piano riff a la 1950 played by the winds and the strings arpeggiating their way to the end.
For my part, I chose to arrange At Last; you know, the Etta James tune that Beyonce performed at our president's inauguration, and Christina Aguilera performed regularly during one of her tours. That song that gets hollered through a Martini laden mic at karaoke — just about every torch singer on the planet has done it. It's one of those tunes that everyone knows, even if they don't know: they know. And that sort of cultural saturation is the beauty of the "standard." We've all got some emotional history with the song, and it makes for a richer, more saturated, communal experience.
In my years as a jazz pianist I'm sure I've played this tune hundreds of times and it's been requested three times that. And for that reason, I tried to avoid all the pitfalls associated with well known material. I can count on the audience singing along, or the mental vinyl spinning with the original recording. So I didn't want to obscure the melody. And due to the fact that it is nestled between the quartet from Verdi's Rigoletto and an amazing aria by Monteverdi, it seemed most fitting to take advantage of it's placement. And so, it became a mashup of sorts. I ended up quoting Verdi's quartet throughout the piece, as a kind of memory that forces it's way into the sentiment. This is all achieved through some laptop sampling and creative pitch shifting. When the bridge hits, the arrangement weasels it's way out of the Verdi and the final recap of the tune is just plain big: With the classic 12/8 piano riff a la 1950 played by the winds and the strings arpeggiating their way to the end.
Sky-Born Music
April 18 2010 ➝ Vocal Works | Recordings
The Milwaukee Choral Artists recently released a recording entitled, Sky-Born Music, featuring my piece "Potter's Clay." It was commissioned in honor of their ten year anniversary... and it just so happens that my mother sings with the group. It's a fine collection of new music for women's choir. If you'd like to listen to the piece and read the notes and such things, go here. You can purchase the album here.
So... what are your influences?
February 06 2010 ➝ Musings
I often spend hours at night staring at the curtains blocking the yellow lamp outside my window wondering what I might've been. This is a ridiculous exercise... Thinking about it isn't going to change anything except to hijack my emotional security... Secondly, I like to think that a sliver of my experience is influenced by the stream of realities that pours forth at each moment of possibility. If that's the case, then I'm experiencing all those realities regardless. It's like a trout jumping out of the stream and getting a broader view of the spiraling river water but falling back in and continuing it's course. Or, more accurately, a fish that's caught and thrown back in, robbed of an otherwise transformative experience. Like being eaten.
Tying this back into my musical life, I find myself doing this sort of headwork around styles and influences. I've spent much of my life with open ears, and a listener today cannot avoid a global polystylism. How in earth could you avoid it? You can hardly spend a day in the world without witnessing centuries of music across all the continents. I wonder what it was like for anyone before recording.
All of this serves me wondefully/terribly. When I sit down to write music, half the ideas that come are earworms noodling amongst my synapses. And once I work through that, I often question whether the ideas are perfect for that project or if it's just whatever comes up at that time. I just hope whatever project I'm working on is served appropriately by my daily diet of randomized musical influences.
I know there are stories of Bernstein locking himself in his apartment and avoiding all recorded music and concerts when embarking on a project. I dream of that. Just like I dream of coffeeshops without music piped throughout.
One way or another, I'm compelled to compose, and whatever doubts arise around the material I've no choice but to continue, or fail. And who is to say whether the cheesy electronica car commercial from last night's TV watching, or the Beck album that's on in my present caffeinated whereabouts, or the elevator spewed Muzak version of Barber's Adagio is influencing the scalar rise in my mind, or the particular phrasing that currently has me locked?
So how useful is it to ask of someone's influences? Just another way to conceptualize music into a box that couldn't hope to hold the abstraction that is music. And with the Internet, you might as well just go listen, instead of trying to pinpoint which Radiohead record that person listened to a year ago and how that could inform their character somehow.
This begs the following questions: What if Thelonious Monk was listening to Webern the day he wrote 'Round Midnight? Would it be the standard we know it to be today? What if Chopin had heard "Poor Johnny One Note" the day he began writing the Db prelude (raindrop)? Or if Messiaen heard a crow on the day he originally wrote his first birdsong into a piece? Was Beethoven secretly listening to Gesualdo?
Tying this back into my musical life, I find myself doing this sort of headwork around styles and influences. I've spent much of my life with open ears, and a listener today cannot avoid a global polystylism. How in earth could you avoid it? You can hardly spend a day in the world without witnessing centuries of music across all the continents. I wonder what it was like for anyone before recording.
All of this serves me wondefully/terribly. When I sit down to write music, half the ideas that come are earworms noodling amongst my synapses. And once I work through that, I often question whether the ideas are perfect for that project or if it's just whatever comes up at that time. I just hope whatever project I'm working on is served appropriately by my daily diet of randomized musical influences.
I know there are stories of Bernstein locking himself in his apartment and avoiding all recorded music and concerts when embarking on a project. I dream of that. Just like I dream of coffeeshops without music piped throughout.
One way or another, I'm compelled to compose, and whatever doubts arise around the material I've no choice but to continue, or fail. And who is to say whether the cheesy electronica car commercial from last night's TV watching, or the Beck album that's on in my present caffeinated whereabouts, or the elevator spewed Muzak version of Barber's Adagio is influencing the scalar rise in my mind, or the particular phrasing that currently has me locked?
So how useful is it to ask of someone's influences? Just another way to conceptualize music into a box that couldn't hope to hold the abstraction that is music. And with the Internet, you might as well just go listen, instead of trying to pinpoint which Radiohead record that person listened to a year ago and how that could inform their character somehow.
This begs the following questions: What if Thelonious Monk was listening to Webern the day he wrote 'Round Midnight? Would it be the standard we know it to be today? What if Chopin had heard "Poor Johnny One Note" the day he began writing the Db prelude (raindrop)? Or if Messiaen heard a crow on the day he originally wrote his first birdsong into a piece? Was Beethoven secretly listening to Gesualdo?