fantasia: on some vegetables + on a ground + for 7 (count 'em) trumpets

Choral musicians are notoriously busy during the krissmiss season and this vocalist is no exception. I mention this only because this entry is more about clearing the stable of bloggable nonsense I have saved up than anything else. I worked a solid 17 days in a row up until last Thursday and, since I now have the time to look back on some things that I wanted to write about, I think I can cobble together an entry here.

First I’d like to mention what has become my favorite restaurant ever: Barbette. It’s a beautiful French bistro nestled about three blocks away from my rented Uptown real estate at the corner of Lake & Irving and the food is par excellence. I’ve only eaten there maybe four or five times (which is a lot since I am always on the lookout for a new place to try) but every single time has been amazing.

Now I’m not completely sure how to make a really great risotto (I’m told it’s easy but time-consuming) but the best I’ve ever had is at Barbette. I picked my sister, Caitlin, up from the airport last week and took her there to have dinner. The vegetarian option that night was the aforementioned risotto (with wild mushrooms) and gotdamn! it was good.


(Quick side note: the vegetarian option the last time I went there was the Croque Madame. This translates roughly to “Mrs. Crunch” but I decided to call my beautiful grilled Gruyère sandwich a “madame sandwich” because it sounded a whole lot better.)

I think I should mention briefly that I sometimes feel like I talk about the fact that I’m a vegetarian a lot. I’ve met plenty of people that are what I call “vegetarian douchebags” and I'm hyper-sensitive to not coming off like this amongst mixed company (hopefully I‘ve succeeded).

In any case, the reason I talk about being herbivorous a lot is that every really-good-but-also-vegetarian meal seems like a huge discovery for me; almost like a secret I found that the world doesn’t know yet but totally should.

But, sue me, I’m from the Midwest. We like meat here. When I told my grandmother (bless her heart) that I stopped eating meat she just said something like, “Oh, then we’ll make some tofu for you next time you’re here for Thanksgiving.” And I hate tofu (but love my grandmother). But this demonstrates a fundamental-but-probably-involuntary ignorance of meatless cuisine…which can be pretty tasty.

Vegetarian food is notoriously well-seasoned. I’m sure there’s a learned person’s reason for that but, in my estimation, the food tastes so complex because the meat flavor is gone and, due to the fact that the taste of just-plain-vegetables can be pretty tame, you have to make up for that with a unique-to-the-dish combination of spices. This is what I love about it. There’s a thousand different aromas and tastes rolling around in a good vegetarian meal compared to a plate of meat and potatoes (a culinary experience that, while admittedly delicious, is so commonplace that it has its own cliché).

Now, don’t get me wrong…because I think a nice steak or a kickass chicken marsala is just about the best thing ever. And, frankly, I cheat every once in a while with a bite from a sympathetic friend’s plate to remind me that what I’m missing is not that big of a deal. But, in the end, meat pretty much tastes like meat no matter what you put on or around it.

(Side note: that sweeping generalization is not completely true. There is an entire world out there of competitive barbecuing where people make a living by cooking the same cuts of meat that end up tasting wildly different from one another. And that’s totally awesome.)

So, with all that being said, here’s my latest find. I had a few people over for dinner recently and, since I’m in my “soup phase” right now, I decided to troll the Internets for a good recipe I could cook.

Voila! Bourou-Bourou from the Greek island of Corfu: boil some chopped vegetables in water and combine with some tomato paste (the only ingredient that isn’t fresh) and pasta.
The secret ingredient, however, is a bit of red pepper flakes. This is literally the only spice other than salt and pepper that goes into this thing but it totally makes the dish.

Alright, so that was the culinary half of this entry. The other thing I wanted to mention is that I attended a Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Concert last Thursday with a whole heap of composers (Jocelyn Hagen, Daniel Nass, Abbie Betinis and J. David Moore…you should all commission them) that consisted of nothing more than pieces written by John Harbison.

The playing was (obviously) incredible but I had a hard time taking anything from the music. It may be because I have a hard time perceiving structure if the music is on the fringes of tonality but I also think it’s because most of the pieces on the program (except for his Fantasia on a Ground) was--shall we say--more sentence-centered than paragraph-centered. And by this, I mean that there were almost no musical ideas that spun themselves out over a long period of time. In fact, one of the lengthier works on the program (at circa 25 minutes), Umbrian Landscapes with Saint, consisted of no less than 12 different movements with nine ritornellos.

And I hate collage.

This is not to say that I didn’t learn a whole lot from listening to a peerless orchestra play insanely difficult music that, since I’m primarily a vocalist, is far beyond the realm of my comfort zone.

So that was that, I suppose. I would love to see/hear his opera, The Great Gatsby, some time since it’s a form that I appreciate more.

On a different note, Jocelyn recently gave me the Mix of You-Have-to-Hear-This and, included with many other gems, was Eric Ewazen's Fantasia for Seven Trumpets. It is hands-down the most metallic piece I've ever heard not-played by a percussion ensemble. Buy it now.

Happy holidays!

a composer divided against himself + la musique de Jésus

I'm kind of picky when it comes to writing on anything but an acoustic piano so, since I'm away from said instruments today, I've decided to do some engraving on the o-PAY-ra in stead. A wonderful choir from California has commissioned what will be the very first performance of any kind for We, The Boys to take place next June. We'll be doing a suite of three movements from the largess that is my melodrama and, seeing as how two of the movements are already written and I've been trying to keep ahead of my deadlines (fingers crossed), I decided that starting on this would probably not be a bad thing. I'm notoriously abstract random--like way, way, way abstract random--and I need to have concrete, don't-f*ck-around deadlines which inspire enough guilt that I get my shit together and actually write.

So that's what I'm doing. Today is the piano part for the first movement: an aria for the character of Howard that is completely written and essentially needs to be given a compelling arrangement for choir and piano. No problem.

The weird thing about this process is that the piece was written in two "sessions" over the course of a year. The vocal part was composed in the summer of 2008 in both the Twin Cities as well as Decorah, Iowa and the piano part got its polish in June/July '09 in the practice huts at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan. So, although there was only one composer at the helm of this particular aria, it sometimes feels to me like there are three distinct sensibilités at work.

I write fairly quickly and rarely, if ever, do I have to keep my creative focus over such a long period of time (id est over two years). Writing this opera has become like an endurance trial and trusting my initial instinct--a huge part of my personal writing process--is sometimes a little dodgy. So I've got winter '09 Josh looking at vocal lines written by summer '08 Josh combined with piano parts by summer '09 Josh and we're all sort of staring at each other across the table waiting to see who's going to cave first:

winter '09: this vocal line might need to be changed for the sake of the singer.

summer '08: but that's what i wanted in the first place. it's got a little quiver in it that makes it effervescent.

summer '09: he thinks that, by using obscure words like "quiver" and "effervescent," he'll be able to impress you with his intelligence enough so that you'll acquiesce.

summer '08: you just said "acquiesce!"

winter '09: settle down, fellas. we're all in this together. do you want to go have a glass of wine or something? i know a great dessert bar down the street that has bottomless glasses of wine for $10 at happy hour.

summer '08: that sounds amazing!

summer '09: totally. let's go.

winter '09: alright, you two go on ahead and i'll pack up. i'll be there in a few hours. order me the house white and be prepared to talk about that berlioz memoir that we're reading when i get there.

summer '08/'09: awesome!

And that's how you get shit done here at joshuashank.com, folks. Ignore the person that wrote it initially and trust yourself in the moment. (And it helps if you can get those other two Joshs wicked drunk so they don't bother you.)

In other news, it's the holiday season and the Jesus music is as ubiquitous as McD's and Starb's. There are some really good rants out there by composers about the crappy/syrupy/vapid music that plays seemingly on a loop this time of year and, instead of this, I'd like to make my contribution to the I'm-a-serious-composer-and-my-tastes-are-super-refined-and-should-be-considered-more-esteemed-than-JCPenney's-music-people's's-choices pool.

I don't mind the crap. I just don't listen to it and, instead, look out for stuff that I really, really like.

Case in point: the Apollo's Fire baroque orchestra out of Cleveland. Madre de Dios they are amazing! Steve Staruch played a few tracks off of their Noels & Caroles from the Olde World on MPR a few days ago and I immediately ordered the album and scoured YouTube for some live videos. There isn't, like, a mother load or anything but there was an insanely beautiful performance of Vivaldi's "La Folia" (Watch around 4'19" or so when the principal cellist and his hair start doing some great off-the-string stuff.):

The tag line readeth thus: "The folia is an ancient dance from Portugal, where young girls engaged in the 'folly' of a wild dance of abandonment. The Folia dance traditionally gets faster and wilder toward the end. This arrangement by [artistic director/conductor] Jeannette Sorrell is a concerto grosso, after Vivaldi's triosonata, La Folia."

The only bad part about that video is that you can't buy the track anywhere. Luckily, the album I mentioned above is available on iTunes and it kicks ass. They go for a land speed record and burn through "Patapan" in 49 seconds flat and their principal soprano soloist, Sandra Simon, joins them on a few tracks with some amazing results (especially "Noël Nouvelet").

But this comes as no surprise to anyone who knows my musical tastes...because I lurv fast-ish Baroque-ish music. The composers weren't afraid to just get into a good groove and go and go and go. It plays directly into the hands of my reptilian brain that wants nothing more than to gyrate to fat beats.

Mahalo.

warning: wonky post ahead OR i heart smart conductors

I went to work with the Women's Chorus at the University of Minnesota last week on their performance of “Snow by Morning” and had a totally great time. It's an older piece and, although I'm a little ashamed to admit it, I had to be reminded of how it went beforehand. (I wonder if other composers have this problem.) Luckily I had a few minutes to sit down at a piano before I got up to wave my limbs at singers and accompanist under the watchful eye of their conductor. I had a blast and the singers followed me perfectly (although I have a sneaking suspicion that it was their talent as performers that’s to blame for this supposed success rather than my conducting abilities.)

Kathy Saltzman Romey is the conductor of the Women's Chorus (as well as the Grammy-nominated Minnesota Chorale) and her interpretation was unlike anything I think I've heard in a long time with regards to that piece. She stretched the tempi out and slowed the pace way down here and there and, in one case, eased into a faster tempo by way of a stringendo that reminded me of a locomotive slowly starting up. Of course none of this was in the score, but that didn't stop the choir from advocating her vision of the work at all. It's one of those rare moments where the conductor finds things to do with a piece that I didn't think were there. Usually ensembles call me in to shed light on what they’re working on. It almost never works in reverse. It was such a pleasure to "re-discover" that piece as I hadn't heard it live since 2002.

But, with regards to Dr. Romey's interpretation, I also think tempos have to be flexible. Experiences like this sometimes make me wonder if other composers are this non-proprietary about their pieces. Are there others out there who throw tantrums about their metronome markings or is that the exception to the proverbial rule?

For my part I think I have a pretty good understanding that a marking I've written isn't necessarily the last word on my piece as long as the choir sounds like they're making it work. I've always thought there's a weird balance that singers have to strike between tempos and the different articulations they have to use in order to make what they're singing sound good. That balance can come into play because of a variety of reasons (conductor preference, size of the ensemble or the reverb in the performance space are just a few that come to mind) but a piece sometimes lives or dies by it.

I faced an extreme example of this back in 2003 when the US Air Force Singing Sergeants gave the premiere of "Musica animam tangens" at the ACDA national convention in New York City. They took the main part of the piece in what felt like an incredibly fast 2 (compared to the relatively slow tempo I had written) simply because they're a smaller choir (20 at the most, I think) and the length of the phrases at the written tempo would have sounded anemic. At the time I was at a loss as to what to do until I just settled down a bit and actually started to hear what they were doing with it (which was awesome).

But what if a conductor isn't that smart or a choir isn't good enough to make the changeover? I have a friend whose piece was recorded by a professional choir (which shall remain nameless) and the conductor took the tempo faster than what she had written. However, he had the choir sing the piece as if it was 10-15 beats slower and the imbalance between the tempo and the articulations made it sound like it was the composer's fault that the piece was so uninteresting. How could she possibly have fixed that in the score?

And that just brings us back to indicating the tempo with a metronome marking and hoping for the best. Or maybe I should just put an asterisk next to it that says something like:

“This is sort of how fast I want you to perform it but you can go slower or faster if you need to. Just make it sound good so I don’t look like an idiot if I’m there and I have to stand up in front of an audience.”

There’s nothing worse than having to be recognized as the composer of a piece immediately after it receives a horrible performance. I like to think that the audience is sympathetic towards me in those cases rather than caustic...but I’ve also sat in that audience and watched other composers stand up and face that exact situation and probably not been on my best behavior.

Yeah, so I guess it’s an endless cycle. But food for thought nonetheless and I suppose the end result is this:

“I love smart conductors”

And--just because this has been an incredibly wonky blog post--I give you Serious Cat

the perfect iTunes stocking stuffer for the winter celebrative season

Do you know a Joshua Shank fan? Well, then you can buy them what they've always wanted for the low, low price of $1.98: world premiere recordings of my carol arrangements which recently popped up on iTunes performed by two of Minnesota's 10,000 choirs.

First you've got The Singers--Minnesota Choral Artists giving a great rendition of "Go, Tell It On the Mountain" from their CD, Shout the Glad Tidings. I've had this album on repeat since they recorded it back in 2004 and it's finally available for easy download. It also includes some great arrangements by Jocelyn Hagen (the soli quartet part on "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" will kick your ass every time) and Abbie Betinis ("The Babe of Bethlehem") but my favorite track is an almost-never-heard piece by Jack Jarrett called "Go, Pretty Child." He manages to set the words "stomacher" and "mellifluous" without sounding weird or pretentious and, since I had to look that first one up, that probably wasn't easy.

The Choral Arts Ensemble also just released a great album of holiday/Christmas/what-have-you music called Joy to the World which includes a recording of probably the last piece I'll ever use the Basque language in (although, to be fair, most of it is in English). They precede my work immediately with John Rutter's "Good Ale" and, being a lover of that piece's namesake, I'll just recommend that one and say "enough said."

And if that wasn't good enough, these choirs are conducted by identical twin brothers. How cool is that? The choral world has it's own Minnesota twins.

Happy Festivus!

spring has sprung + currently listening

The deadlines keep rolling closer and, with a bit of luck, I won't be missing any of them for this season. I finished up the piece for Brownsburg High School, Spring, this past week and I think it's going to be really, really good. It's quite a bit simpler than the winter and Autumn movements of the cycle but I think that flows from the poetry by Sara Teasdale rather than any sort of compositional decision I made.

I used her poem, Twilight, to fill out part of the dramatic narrative and was extremely tempted to quote a musical device from the craptacle (that's my combination of the words "crap" and "spectacle") movie that came out last year but, alas, it slipped my mind. I plan on moving to the Pacific Northwest and brooding about this for a few weeks before coming back to the Midwest where brooding is discouraged from birth.

But I digress.

I'm still just under two weeks ahead of schedule in my grand scheme of commissions this season so I have the feeling that I'll be working quite a bit on my piece for The Singers in the coming weeks. I had originally set myself a February 1 deadline for that piece but I think I'm going to aim closer to early January instead. Some end-of-the-year projects have presented themselves recently and I need to get cracking on them if I want to--oh, I don't know--not go insane.

I've limited my iTunes habit to 4 albums a month (one a week) and so far I've been doing okay. I made some good buys recently that you should totally check out. First off we've got a great album by Jay Farrar (of Son Volt) and Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) called One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Music from Kerouac's Big Sur. It uses passages from Jack Kerouac's novel, Big Sur, set to music and it's pretty much been on a loop in my Uptown apartment when I'm not watching old episodes of thirtysomething on DVD (remember that show?).

I've never been a huge fan of Kerouac (although this blog used to be named after one of his techniques for "modern prose") but I did try to get through On The Road at some point. Having listened to this album for a while I may have to go and visit Big Sur now because I'm definitely intrigued.




















There are some interesting songs on the album and, although I'm more a fan of the ones that Gibbard sings, it's all pretty good. I like the title track in its straightforward telling of a story but my personal favorite is "The Void." It uses this strangely-constructed melody over some bluesy, modal stuff that gets completely hypnotic and reminds me of chant. Here's a shaky, YouTube video from a live show the two of them did last October.

Then, in a huge departure from those songs, I've had Lady GaGa's new album, The Fame Monster, going for the past few weeks during my hi-speed morning burn down I-35W. Waking up before 6am is tough unless you have a fresh cup of coffee in hand and "Bad Romance" pounding out of your speakers at 55mph. (Combine that with an occasional buttermilk scone from the bakery next door and you've got a possible Combustible Edison.)

God this album is so good. "Alejandro" and "Teeth" are my personal favorites but I love the part in "Bad Romance" where she mysteriously starts singing in French. It's impossible to resist.

Is it bad that this thing has only been out for a few weeks but I can't wait until she comes out with a new album? I think I'm about to unrepentantly become a fan.

On to the next composition. I'm looking to use a really great Wendell Berry text for what I'm writing for The Singers and I think I've got some good stuff in mind (including an orchestration trick that I've known about for a while but haven't had occasion to use quite yet).

happy shanksgiving! OR why not a youtube video populated with repeated picturesque vistas from what i can only assume is Utah?

Here's a great performance of winter from the Weber State University Chamber Choir in Utah. This piece is one of the more cranky ones in my catalog and they perform it SO well. Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

new toy

I was helping my friend, Eric, move this summer and during the trek from Former Home to New Home a motorcycle passed us as we were driving a van packed full of stuff down the highway. This particular motorcycle was really, really loud and, since we were going through a tunnel at the time, it was that much more offensive to mine ears.

I don't get the fetish of loud automobiles and I never have. Because of this I made some snarky comment about the uselessness of machismo and asked Eric what the appeal was. Of course, it turns out that owning something like that is just like wanting a new toy when you're a kid.

Still nothing from me.

This then prompted a discussion about what I would do if I had to spend a million dollars.

How about a sports car?

What's the point? Why would I ever want to spend money on something like that?

What about a nice house?

Like a house that costs a million dollars?

Yeah.

Why would I need all that room?

There's nothing that you want that could cost all that money.

I guess I would just pay off all my loans, buy a decent house and a decent car and then just give the rest away.

That's incredibly boring. There isn't a single toy that you don't need that you could use that money for. What about guitars?

Oh. That actually sounds like something I might buy.

So that's your 'toy' then. You're a guitar guy.

Shit. I think you might be right.

So feast your eyes on my newest toy: a beautiful Fender Telecaster. I got it for a ridiculously small amount of money on Craigslist.















And it plays like a dream. One of the reasons I've always wanted a Telecaster is because the sound is so clear. You can play an acoustic gig with just a little reverb and a microphone or you can turn up and wail.

I don't have a name for this thing yet but my guitar collection is complete for the time being.

dominick argento vs. 80's aerobic goodtimes

Jocelyn and I went to the Minnesota Opera's production of Dominick Argento's opera buffa Casanova's Homecoming last night (that's a lot of apostrophes in one sentence) and it was a fantastic show performed impeccably. The best part was the opera-within-an-opera thing in the first act that worked frickin' perfectly. Since the action takes place in Casanova's Venice the music had to be reminiscent of opera from that time period. It must have been fun to "try on" that harmonic language and style while manipulating it to his own devices.

I found a picture of the set design from that particular scene on the Internets. Here you've got the opera's opera being performed in the middle and then the actual plot happening in the boxes on either side (Casanova is on the left and the antagonist, the Marquis de Lisle, is with his crew on the right).














Okay, now I'm about to throw something mildly sacrilegious out here--at least here in the Twin Cities--so everybody take a breath. I don't really like Argento's music all that much. Some people flip out over his vocal works and, honestly there are some pieces out there that I really like ("Walden Pond" and "Dover Beach Revisited" are amazing choral works) but I've never heard anything that made me feel certain that I liked it on the very first hearing. Casanova's Homecoming changed this for me because the entire thing was designed to make the audience have a great time.

And that's exactly what I had. It was hilarious and I'd see it again in a heartbeat. I may even jump online later today to see if I can find a recording I know is floating around from the Houston Grand Opera's production.

Someone told me beforehand that it was an incredibly long show (three acts and two intermissions) and I was like, "Oh no. I'm going to be really tired by the end." But I think he broke it up perfectly. There should be two intermissions in everything.












There was a great review in the Star Tribune a couple of days ago that, amongst other things, stated that the opera was, "a meticulous, spirited production that argues powerfully for the work's place among the best modern comic operas." And I think that sums up my feelings about the entire thing.

Now, going back to my previous statement about Argento's music, I think I sometimes respond so negatively to it because it's incredibly erudite (I'm not the first person to make this accusation) and I tend to like music that wears its emotions on the surface. For better or for worse, Argento doesn't write that kind of stuff.

It should be noted, however, that this didn't keep him from forging an amazing career in classical music. I'm so glad I got to see this show and also wish I could rock the glasses like Dr. Argento.

In other news, why does this video only have a little more than 800 views.I would love for this event to be local so I can attend sometime. Sadly, I don't think this is the case and I therefore weep bitter tears.

"You're all beautiful. Except your lives."

Mahalo.

reelin' in the years OR how many finnish conductors does it take to watch a steely dan concert?

The answer to that question: at least one that I talked to. I totally ran into Osmo Vänskä at Northrop last Sunday when I went to a Steely Dan concert with my dad.















They played their entire album, Aja, front-to-back and, although my experience with SD flows only from their greatest hits and quasi-cameos in the Yacht Rock episodes (you should check that link if you're a 70s rock fan...Eagles!), I'm really glad I went to this. It was some good father/son time and they are incredible musicians. There was a full compliment of brass on stage with a trio of back-up singers in sparkly dresses and a whole bunch of others (a total of 13 people).

Time well spent.

Mahalo.

done + a whole lot of music

I always hate it when bloggers start a post off with something like "it's been so long since I posted anything" but...it's been a long time since I posted anything. That will have to serve as my apology for what will inevitably be some sort of treatise on my life at the moment.

But that's neither here nor there. The bottom line is that I'm done with that French set! I've been writing about my recent attempts at trying to wrestle the Rilke poetry into my music for some time now and I finally finished the thing last week. It feels so good to get it out of the way so I can sit and wait for Jessica to sing the bejeezus out of it. I ended up calling the thing Trois Méditations ("Three Meditations") because the poetry has that kind of vibe to it: thoughtful, introspective and peaceful.

Jessica is incredibly excited to perform the set next April (I think that's the right date...I'll have to check on that) and I'm excited to hear her sing it. She came to town a few weeks ago for a thing with the Minnesota Opera and we had a chance to pal around downtown Minneapolis and visit the Twin Cities' fabled Mall of America (which isn't really a big deal...it's just a big mall). Here she is on the Guthrie's endless bridge mugging for the most attractive picture ever taken of her. She'd never seen the Mississippi River before so that was a stop on our abbreviated tournée des Villes Jumelles.

And since that piece is done, I've moved on to my next commission: a new choral work for Brownsburg High School in Indiana. They made a blog appearance way back in April of 2007 when I flew out to conduct them through an intense performance of Autumn. In discussions with their amazing director, Debi Prather, we decided to stick with the theme and have them premiere the next season piece I was ready to write. It's been six years since I wrote one of those pieces (there will obviously be a total of four) and, since that was how I first encountered this amazing choral program, it seemed like it was the right thing to do. I'm way ahead on it and, although I set a December 15 deadline for myself, I imagine it will be completely done a month ahead of schedule. This doesn't happen very often so I'm running with it and will try to get to work on the next commission in line.

As far as listening goes, I've been to a ton of performances in the Twin Cities area recently. The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the SPCO Chorale gave an insanely beautiful rendering of Arvo Pärt's Te Deum and Duruflé's Requiem a few weeks back. It was really good to hear both of those works live and, since the Te Deum is one of my favorite choral/orchestral works ever, I had a blast. (Side note: I've only laid out to get a tan once in my life and that's what I listened to...I burned but that was hardly Arvo's fault.) The penultimate chord of the Requiem is this incredibly chunky thing that Dale Warland (who oversaw the proceedings) stopped on for just a second longer than he needed to. It's one of those sonorities that makes your eyelids flutter a little and your eyes roll back in your head. It's not really highlighted in the old, standard Shaw recording so I may be on the search for another one some time in the near future. It was just some really, really good stuff sung by a world-class ensemble.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention The Singers' mammoth performance of the Rachmaninoff All-Night Vigil this past weekend. This choir took this thing and made it there own...just incredible musicianship combined with ownership of the material. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to get to know this piece so thoroughly and the fact that it was with that inspiring group of people makes it that much better. The Pioneer Press gave a great review of the concerts in which the writer went so far as to say that "you owe it to yourself" to attend. And he wasn't joking. It was a serious 60 minutes of music-making.

On Halloween I made it out to see Ben Folds play a show with the Minnesota Orchestra. It was mainly the same set as his Live with the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra DVD but there were some new ones thrown in from his last two albums. It was nowhere near as fun as the last Folds show I went to but wasn't a chore to sit through at all. Last time I saw him I was crammed in a club with earsplitting volume and a stripped-down trio accompanying. Taking the volume way down and adding an orchestra was more of a curiosity than anything else but the fact that it was on Halloween definitely allowed all the people I was with to dress up and cavort around Orchestra Hall in costume. I went as Triathlon Moses and my sister, Emma, was a spot-on Lady Gaga. Even Folds and conductor Sarah Hicks got in on the fun when they came out after intermission dressed as Sonny and Cher.
















Last night I went out to the Cedar Cultural Center to see a triple bill of indie folk-rock artists. The headliner was local singer/songwriter Chris Koza. Good stuff. Not my style but obviously a lot of integrity in it.




















The middle act was local quartet the Wars of 1812 in their final performance as a group. It's too bad, really, because they were quite good.

JoAnna James started the show off with an amazing set of tunes and was my personal favorite by far. It was just her acoustic guitar alongside another player on electric adding some spice here and there. I always enjoy it when I can hear a singer/songwriter strip everything away but the very basic elements of their music. She did an incredible job.

So that's that. I think I'm caught up on blog stuff now. I'm off to Sham Rock's tonight to meet with some friends and hopefully hear some kickass Irish traditional music. I just finished a three song French set for soprano, piano and harp and am 85% done with a new choral work. I think I deserve it, damn it!

currently listening

I've been listening to Matisyahu's new album, Light, at least once a day since my brother gave it to me recently. It's an absolutely incredible achievement and certainly a departure from his last one.

I read a review of this thing somewhere in which the reviewer described trying to tell his friends who Matisyahu is. It read something like, "He's the Hasidic Jewish rapper with a reggae rock band."

And that pretty much sums up the public image he's cultivated on his last few albums, right? This new album presents him as a human being rather than a Jewish rapper; sort of like a Christian rock artist dropping the aspects of faith that are "normally" in their music and just writing about something that pertains to all of us. In fact--though I'd have to look--I suspect there isn't a reference to "god/God" in the entire thing.

So maybe he's aiming for a wider audience. Or maybe he's just evolving as an artist (not in the Darwinian sense but, rather, he's just into writing different stuff at the moment). Maybe this is why the album cover for Light has almost no trace of the traditional Hasidic garb that his previous album, Youth, did.

But that's just me waxing philosophical about how a marketing campaign might be made for someone as "out of the box" as Matisyahu. The bottom line is that Light is incredible.

The first song, "Smash Lies," is my hands-down favorite. It's got this really cool harmonic stacking on "You can listen stereo or monotone/Mega phone, mellow drone DJ with delay" that makes me enthusiastically ball up a fist every time I hear it. Then a few tracks later, in "I Will Be Light," he drops one of those amazing lyrics that just get repeated over and over again: "You got one tiny moment in time for life to shine/Burn away the darkness." It sounds a little preachy when I write it out here but I can assure you that he does it a huge amount of justice in the song.

I'm so glad he finally came out with a new album. It's been over a year since I saw him live so I hope he comes around the Twin Cities some time soon.

carlos salzedo, please allow me to introduce you to joanna newsom + soup!

I've been trying to finish this song cycle for soprano, piano and harp and am very, very close. I had a meeting with my French tutor last Wednesday (at the always-amazing Cafe Latte in Saint Paul) to get the syllabic stresses correct and talk shop about what-have-you over some food. We may have been a little loud because the gentlemen next to us stopped me on the way out to question me about what kind of music we were writing.

Composing for the harp is a very strange thing for a composer who, like myself, writes primarily for the voice. In getting to know the instrument better I've gone through all sorts of listening phases: from Debussy's Dances for Harp and Strings to some sort-of-New-Age-y music by David Michael that is really, really good (listen here!).

Then there's the folk artist, Joanna Newsom. Anyone ever heard of her? I hadn't until my sister forced her album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, on me. Her voice is...um...a "singular" instrument. Here, listen.





That voice really felt awful to listen to the first time I heard it, but the fact that she sings and plays harp at the same time was just too intriguing not to keep coming back to the songs as a curiosity...and the harp stuff that she writes is totally hypnotic. The more I listened to it the more I was able to wrap my mind around what she was doing and desensitize myself to the grating nature of her voice. She wormed her way into my heart and I think I'm a fan now. Of course, with lyrics like "I killed my dinner with karate" how can you not love it?

Aside from just listening to all sorts of harp stuff, my other major resource has been Carlos Salzedo's landmark 1921 book, Modern Study of the Harp. It's a massively important work for harpists and, aside from the études that you would assume are in a book like this, there are all sorts of reference materials for how to do certain out-of-the-box stuff on the instrument. For instance, I never knew there was a harp technique called "Aeolian Flux." How many other instruments have technical terms that sound like a dystopic Charlize Theron sci-fi movie?

And, as over-the-top as that movie reference was, it's nowhere near to how over-the-top Salzedo writes. The first page of the book has nothing but the phrase "La harpe est a la musique ce que la musique est a la vie" written on it. Translated that means, "The harp is to music what music is to life." What does that even mean?




















Throughout the book's introduction he comes off as more of a harp guru than a harp teacher. For example:

There is nothing difficult. There are only NEW things, unaccustomed things.

When one is profoundly impressed with this truth, has meditated upon it and then put it into practice, calmness and confidence will ensue; and thanks to these indispensable qualities, musical practice becomes an agreeable pastime, leading towards the purest joys.

Now some of that might be the translation out of the original French text, but it still sounds like Confucius is trying to teach me the harp. You'll hear no complaints from this composer, though. The book makes me want to write a lot more for that instrument.

In gastronomical news, I made some amazing tomato soup recently. It's sort of a Cliff's Notes version of a Giada De Laurentiis recipe called Quick and Spicy Tomato Soup. My version has a bunch more onion and garlic (some of it raw) but pretty much everything else was unchanged. It was way good.

cheating death with stephen colbert

I try to watch The Daily Show or The Colbert Report when I eat lunch every day and the first three and a half minutes of this clip may be one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It's always hilarious when he can't stay in character and Camel releasing a new smokelss tobacco product sends him off the rails in a big way. Please enjoy!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Cheating Death - Snus & Placebo Effect
http://www.colbertnation.com/
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore

december in october

I went to an awesome Decemberists concert last night at the State Theatre. They played the Walker Art Center's festival this summer but I was at Interlochen and had to miss one of my favorite bands ever. The show they put on featured their new album, The Hazards of Love, played in its entirety with guests Becky Stark and Shara Worden singing the roles of Margaret and the Queen of the Forest, respectively.

I can't overstate how much fun this was. How many times am I going to get a chance to see an incredible rock opera semi-staged and played this well? And to hear Shara hit that high note at the end of "The Wanting Comes In Waves/Repaid" is worth the price of admission...she is absolutely incredible. I would highly recommend her album, Bring Me the Workhorse, if you haven't heard it yet (especially "We Were Sparkling").

I blogged briefly about The Hazards of Love last March before I left for Greece but didn't really say much because I hadn't had a chance to really absorb the thing. It is easily my favorite album that The Decemberists have ever put out (Sorry Picaresque. But you put up a massive struggle before you were unseated). The music ranges from heavy metal ("The Queen's Rebuke/The Crossing") to Nashville-style country & western ("The Hazards of Love 4") to one of the best/creepiest uses of a harpsichord on a rock record I think I've ever heard ("The Hazards of Love 3"). And the motives they use to tie everything together are amazing little things that re-occur at just the right time.

And if that wasn't enough, they played another set of songs from their other albums. For the final encore they invited Becky and Shara back out for an incredible cover of Heart's "Crazy On You." I am so glad that YouTube had this...and it's even from the Rock the Garden concert here in Minneapolis that I missed last summer.

currently reading

I just finished Jeffrey Zaslow's The Girls From Ames: A Story of Women & a Forty-Year Friendship. Now, why--you might ask--would I be reading such a thing? Well, first of all, because it's a pretty decent/interesting book. But, secondly, a friend of mine is actually one of the main characters.

Which is really, really weird. But I'll get to that.





















Although the title is pretty self-explanatory, the story is about 11 girls (Jenny, Kelly, Sally, Cathy, Karen, Karla, Marilyn, Diana, Jane, Angela and Sheila) who grew up together in Ames, Iowa and how they have managed to maintain their intense friendships with each other over the past 40 years. If you'll pardon some crass definitions, it all sounds very "Oprah" or "Lifetime" when I say it out loud and, frankly, that's because it is--if you're that cynical about it. Overall, it's just a story that can be incredibly moving at times. It's not my normal cup of tea but there are some things that transcend genre in this book that are exceptionally powerful:

• Karla's daughter, Christie, has a battle with cancer that I'm not ashamed to say made me a little teary-eyed while I read it.


• Kelly says some extremely candid things about her battle with breast cancer. In particular, what she says about how it changed her body image showed me an aspect of that disease I had never thought of.


• The death--at a young age--of one in the group (I won't say who) really colored their adult perceptions of how they've lived their lives. It introduced mortality to the Ames girls a lot earlier than "the norm" and this obviously had an effect.

Zaslow is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and is co-author of The Last Lecture but this book is solely his and the reportage is thorough in the pictures it paints. Here's a decent review from The Dallas Morning News that could shed some light on it all if you're interested. And, if that weren't enough, the publisher has set up an interactive website at girlsfromames.com for people to share their own stories. Definitely cool!

The strange thing about reading this book was that one of the Ames girls is a friend of mine that I've known for going on 10 years now. Every time she popped into the narrative it made the reading a much more immediate and intimate experience that I'll probably have to wait a while before I stumble upon again. But, aside from that, it's a great book to page your way through.

Next it's on to Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity. Aside from the kickass title, it's one of those books that has absolutely no description of itself anywhere on the jacket because, as I'm gradually finding out, it's really tough to determine what it's actually about. It's great--don't get me wrong, here--but I'm almost 20 pages in at the moment and I have no idea what I'm in store for. In fact, it kind of reminds me of the sensation of reading something by Hunter S. Thompson or Jack Kerouac; the journey being more important than the destination and whatnot.

dominick argento vs. the bear

Thanks to the Minneapolis music scene, I went to a couple of great concerts in the last week. Last Friday it was a VocalEssence show that presented the Midwestern premiere of Dominick Argento's Evensong: Of Love and Angels. He's the hometown hero 'round these parts and is beloved by pretty much every composer and conductor I know in the area. The 45-minute piece was written in memory of his late wife and is a man exposed in grief. The amount of confidence it must have taken in order to write something so personally painful is beyond me.





















The opening movement, "Threnody," was an orchestral piece with soprano Maria Jette offstage (and unseen) singing on neutral vowels and it took me a second to realize what he was doing: it was the spirit of his wife (an operatic soprano prominent in the Twin Cities community) coming to give the piece permission to exist in the first place. Very goose bump-inducing and easily the best part of the work. The rest was typical Argento (both the stuff that agrees with me and the stuff that doesn't) but, that being said, he's earned the right to say whatever he wants. The fact that he let the listener in on his own grief-stricken heart so readily makes it okay for him to say pretty much whatever he likes and, in the end, I'm profoundly grateful that I got to hear this piece with him in the audience.

Read reviews by two different writers from the Star Tribune here and here. This blog has gotten incredibly wonky as of late so, if you're game, I'll let them explain the piece in much more depth. (And you should definitely check them out...there are some things about it that are very interesting.)

This past Wednesday I headed over to First Avenue to see a Grizzly Bear show. I blogged about their latest album, Veckatimest, way back in July and they finally came to town. It was a fantastic show and, having lived with that album for the past three months, it was awesome to see it translated into a sold out live show amongst all those fans (who were packed cheek-to-jowl in the club).







One of my new favorite things about this band is that for their latest single, "While You Wait for the Others," they released a B-side with none other than Michael McDonald singing the vocal track. They just drop out the lead vocal that's normally there and have Mr. Yacht Rock himself sing it instead. And, you know what? It's really, really good...I almost prefer it to the original. Here, listen to it!

multiple solutions + currently listening

Over the last few days I've been working to get the proportions for this new movement of the French set down. It's a fairly placid piece but the piano has outbursts here and there that need measuring to make sure they don't take over the sensibility of the entire thing.

The Rilke text for this one is absolutely beautiful. Here's the English translation:

Perhaps it's no more than the fire's reflection
On some piece of gleaming furniture
That the child remembers so much later
Like a revelation.

And if, in his later life, one day
Wounds him like so many others,
It's because he mistook some risk
Or other for a promise.

Let's not forget the music, either,
That soon hauled him toward absence complicated
By an overflowing heart...

I love how he adds that ellipsis at the end. It delicately insists the entire emotional world of the thing up to somewhere you can't see. I've put one of my own at the end of the movement with the harp intoning the 5th and the 3rd of the tonic chord in succession (maybe with harmonics...haven't decided yet).

And remember that math problem I blogged about an entry ago? I came up with what I saw as two viable solutions. First is the one notated in 6/8 that I didn't end up using:








I decided against this one because notating the vocal part above it made the relatively simple line appear incredibly complicated. So I pulled up stakes on my 6/8 riff and re-notated it in 2/4.

This puts the complicated-looking-but-not-actually-that-hard music in the hands of the pianist. However, I think instrumentalists have come to expect this sort of thing so there shouldn't be a problem.

We'll see how this all fleshes out as the work continues, of course. At the moment I'm trying to bitchslap Finale into letting me notate the vocal parts in 3/8 above this 2/4 without any funny business. It's either that or I've got to figure out a way to notate that 2/4 thing in 3/8 with all sorts of weird bar crossings. Stupid Notated Music! It would be so much easier to just teach this by rote.

The Singers have been preparing the entire Rachmaninoff All-Night Vigil for their fall series (check out the Dale Warland Singers' live recording of the piece...the ninth movement is incredible) and someone called that work "the grand choral symphony" within earshot of me. I had never thought about it that way and, after stewing about it for a while, I've come to the conclusion that there really isn't another a cappella choral work with that dramatic scope and sterling reputation. Maybe Frank Martin's Mass for Double Choir but that still only clocks in at circa 25 minutes (versus Rachmaninoff's full hour). Can anyone think of any other pieces like this?

So with that in mind I'd like to make a nomination to the Grand Choral Symphony Club. How about Joby Talbot's Path of Miracles?

Haven't heard of it? Well, then rundon'twalk to iTunes or Amazon and order it right now. There's an incredible recording by the commissioning choir, Tenebrae, that you've got to listen to. Abbie Betinis gifted me the album a few years ago and insisted (like more than she usually does) that I listen to it. She felt so strongly about it that she actually went out and spent money on me.

And, as it turned out, she was completely right. It's an amazing work that serves as a musical treatment of sorts for the most enduring route of Catholic pilgrimage, the Camino Frances ("The French Way"). I won't go into too much depth about all the specifics of the piece (because--seriously--find out for yourself) other than to mention here that its four movements are named after the major staging posts of the route: Roncesvalles, Burgos, Leon and Santiago, respectively.

It's rainy and cold here in Minneapolis today and this piece is perfect for sitting down with a hot cup of coffee and some engraving to get done. For me, it cultivates the same sort of warm-and-cozy devotional aesthetic as The Rock's Vespers does. Give Sergei some company and go get it!

a math problem + i heart hector

I spent the majority of last week trying to make strict minimalism line up with the modern romantic aesthetic. Sounds heady, right? Not so.

The text I'm setting right now has this really cool line about the reflection of fire ("reflet du feu" in French) and so I got this sound-image in my mind of sitting around a campfire having a conversation. No matter what's being said in that situation, there's always this constant underpinning of the crackle of the fire. The musical device that came to represent this is the constant back-and-forth of a C-minor triad in either the piano or harp which vacillates from start to finish between a single 'C' and an 'Eb-G' double stop.

Unfortunately for my not-so-good-at-math brain, the music that surrounds that triad switches from 4/4 to 6/8 to 2/2 and all sorts of stuff in between with the crackle of that fire never changing tempo. What that means is I've got a math problem on my hands. How do I notate that in all those different meters so it never, ever changes?

So that's the challenge for this week of writing. It's going to take me forever. Well, probably not that long but it's going to feel extremely tedious and un-creative.

For obvious reasons I've also been listening to a lot of French music lately. My current pièce du moment is Berlioz's song cycle, Les Nuits d'Eté. I've been listening to the orchestrated version of it in a recording by the Argentinian mezzo, Bernarda Fink and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester. I'm completely mystified by how Berlioz makes the vocal line sound totally spontaneous but still perfect. And the opening to the fourth movement, "L'Absence," is simple but incredible. He makes this serene moment out of nothing more than a few suspensions.

And what do you suppose he's looking at in that picture?