Breath

On July 17th, 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:

Last night
the fire died into itself
black stick by stick
and the dark came out
of my eyes flooding
everything.

Breath Ex. 2

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.

I give
the world my worn-out breath
on an old tune, I give
it all I have
and take it back again.

Breath Ex. 3

Links:

Levine discusses "Breath" with the conductor, Donald Nally:



Donald Nally interviews Lansing Mcloskey and me, regarding the Levine Project:

Sympho: Tweetheart 1

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.

Sky-Born Music

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?

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?

The end of the aughts

It is a new decade. Which is really just a point on a circle – more accurately – a tightly wound spiral. One that we attribute significance solely for the purpose of historical analysis. Not to mention the idea of the New Year. It's just a procession of energies and time. It seems we like to think we can stop it for a moment and take stock; and that the stopping has significance. Of course, if we could truly stop time...well, that would be interesting (ever let go of a spinning merry-go-round?).

10 years ago I was in my fourth year at Ithaca College. When I think back, it's sort of a black hole. In January of '99 I was in London for the semester; in January of '01 I was finishing my final year at IC. So that middle ground seems rather uninteresting, or unmarked in my memory. It was the first time I had a lead role in an opera; the Vicar in Britten's Albert Herring. The story here is that I spent the entire rehearsal process as the Vicar's cover/understudy. And then a week before the show opened, I found out I would do the entire run, due to the original singer's required vocal rest. Had that not occurred, I probably wouldn't have been bit by the opera bug and my current dreams and desires would be rather different.

That was a time when the music that I thought was most effective required some sort of theatrical bent, or some other performing art in its rendering. From an audience perspective, I've always found chamber music concerts and orchestra concerts somewhat boring, even though I absolutely love the music. Whenever I "check in" with the other audience members, it seems their focus is lacking and when there's some story or images or dance the focus seems much deeper. I often wonder if audiences are more penetrated by multimedia than simple singular focus events. As a sometime meditator and lover of simple things, I'm clearly torn on this subject. I think of fewer powerful images than a pianist and grand piano occupying a stage and performing. Or similarly, a string quartet or smaller ensemble. But as soon as the number reaches 10 or so, I'm distracted by the rather un-unified front. Especially with orchestral music: I arrive, find my seat, and close my eyes...then I'm in heaven. But the problem with this way of experiencing music is that it denies half the elements of performance. So, what to do...?

The following year, while in London, I became obsessed with music-theater. This could be anything from simple blocking (a la theatre), or dramatic lighting, or some form of language taking place in music... and the continuum extends all the way to opera. My memory of the concerts during that time are plastered with strong imagery, and the music seems to envelop the imagery as I recall them. It seems, due to the theatrical presentation, my mind is hooked in from more than one angle. It's not just music, it's also a relationship to space, and costumes, or blocking and I actually recall the music itself with more depth and clarity than other concerts that lacked this sort of presentation. Again, what to do...?

I continued to pursue this bent as a composer, and tried to hang on as long as possible upon pursuing my Masters degree at the University of Michigan. Due to my newness in Ann Arbor, I had little time to make the connections with actors and directors and other schools to pursue this sort of musical experimentation. And I had also fallen in love and completed my degree in 1 year so that I could join with my beloved at the time. I just couldn't hack school anymore. UM was incredible, and in retrospect, I wish I had stayed longer, but my life's energy wouldn't allow me much more time with the intellectual pursuit of music within an institution. There was one piece, from Basho, which I composed for a a harpist friend at UM. She had a keen kinesthetic sense and I composed the work around her quality of movement with the instrument. Her recoil after striking a chord and other such things. The piece was successful at UM and that summer I composed Michiyuki for Naoko Takada using her quality of movement as a continual focus of the piece. (I desperately need videos of these pieces).

The story goes on... Upon leaving Michigan, I moved to Massachusetts, lived on a haunted horse farm; moved to Taos, NM, waited tables, began playing jazz piano for a living, wrote my first orchestra piece; moved back to MA, worked as a stone mason/gardener; returned to Taos, gigged all over NM; and for several years I took a spotty hiatus from composing. A few projects came along, but it wasn't until about 3 years ago that a bit of momentum struck and I began writing a tad more. Now, finally, I am in a position to truly delve into my compositional language again. I've composed mostly vocal music in the past few years, and it's as though I'm starting again at 15, back when my interface with music was as a singer. And instead of going to college, I'm teaching college; and instead of composing instrumental works with a theatrical bent, I'm writing vocal music which is theatrical by its nature; and most significantly, I'm hungry for an opera.

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense, but there's a certain timely architecture that I'm seeing in my mind. And as I said at the beginning, it's really not that significant, but in stopping the spiral for just a moment, I feel like I'm at a new jumping point. The aughts were pretty much the antithesis of the nineties for me. The nineties were about school, rigidity, focus, incredible amounts of learning, trying anything anyone suggested, etc. The aughts were about freedom, lack of focus, slowing down, understanding life without the structure of school, aloneness, and seeking a true sense of direction and desire. And now that we're in the tens, it's about integrating those 2 decades as a composer/performer, and moving into life with a balance between structure and space.

The Love of Three Kings (L'amore dei tre re)

Last night was the first performance of "The Love of Three Kings", performed by the Bleecker Street Opera Company at 45 Bleecker Street. My friend and frequent collaborator, Paul Haas, is music director for the group and asked me to re-arrange/reduce/re-orchestrate (whatever you'd like to call it) the score to accommodate a 1-on-a-part sort of orchestra. 4 winds, 4 brass, percussion, keyboard, 5 strings. This was an incredibly daunting task for me as I've never dealt with so much music in one project – so many black dots and lines. But now I understand why younger composers often worked as copyists. I learned a great deal about Montemezzi's orchestration and his language, and his particular use of the late-Romantic opera orchestra. The original forces are huge – it's an incredibly difficult work for the players – and there's a kind of weight going on all of the time. The work is often compared to Pelléas, and without a doubt there are several Debussian things in the score, but I'd have to say that it felt more like Wagner. Of course, with such a small orchestra, I bet it leans back to Debussy in the audience's ear. How ironic that two of the most diametrically opposed composers (at least in our historians' judgement) emerge as the most obvious influences. Read the NYT review.

I'm thrilled to be involved with this company as they do great work in apprenticeship and outreach and are family relations with their famed predecessor, Amato Opera. Check them out here. I wish them the greatest of luck, and I'm looking forward to attending the performance soon.

On another note: "Oh, the timing." (I say this often.) It's my firm belief that timing is everything. I mean this in broad strokes, and more aligned with personal development... but if God is in the details, it seems that karma is in the timing. I was sort of raised in an opera house. Both my parents sing opera in Milwaukee, and I spent a good deal of my youth in dressing rooms with my mother at the Florentine Opera and elsewhere. After studying voice for a long long time, I stopped singing Classical music right around the time of my Master's degree and just started up again – it's been almost 8 years. I've been hungry to write an opera for the last 2 years or so, and have been taking up old ideas and searching for new ones, and the floodgates just sort of opened. Within a month of taking up the voice again, I was hired by Naropa University to conduct the Chorus, I was commissioned by Donald Nally (Chorusmaster at the Lyric Opera), I've met numerous collaborators, 2 librettists, and several opera singers with similar desires as my own, and then I get this job re-orchestrating an opera. Timing, timing, timing. I suppose I'm supposed to do this. And in typical fashion, it's unlikely that I'll ever sing in an opera in New York City, but I've already gotten involved somehow.

Music from Angel Fire

Had a concert in Taos last weekend. Robert Mirabal performed "On Taos" with the folks at Music from Angel Fire. Best collection of players I've ever had performing my music and it was incredibly satisfying. To accommodate Mirabal's flutes the piece is almost entirely modal, and I often feel guilty for this, like I'm cheating or something.... but whatever, music is music, regardless of the math behind it. What was most interesting though, was the quality of the audience. Having this piece played in Taos – a piece about Taos – makes for a really intense, intimate experience. Most the audience shares the same imagery and emotional memories of the landscape and quality of life in Taos... and so the piece seemed so much more resonant with the audience than anything else I've written... except for Shanti (which was written for a close friend and performed for her close friends). I love this quality and hope to find more ways to incorporate it into my music. I was reading the other day about Mozart's premiere of Don Giovanni in Prague, and it's just wild that at the time Prague was no bigger than Boulder... that closeness, and social tightness must have been incredible. Could you imagine someone on par with Mozart premiering an opera in Boulder? What a different world we live in today. How might we bring art music back to the community? Artists writing for their most relevant communities... I often think that as we broaden our scope in search of larger audiences, we lose the intimacy that's valuable at the fore, and all we're left with is a generalized version of ourselves as artists. But to make art-things that are tied to our direct social and environmental experiences and then perform those for our peers and community – that's magic.

On Taos - for native flute, flute, cello, and piano by PaulFowler