Recent Losses

After Lukas Foss, George Perle, and Max Neuhaus, now Blossom Dearie and Louis Bellson have passed away. Very sad.

The Next Steps

More info on the piece:

1) The quartet idea is out-- there's not a lot of time left before the show, and I'd rather have this project be slightly smaller and totally solid rather than too big and under-rehearsed.  So it's me and Laura, or just me.

2) The piece has a title: Pasir.  Needed it because programs were due today.  The end of the piece is most likely going to draw on gamelan, so if this is music for the dance work Grain of Sand, why not go with the Indonesian word for sand?  Good?  Done.

3) Right now, the acoustic raw materials of the piece are...

... a flowerpot with some beans, and a vibraphone.  (And a computer.  You know me.)

While there are some lovely pieces for flowerpots-as-they-are (Rzewski's To The Earth, etc.), the flowerpot idea here comes from English composer James Wood via my friend Matt Apanius.  But whereas Wood asks performers to hunt down a series of flowerpots tuned to precise pitches, I'm dumping this into a sampler and mangling it in any number of ways.  Seems like an efficient and flexible way to bring sand-like sounds into the work.  (The netting keeps the beans in the flowerpot as it swirls-- otherwise, messy.)

4) Meeting with the choreographers tonight for beginning-stage idea-bouncing.  Hope they like it so far!

The Start of the Process

Last week I received and accepted a commission from my colleague Alicia Diaz to compose music for her new piece Grain of Sand, which she's choreographing with her husband Matthew Thornton.  Even though the concert is coming up fast (the first weekend in April, with Jane Eyre, the Student Dance Festival, and spring break intervening between now and then), here's why I'm excited and optimistic about this opportunity:

1) Alicia gave me a ton of very useful info right at the outset.  Basic info like the duration of the piece, info about structure/sections, basic adjectives about the movement, the music she and Matthew have been using in rehearsal...in about 15 minutes I had a pretty clear picture of the work, enough to generate sparks.

2) Alicia has also been very receptive to my early-stage mode of working, which is to think quietly until questions burst out at times that make sense inside my head, but which probably appear to other people to be pretty random and sudden.  (Joan Meggitt experienced this last Wednesday evening when I was doing some writing, and was equally gracious...)  Tomorrow I'll be giving her some samples of stuff to see if she's receptive to what I've got going on in my head. (Observation: the beginning of the process is more about throwing out what doesn't work than sculpting what does.  I need to find my materials and get to beta as fast as I can because this thing has to work for Alicia, Matthew, and me, and it has to work soon enough so that the dancers and musicians all get comfortable with something resembling a finished product before we tech.)

3) Hopefully, I'll get to work with violist, fellow Bang-On-A-Can-Summer-Institute-alum, and current-northeastern-Ohio-dweller Laura Sinclair.  Laura is currently wrapping up her master's in viola at CIM, and is heading for other places come summer.  We had some fun vibes/viola improv moments and some great conversations at BoaC, and this could generate some more good work and talk.

4) The other two members of the quartet would hopefully be dance students, playing some easy percussion parts.  They'll get a chance to see the music-dance relationship from the other side, and pending faculty approval, they'll get production hour credit for it.

5) Ring modulators, granular synthesis, Wii remotes on stage...mwahahaha...

There are also some things I need to watch out for:

1) How many mics?  How much live processing?  Feedback from monitors?  How much of an increased tech headache?  It's got to be solid enough that I'll have time to actually play the piece without worrying about tech stuff.  (Specific concern: sounds from the stage-- dancers' feet, etc.-- getting into the mics and being processed along with the music...)

2) What's going to replace stuff that gets thrown out?  Right now, I have an entire piece in my head, but very little new material ready to go as a backup.  I really hope Alicia doesn't hate gamelan...I'll find out tomorrow.

All in all, much more on the upside than the downside.  Can't wait for the next step.

UPDATE: And sometimes, you start composing and an hour later you see an entire new direction or two open up in front of you.  I meant to start writing one piece this evening; I think I accidentally ended up starting three.

Cory Doctorow sums it up

On his Twitter feed, Cory Doctorow sums up my entire post on investing in failure:

"To double your successes, triple your failures."

That about does it.

Small Updates, Round 2

Here we go...

1) Jane Eyre is getting off the ground-- we had our first two orchestra rehearsals this weekend, and the sitzprob all day this coming Saturday. Between now and then, installing new timpani heads.

2) We had the first round of showings for the KSU Student Dance Festival coming up in early March, and I'm really excited about the pieces I saw-- it's going to be great seeing these pieces grow and develop over the next month

3) I had my first performance with the Akros Percussion Collective this weekend at the Akron Art Museum, and we had a great time and a great crowd. If you came, thanks for coming out. The next Akros show is at 3pm on May 3-- it's part of the Kulas Concert Series at Guzzetta Hall on the University of Akron campus. There will be works by Gyorgy Ligeti, James Tenney, and two premieres.

4) My friend Tanner Menard deserves his own post, and when things slow down I'll be able to get to it. Tanner is a wonderful sound artist I met out in Arizona, and he's now in New Orleans. He's curating an all-night sleep concert modeled after the ones Robert Rich gave a couple decades ago, and he's commissioning audio for the 9-hour event. (Caveat: Tanner will probably end up modifying submissions to a certain degree. Also, submissions will be released under a Creative Commons license.) If you're a sound artist and would like to send him something, you can read more about the concert and Tanner's call for audio on his blog. (If you'd like to hear my first submission for the project, you can listen to it here.)

5) Three big deaths in the new-music community: George Perle, Lukas Foss, and Max Neuhaus. Perle's music is some of the most beautiful atonal music there is, and he was a very important counterbalance against the more systematized atonal music that gained prominence after World War II; Foss was the music director of my hometown home-team orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic, when it was a new-music powerhouse several decades ago; Neuhaus' early LP recordings of pieces like Morton Feldman's King of Denmark introduced me to that very important body of experimental music for percussion. The music community is poorer without them.

6) We might top 60 degrees on Wednesday, and that would be welcome.

UPDATE: 5a) The NY Times remembrance of Max Neuhaus is here.