Keepin' The Faith

Last month, a stellar group of musicians (doubling as good friends), put on an amazing performance of my new horn quintet The Revival. Tyler Taylor, the horn player and composer extraordinaire, fully embodied the crazed Evangelical role the horn plays in the piece. It was a real joy to work with these amazing people! Their performance is now on Soundcloud and on YouTube (above).

Coming up in about eight days or so, the premiere of Full Fathom Five in Bloomington with the IU Concert Orchestra, David Dzubay, conducting.

The Next Twenty-Odd Days

With sweater season solidly underway (at least here in Indiana), thus rolls in a series of Autumn concerts in Bloomington. First, my horn quintet, The Revival, gets premiered tomorrow night by a stellar group of musicians (8PM in Auer Hall at Indiana University). Second, on November 9th, my John Bolton inspired saxophone quartet Ain’t Gonna Study War No More, gets a post-Bolton performance as part of the 2019 Midwest Composer Symposium (2PM in Ford Hall).

Finally, my big ol’ hefty orchestra piece Full Fathom Five gets premiered by the Indiana University Concert Orchestra conducted by David Dzubay (November 20th at 8PM in the Musical Arts Center at IU). Through the magic of the internet, it will also be video live-streamed (a pretty darn good quality live stream at that) here: https://music.indiana.edu/iumusiclive/.

On Christopher Rouse

Even in this very small world of music composition, where everyone seems to have met everyone, I never got around to meeting Christopher Rouse in any professional capacity. I did briefly speak to him after a performance of his beautifully haunting piece Iscariot by the New York Philharmonic a few years ago. Even in that short encounter, he was very kind and gracious to a young composer who was utterly tongue-tied and doesn’t remember a thing he said. That being said, I find it difficult to lend my voice to the sea of very personal remembrances that are being written on social media today. These personal stories only further illuminate my admiration for what I believed Rouse the man to be. I can only speak as a musician and budding composer that looks up to him as a model for what I so desperately want to be. 

There are a small handful of musicians and composers that I can say without a doubt made me want to be a composer in the first place. Mahler, John Adams, Leonard Bernstein, John Corigliano, and Christopher Rouse. When I was in high school, I purchased a library card from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and started checking out tons of orchestral scores from their massive music library. Two of those first scores I checked out were Rouse’s Rapture and his Trombone Concerto. Like a lot of young American composers, there is the perceived notion that there are two composers; the kitchy ones that write “tonal” music and the serious composers that write “atonal” music. Though a completely ancient ideology (if it ever really was), I found in Rouse a compromise of sorts. I learned through those scores and countless others through the years that communication and expression above all else is what is important. Rouse was a true American romantic. Throughout those high school years and up until now (and I’m sure further on), I turn to Rouse as a composer unafraid to express something powerfully. Whether that means placing the thorniest of thorny harmonies into a piece or writing a traditional melody line that’s unapologetic in its simplicity and beauty, all of these are used to communicate and express something important to an audience.

Rouse was a composer of extremes. His music can be completely overwhelming in violence, brutality, and sheer volume (with Ligeti-esque fortissississississississimos) as in his unrelenting Gorgon from the mid 80’s and his recent Heimdall’s Trumpet (check that last chord). I remember audience members literally jumping out of their seats at the sudden whack of a Mahler-hammer at the opening of Iscariot. For god’s sake, I can’t think of a single composer who included a Mahler-hammer in almost every orchestral work they wrote for a solid decade. His music is also some of the most simple and beautiful written in the late 20th century as in the slow chorale from the third movement of his Flute Concerto or in the Agnus Dei from his criminally under performed Requiem. Most importantly, this huge range in harmonic language, formal design, and complexity are all in the service of expression. Rouse’s large toolbox of eclectic musical materials were all at disposal in order to express something, something in order to communicate in the deepest possible way to an audience. 

Combing through Twitter and Facebook these last few hours, I’ve come across some beautiful stories about Christopher Rouse the person. I came across this quote from a 1994 interview with Bruce Duffie that basically puts what I’m trying to say in better terms…

“…simply saying, “Well, I’ve expressed myself, now, thank you. Here it is. I don’t care what you think,” is not enough for me. It’s not enough to be satisfied with just satisfying yourself. There is almost a social obligation that a composer has to create something that fills a need for society. And one hopes it will not speak just to the composer’s own time and place but will be something that is broad-based enough in its meaning so that it will convey important things to successive generations. Beethoven’s music certainly does that; so does Mozart’s, Mahler’s, etc. It is important for us to consider an audience, and if you have satisfied yourself, that’s a beginning, but always keep in mind that we are not simply isolated figures. We are members of a culture, members of a society, and just as a bard had the obligation to sing songs for the edification of his fellow man, so too I think creative artists now need to think in terms beyond simply their own needs. The pithiest way to put it is that I don’t think that the creation of any work of art is purely an act of masturbation. It needs to be a shared act, more like love making than masturbation. It’s important that we recognize that there is an audience and that they’re a very important part of the equation. We need to recognize that we do almost have something akin to a social responsibility on their behalf, though never at the expense of our own sense of integrity.”

Old-Time Religion

For the past few years, I’ve made myself (admittedly) ambitious summer reading lists. And for the most, part I’ve done pretty well sticking to it. Last summer, it was the new Rodgers and Hammerstein biography Something Wonderful by Todd S. Purdum, Matthew Desmond’s masterpiece Evicted, Jean Edwards Smith’s big ol’ George W. Bush biography simply titled Bush, and Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law. A noticeable lack of music books, but after a few years or reading solely music biographies, articles, and essays as well as going to music school during the rest of the year, I tend to need a break. However, as is life, pleasure reading makes its way into “work”. Such is the case with this new horn quintet I’m finishing up for my friend (and fellow IU-er) Tyler Taylor.

Late this summer, I started reading a new book by the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Frances Fitzgerald entitled The Evangelicals. For whatever reason, I have an immense fascination in the fringe elements of American christianity. My father and I will often get into heated echo chamber discussions regarding our shared frustration with the hypocrisy of televangelists and far right spiritual leaders. My fascination might spur from my own sexuality and a desire to learn where my political oppression is coming from (maybe?). But nonetheless, I picked up Fitzgerald’s book and devoured it. Ranging from the first two great awakenings to Billy Graham to the New Christian Right of Donald Trump, the book satisfied my evangelical cravings. While in the midst of reading the book, I began watching YouTube videos of the giant revivals of the 1950s with Billy Graham and the healing ministries of A. A. Allen (much to the annoyance of my boyfriend).

One morning, around 2am after putting down Fitzgerald’s book hours earlier, I had a Hollywood Style Composer Moment. The one that crops up in every film about creating music in which the protagonist suddenly gets the idea (!), the music rushes in (!), and the inspiration arrives in full force (!). “The Great Work Begins”! But I quite literally woke up at 2am from an “eureka” moment and started working on a new structure for this struggling horn quintet. The work became one in which the horn would act like a fire and brimstone, Pentecostal preacher with the string quartet acting as a congregation.

The new and improved horn quintet, The Revival, is at its core about manipulation. The piece begins with a call to action (The Message), in which the horn sounds out a four note gospel that will remain its core musical material throughout the work. The second section (Thus Saith The Lord), has the horn, desperately trying to relay its message to a seemingly unwilling and reserved string quartet. After a fire and brimstone cadenza (The Sermon), the string quartet beings to take up bits and pieces of the horn’s spirited call and “speak in tongues” (Glossolalia), a danse macabre in which the players ecstatically perform in a series of unorthodox ways. Finally, in the concluding section (The Revival), the string quartet, now seemingly brain washed, repeats almost everything the horn gives them, expressionless and hypnotized.  

The work also has a great deal to do with the works dedicatee, Tyler Taylor. Aside from his phenomenal chops on the horn, Tyler is also an astounding composer (the man has it all, folks). Tyler’s music has a tendency to treat individual instruments like people, with their own unique quirks and personalities. These instruments, in Tyler’s musical world, are also subjected to some of the darker elements of the human experience; they are manipulated, restricted, and rejected. I thought a great deal about his music when writing a work for him and wanted to, in a way, pay homage to his composer side while on the surface level highlighting his performer side. 

The Revival will be premiered later this year….

Gone West, Young Men

I’m at the tail end to my first trip out west (I’ve embarrassingly kept to the east coast for all of my 25 years). The topography alone took me a good week to fully get used to after initially feeling like I had landed on Mars. There is a sort of violent strangeness to the nature, with branches (and roads) bending in radical formations and mountains seemingly coming out of nowhere. Even at the end of a second week, I am still awestruck by the beauty of it all.

Of course, no trip is complete without pillaging for used books and records, eating at a bunch of local favorite spots, and going on a few hikes to burn off eating at a bunch of local favorite spots. As with the nature, the used bookstores and record shops, particularly in Berkeley, are something to be in awe of. Moe’s, with its four stories of used books and miscellany, and Rasputin, with its largest collection of classical recordings (apparently) in at least the US.

As summer winds down, I ramp up on a new horn quintet for Tyler Taylor as a companion piece to the Mozart Horn Quintet K. 407. Though I love being asked to write something that I know will sit alongside some sort of standard repertoire on a concert, this piece has little to do with Mozart. Actually, I has perhaps more to do with Mahler due to the fact that Tyler, like anyone with brass in their blood, loves himself some Mahler. More to come on that in the near future…

Now of course some photos:

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Daily Grind

I’ve heard many mixed things about Harrison Birtwistle the person, but Harrison Birtwistle the composer is someone I love and this video is an amazing document of his own writing process but also the universally mundane task of writing music in general.