through rain, sleet and snow...

I drove to Ankeny, Iowa (a suburb of Des Moines) yesterday to work with the choirs at Ankeny High School on a few pieces of mine. Although the weather in the Twin Cities was awesome when I started out, there was supposed to be a winter storm for the Des Moines area. I was about 90 minutes out when one of those weather status billboards informed me that "eastern" Iowa was having an enormous amount of snow. I should have known when they mentioned a large area of an entire state that I was in for something awful. It turns out the weather people were right and it took me about an hour and a half to go 45 miles into Ankeny in a drive that would have made a mailman nervous. The exit numbers were all frosted over and I actually had to stop one time and ask where I was. It was a white knuckle drive and, by the time I finally got to Ankeny, I was really stressed.

Luckily, the local Chili's was close to my hotel and had my prescription.













I met Brandon Dean (the director at AHS) and his wife there for dinner. They brought their son, Carter (who barely said a word the entire time) with them. He takes a good picture and, as I found out the next day when he and his mom, Ashley, dropped by to watch some of the rehearsals, he is the unofficial mascot of the choir program. I think he was fascinated by the blinking red light on my camera.













Apparently they had some sort of advisement period before I got there and the students like to make grilled cheese sandwiches during this time. How often does a choir room smell like Kraft singles? They also had the dry erase board all decked out.













First, I worked with the Ankeny Singers on The Boy Who Picked Up His Feet to Fly. They sounded awesome. This is their "fun" picture.













I hadn't heard that piece live since 2003 so it was fun to get to know it again. It was like visiting an old friend that I hadn't seen in a while. I wrote it six and a half years ago and it was in good hands with Mr. Cacciatore and his singers.

I learned that Ankeny High School is known throughout the state for having a great show choir program. They have these enormous full-length mirrors right in the choir room to fascilitate rehearsal.













After the Ankeny Singers I worked with the Concert Choir on their commissioned piece, Renascence. I used a portion of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay and set it for choir and piano. This ensemble--for only having maybe 40 singers--puts out a ton of sound. They are very serious about doing a good job (like really serious...they wouldn't laugh at my jokes...which, come to think of it, might have been because they just weren't funny) and performed the bejeezus out of the piece. Since I wrote it way back in October, it was awesome to finally hear it. I really can't say enough how awesome this choir was. It was awesome. Did I mention how it was awesome?

Here's conductor Brandon Dean warming them up before I got on the podium and ruined everything. They also performed a really cool hymn setting that Mr. Dean wrote.













After the Concert Choir I worked with their women's ensemble, Cantamus, on The Arrow and The Song. I took way too much time to work with them and, unfortunately, didn't get a picture. However, this isn't a comment on how the rehearsal went because, as I'd come to expect by this point in the day, they did not disappoint.

As I said before Ankeny High School has an awesome show choir program (they told me a story about how one of their competitors drove 3 hours across Iowa to videotape them prior to the competition...can you believe that!) and there are a ton of trophies around the room to testify to this fact. Since they had an extra few to go around, Mr. Dean and Mr. Cacciatore presented me with one (that was taller than me) in honor of my visit.













I was happy with my new gift. I have no idea where this is going to go.













Okay, they didn't really give me the trophy but it certainly made for an internet-worthy picture. Thanks to Mr. Dean, Mr. Cacciatore and all the awesome singers I worked with in my short time in Iowa. It made the trip through all the snow completely worth it. Go Hawks!

honors choirs + sufjan

We're blessed with a wealth of choirs here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes and it obviously wouldn't be a proper 150th anniversary if we didn't have a kajillion choral concerts honoring that aspect of the state's heritage. I've been through one already and, last Sunday, I had the opportunity to go down to Rochester and work with the Honors Choirs of Southeast Minnesota on a few of my pieces for their March VOICES concert.

I've been involved with this organization off and on since 2003 as a subsitute conductor for rehearsals but this is the first time they've actually done any of my compositions. I spoke with the Treble Choir (5th and 6th graders) about The Arrow & The Song and worked with the Concert Choir (the advanced SATB choir of high school students) on when god decided to invent. Both choirs did an understandably amazing job and I'm anxious to see how my pieces will fit in with the concert as a whole.

Here's the Concert Choir doing some sort of weird, kinesthetic warmup excercises.













On a side note I just bought Sufjan Stevens' Avalanche album. It's all material that got cut from his 2005 Illinoise album...which was already 22 tracks to begin with. Heap on top of that Avalanche's 21 more and you come up with a grand total of 43 songs for one recording session! This guy just doesn't know how to disappoint. In fact, he plays almost everything on the album. And I'm not talking about just playing guitar, drums and bass, either. He plays flute, English horn, oboe, trumpet and a bunch of other stuff. It's ridiculous.

















So that's that. It's a pretty slow blog season at the moment. Work on the opera has slowed to a (temporary) halt and I don't have any residencies until late February. I'm thinking about doing some more philosophical stuff that might be a little more interesting to read. We'll see, I guess. Happy trails.

mpr interview

Minnesota Public Radio just uploaded the performance that The Singers recorded last Monday for their upcoming concert. You can read the brief article and listen to the segment here.













It's always funny to see what they use and what they don't. I talked for a couple of minutes with Steve Staruch but they ended up only using 2 or 3 sentences. Oh well.

Last night was the first concert that the Singers did in the Twin Cities proper and it was a full house of composers. We all posed for the obligatory (and sometimes maddening) If There Isn't a Picture it Never Happened picture. Can you pick who's still in concert dress?













Left to right: Minnesota poet Michael Dennis Browne (some of his poetry was included), conductor Matt Culloton, Stephen Paulus, David Evan Thomas, Abbie Betinis, Craig Carnahan, Jocelyn Hagen, Tim Takach, some bald guy and Edie Hill.