trippin' to CA

It's off to Chapman University in Orange, California bright and early tomorrow for the premiere of Chansons de la Vigne. This choir is fantastic and I'm ridiculously excited to hear these pieces. Yee-haw!

art for thought: gregory euclide

I'm a huge fan of local artist Gregory Euclide (anyone want to get me a giant print?) and one of these days I'll get around to seeing a show of his. He's a fantastic guy and an unflinching artist whose landscapes are some of my favorite things to look at that I've ever seen (especially the ones he painted-or-whatever in 2007 & 2008). He recently did an interview with Metro Magazine about some of his relief work which is extremely interesting. There's also a great article if you're game.

It's always an eye-opening experience to hear how another "type" of artist thinks about their particular medium. I found it incredibly intriguing to try and relate what he says about memory to music. Remember the first time you heard Bach's Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied or Norah Jones' first album? I do. And they have incredibly specific emotional contexts.

Jenůfa

I went to see Jenůfa at the University Opera Theatre last night. We started out with sushi and sake at one of my favorite restaurants in Uptown, Fuji Ya. I sprang for grilled salmon skin and spicy tuna rolls. Very delish.






























I've heard a lot about Leoš Janáček and this opera in particular (it's the one that finally put him on the proverbial map...at age 62) but I've never heard any of his music. It's quite a striking piece what with its infanticide, facial mutilation and--you guessed it--love. Can't have an opera without a twisted love triangle or some other sort of romantic intrigue.

In my humble opinion, the strange thing about this work (other than the fact that all the main characters are tenors and sopranos) is that its title character seems to have little to do with the actual forward motion of the plot. Jenůfa is the pivot point for the other main characters' transformation into better people and, aside from all sorts of bad stuff that happens to her (unplanned pregnancy, disfigurement, the murder of her baby by her stepmother...I mean give a girl a break), she doesn't necessarily change all that much by the end. That being said, it's also quite possible that she could be the one that changes the most by the end of the opera and, depending on how you look at it, her ultimate forgiveness of her step mother could be the point of the entire proceedings. Who knows.

It was spectacularly performed and the fact that these were students from the University of Minnesota was hard to tell. The lead sopranos (Jenůfa and Kostelnička) and the tenor who played Laca were particularly fantastic.

massed choir day

I drove up to the St. Paul campus of the University of Saint Thomas yesterday to listen to their combined choirs rehearse "Orange-Mounts of More Soft Ascent" from my Color Madrigals set. The Concert Choir performed it in Orchestra Hall last October and the choir department decided to use it as one of the massed pieces for their upcoming concert. The rehearsal was in their beautiful chapel.
















They graciously afforded me 15 minutes or so to work with the choir and, although I hadn't had any caffeine that afternoon, Nathan Knoll told me that I "went off like an A bomb" as soon as I hit the podium. I'll take that as the compliment it was intended as, sir. I can't wait to hear them in performance!

Then it was time to head south to hear Matt Culloton and the massed choirs of the Missota Conference perform "The Boy Who Picked Up His Feet to Fly". The concert was held at New Prague High School (Minnesotans pronounce it closer to "prey-g" for some odd reason that I've never understood) and featured somewhere close to 400 singers shaking the rafters on one of my oldest pieces.

The smaller Select Choir performed a pristine rendition of Abbie's "Journey Home" as well so we drove down to the concert together on a composer road trip. There was also a Massed Band (40 trumpets, anyone?) and a Select Band that performed equally well and, after everyone was through with their respective sets, all the singers joined forces with the smaller wind ensemble for a rollicking good "God Bless America."
















Hearing "Boy" performed again so well was an interesting experience. The text is reminiscent of Shel Silverstein's poetry and, as such, is over-the-top whimsical. Because of this, I never took the music I had written to it very seriously and had always just listed it in my brain as nothing more than a piece that I wrote when I was 20. However, having looked over the score and listened to it again for the first time in a long while, I think I may have sold it a bit short. There are things in that work that I'm still very much interested in (patterns and how they interact with different chords, for instance) as well as some ballsy stuff that only a 20-year-old composer with very little experience would ever think to do (i.e. having the piano play 4 entire octaves of an F major scale at the end while the choir just oohs).

In any case, it was a blast to hear it again with so many singers and Matt Culloton--yet again--proves that he understands how my music "works". I am incredibly lucky to have him in my proverbial corner.

In other news, I'm kitten sitting for a friend today. Meet Dori. She's staying for a few hours today and is the first feline to set foot in my apartment since I had Max a few years ago.

got 30 seconds to make a baby?

guest blog OR commissioning a new work of art OR how to build your own stained glass window

The past 2 summers I've had the honor of working with the Summer Singers on a few of my pieces (read about the adventures here and here). One of the really cool things about this ensemble is that one of their tenors, John Hanson, is an accomplished stained glass artist who builds something gorgeous for them to raffle off every year at their concert series. As they also throw a heck of an after party I had the chance to chat with John on more than a few occasions and, in the course of these discussions, I talked to him about commissioning something for my mother's birthday in March. He enthusiastically agreed and we decided to base it on a piece that I remembered having around the house when I was a little kid which was a semi-prized possession/heirloom in the Shank household. It got broken a few years ago so working with a tenor/stained glass artist provided the perfect opportunity to get it replaced. And the fact that Mama Shank was turning a fairly momentous age (which I won't publish here because she would seriously kill me) made it even better.

First of all, John is a mensch of a guy who made commissioning a piece of art into a really cool and eminently bloggable experience. He took a ton of pictures along the way and wrote a ton about the entire process so what follows will be my first guest blogger!

Note: there are a few asides from yours truly along the way so, if you're a stained glass scholar who stumbled here through some internet wormhole, you'll have to bear with the ramblings of this blog's rambunctious proprietor. This was such a fun process and I couldn't help myself. Without further adieu:

How to Build a Piece of Stained Glass Art for a Composer
by John Hanson

My first stab at a design. This was meant only to show the glass colors I intended to use. (John and I changed it a little after this...cut out the blue and adjusted some proportions.)
















I have developed a habit of making a scale "cartoon" of new designs using colored pencils which lets me see how the composition and colors balance out.
















I make two black and white copies of the previous template. One is used to cut out the pattern pieces and the other is used for layout of the cut glass and construction of the window. (It took me a second to figure out what he was saying here but, upon further inspection, it turns out that one of them is cut up as a template for the individual pieces while the other is used as a template for assembling the finished product.)





















Glass has a three-dimensional structure much like the X, Y and Z axes we struggled to comprehend in geometry class. (Or--if you're me--really, really struggled and essentially gave up on.) When it is cut or scored it will break along the score line very neatly. The pliers shown are grozier pliers and are pretty much unchanged over the thousand years or so that stained glass making has occurred.
















A grinder coated in synthetic diamond (cool!) serves to rough up the edges for taping. A grinding spindle rotates on a motor shaft driven from below and the open grill sits in a pool of water. The sponge behind the grinding shaft draws water up to keep the grinder cool while the glass dust it generates becomes wet and falls through the grill and collects in the water. Many of the early glass artists used dry grinding wheels, breathed in huge amounts of this dust and later suffered horrible lung diseases. (Cheers to John for including the grisly details.)
















Tracing a pattern piece: each one is laid on top of the glass and the outline is traced with a black Sharpie marker. This guides me in accurately cutting the edges of each piece.

Glass cutting came to me very easily. My first instructor made a strong point of teaching us to "reduce the volume" of a piece as we cut it. (It should be noted here that John is apparently the type of guy who said to himself one day, "I really wish I knew how to make a stained glass window" and then just went out and did it...and that is way cool.) Instead of trying to make a single cut around a curved line we were taught to make a series of concentric cuts outside the pattern edge, leaving a small area of glass for the final cut. This dramatically reduces the chance of the piece fracturing in the wrong spot (this can often happen when making curved cuts). When the final score is made along the black outline, the glass is literally pulled away with the grozier pliers and never snapped off.

Grinding the edge of the glass: when using copper foil, the edges of every piece of glass must be lightly ground. This has the added benefit of dulling the sharp edge created by the cutting process which saves blood and fingertips when holding all this glass.

The use of copper foil around the edges of the pieces is widely attributed to Louis Tiffany. However, this is mainly because he stole it from an employee he later fired and the artisans he had making the pieces used it extensively thereafter. (Cheers for including some stained glass gossip! I looked up Tiffany and he has one of the best middle names ever.) The wooden object is called a "fid" and is run across the tape on the edges and the sides of the glass to smooth it out and make it adhere better.

The 7/32" wide tape is centered on the edge of the glass and leaves an overhang of about 1/16" on either side. I then run my fingers along the overhang to form the edge seam used to solder the glass together.

After cutting and taping all the pieces I add the last two sides of aluminum angle iron to hold everything together while I solder the seams. Every one is covered with solder that is 60% tin and 40% lead and melted on with an electric soldering iron. (Just out of curiousity, why is a word pronounced "saw-der" spelled "solder"? That makes absolutely no sense to me. It comes from Middle English and French so who knows.)

After this part of the process the solder is bright silver so the next thing to do is treat it with a chemical patina which reacts with the lead and turns it almost black and simulates the aging and putty process of traditional glass. I then polish the entire piece with a special (and very expensive) stained glass polish.

I frame all my work with wood because it gives the glass a completed look that is lacking when the zinc edge is left exposed.
















I am fortunate to have a good supply of 200-year-old American Chestnut that was salvaged from a demolished barn. This particular tree was the victim of one of the earliest environmental disasters to occur in America.

In the 19th century there were billions of chestnut trees ranging from the Appalachian Mountains to the western border of Wisconsin. Sometime in the 1880s, Japanese Chestnuts were introduced to northwestern America and, unfortunately, they carried a blight. (I checked on this, by the way. It was a fungus.) The native chestnuts had no resistance to this disease and, by 1940, almost every one of them had died. These trees--related to the Oak--grew to be over 100 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter and, as they were felled, the lumber was used to build barns, warehouses and even coffins. As these old buildings are being torn down the wood is becoming available at a very high price (an 8-foot long 2x4 of American Chestnut can cost $300).

When stained with a dark, coffee-colored stain the grain revealed is unlike anything you can imagine. It's got a very defined, striated grain and, when cut like quarter sawn oak, the grain appears to be filled with miniature bolts of lightning.

The completed window. There are five different kinds of glass in the piece (some of which was salvaged from a demolished church in South Dakota and is over 100 years old).

So, there it is. That's simultaneously my very first guest blog as well as my first experience commissioning a piece of visual art. It certainly won't be the last of either of those things.

food for thought: composer v. orchestra

This is making its way through composer circles around the country (thanks, Jocelyn) so I thought I might link it here. You be the judge because I really don't know what to make of this other than the fact that it seems utterly ridiculous. Here's the first paragraph:

"A composer is suing the Brooklyn Philharmonic for abruptly cutting short his environmentally themed symphony in mid-performance at a concert almost five years ago — a show that left the songsmith fuming and critics appalled."

Read the rest. It's a fairly short article and I can't even imagine how I would feel if this had happened to me.

death cab

I went to see Death Cab for Cutie last Wednesday at Roy Wilkins Auditorium in Saint Paul. It's part of the same complex as the Xcel Center and the Ordway (they call it the River Centre...that's centre with an "re" at the end). I saw DCFC last June at the Orpheum but missed them when they opened for Neil Young last fall. Needless to say I'm a fan, so it was great to see them again.

Because of the nature of the space our seats were better than the previous time. Here's the bird's eye view from the Orpheum last year.
















And the head-on view from the much more boxy Roy Wilkins. We were in the balcony but much, much closer.












They played a few songs from their new EP, The Open Door, along with material that spanned pretty much the entire DCFC catalogue (not to sound like a total fanboy) and a good time was had by all.

It was interesting to see that their stage decoration changed completely between June and April. That must cost a fortune.

Mahalo.

the terrible twos

Happy birthday, blog! It's been two years since I started this rambling, incoherent screed for the benefit of the 3 people who read it (that includes you, dad). So in the spirit of last year's summation let's briefly take stock of the past year.

Month with the most entries: July. A composing vacation and a trip to the east coast are to blame for this.

Single entry with the most pictures: Greece - part 2 (a grand total of 34). A week in the Mediterranean produces an s-load of photos? Imagine that.

Best meal: the steak and rhubarb crisp I had at La Rana Bistro in Decorah, Iowa. This was the last steak I had before I went vegetarian in August. Although, I may have subsequently "celebrated" election night with a nice juicy steak and a cold beer at a local establishment where I may or may not have witnessed a drug sting by undercover cops yelling with their guns drawn. (I was going to write a blog entry about this but couldn't--for the life of me--figure out how to make it seem funny. Our waiter actually hid behind me. It was a bit of a nail-biter.)

Most verbose: my diatribe about Laura Ingalls Wilder and musical theater. Re-reading this today makes me think I may have woken up on the wrong side of the bed that day.

Most useless: This one's a tie between my critique of Jean Claude Van Damme's Bloodsport and the time Google alerted me about a children's photo contest in Des Moines that I was apparently a participant in.

Proudest moment: running an Olympic triathlon!

Personal favorite: Lee Greenwood's new job

Shows enjoyed:
Death Cab for Cutie at the Orpheum
Dave Matthews Band at Busch Stadium
Matisyahu at the MN Zoo
Hamluke at the Lowry Lab
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers at the Target Center
Hedwig & The Angry Inch at the Jungle Theater
The Juliet Letters at the Southern Theater
Little House on the Prairie at the Guthrie
Rufus Wainwright at the State Theater
Ben Folds at the Myth
Savion Glover at Orchestra Hall
The Making of Americans at the Walker
AC/DC at the Xcel Center
MASS at Orchestra Hall
Bobby McFerrin/Cantus at Orchestra Hall
Mötley Crüe at the Xcel Center
Fleetwood Mac at the Xcel Center
The Adventures of Pinnochio at the Ordway
Britney Spears at the Target Center
Death Cab for Cutie at Roy Wilkins Auditorium

Trips taken:
Greece
Boston
Decorah
Saint Louis
Madison

Pieces premiered:
Passages
To Sing You to Sleep

Hmm, that doesn't seem like very many but, hey, I took a much longer hiatus this year. There's some sweet stuff coming down the pipeline in the next 2 weeks (including 2 premieres in as many weeks and packing up and moving north). Add to that the pieces I wrote/did research for in both French and Urdu and all the opera work I did this summer and I feel pretty good about it. Happy 2nd birthday, blog!

ra ra riot + disclaimer

Whenever I go to see a show, I like to be prepared for what I'm going to be listening to. I'm going to see Death Cab tonight and recently bought the album of their opening act, Ra Ra Riot. It's a great headphones listen with some real gems on it.

The critics mention the term "Baroque pop" a lot when they talk about these New Yorkers (possibly because they have a cellist in their midst). It's a term I've not been familiar with but, apparently, it just means that they use strings heavily? Whatever. It's just good music.

"Can You Tell" is my favorite track on the album but close seconds are "Ghost Under Rocks", "Too Too Too Fast" (the keyboards totally remind me of Stevie Nicks' "Stand Back") or "Suspended In Gaffa" (nobody writes a pop song in a clippy, compound meter anymore).

On a completely different note, I just read what may be the first disclaimer ever (I can't back that up). You know how at the end of a Law & Order: SVU episode they flash that "all characters are completely fictitious and similarities to actual events are completely coincidental" mumbo jumbo which we all know isn't true? I just read what may be my favorite version of that from the 12th century manuscript "The Book of Leinster" (the specifics of why I was reading about ancient Irish mythology will have to remain a mystery for now because it would just take me too long to explain). It reads:

"But I who have written this story, or rather this fable, give no credence to the various incidents related in it. For some things in it are the deceptions of demons, other poetic figments; some are probable, others improbable; while still others are intended for the delectation of foolish men."

How awesome is that? Maybe I'll add that to the end of all my new pieces. Or maybe just to this blog.

Mahalo.

ooh ooh, read this!

Minneapolis singer/songwriter Adam Svec (of The Glad Version) recently did a brief-but-great interview which is published on the Internets. I mentioned him last January (amongst a lot of other things) when I was on a steady diet of French poetry and his debut solo album, Enemy Swimmer, and this is a totally interesting interview if you're into hearing about other people's creative processes.

Reading it makes me realize that I probably won't ever have the gift for melody. I can get close but I'm never going to write an "Amazing Grace" or "Here Comes the Sun" because my ear focuses almost exclusively on harmony. Is that a loss or a gain? Sigh...or cheer...or whatever.

Click here to read it. Here's Adam playing a fat guitar. I can't wait for his/their next album.

new piece: To Sing You to Sleep

No, not a new piece to sing you to sleep. It's a new piece entitled "To Sing You to Sleep." I realized recently that I never talked about my last premiere with The Singers. Their January concert series was entitled "Mars & Venus" and featured the ensemble creatively splitting into a men's chorus and a women's chorus. Matt programmed some amazing things (György Orban's Mass No. 6 and Francis Poulenc's Quatre petites prieres de Saint Francois d'Assise chief among them) and gave the world premiere of my work for men's chorus.

It's an older piece from 2003 that never received its premiere and, holy hell, am I glad I asked Matt to consider it for this series. The men of The Singers performed the bejeezus out of it and, in at least one case, got a standing ovation afterwards.

The work is incredibly difficult. The normal TTBB scoring opens up to some pretty large clusters (6-part TB writing with 2-part countertenors above them) that the ensemble pulled off with the beauty and ease I've come to know over the past 5 years as one of their composers-in-residence. (I just love this "job".)

Here, take a listen. It might take a bit to load but I think it's totally worth it. You can read the poetry at the main website under the TB cache of pieces.

This post has been photo-less so far but Henri Rousseau's La Bohémienne endormie (one of my favorite paintings) seems to fit in here while we're talking about "singing someone to sleep". I got to see it in the flesh a few years ago and fell in love.















On a more gastronomical note, I just had the most amazing soufflé of my entire life. It had artichoke, spinach and red peppers in it and was oddly filling. I've got to learn how to make one of these!

britney spears OR a stranger in a strange land OR the most fun I've ever had OR you know you totally would've loved it

When I decided to start this blog almost 2 years ago I don't think I could have predicted that there would be an entry about what I'm about to write about here so I'll just come right out and say it: I went to a Britney Spears concert last Friday.

And I had an effin' blast...like some of the most fun I've ever had at any concert. I sang my voice ragged and danced like it was the end of the world. And this erudite, high-falutin, obscure-French-poetry-loving, "classical" composer is nowhere near ashamed of any of it.

There. I said it. Everyone okay?

Of course, I'm being a bit dramatic here but, hey, this entry is all about Britney, dammit! She came to town for the first time since 2001(!) and, for all intents and purposes, it was a triumphant return.

We stopped at Gluek's for supper beforehand. It's the oldest restaurant in Minneapolis and serves German fare. In the spirit of excess I decided to drop the vegetarian thing for the night and had an amazing brat. Oh my, I completely forgot what these things tasted like...sooo good. I'm happy to report that I'm back on the veggie wagon, though. Meat makes me feel so "heavy" after I eat it.
















Then it was on to the Target Center for the concert. The Pussycat Dolls opened up and, having never heard any of their music before, I had an adequate time. Definitely not my cup of tea but they were also definitely entertaining.

Then She came out. And oh my god did everybody freak out.

I've never been a fan of her music but, truth be told, I just hadn't ever heard any of it. Having listened to a mix someone gave me for the past couple of days now I think I can say it's actually fairly complicated and enjoyable. I'm completely floored by how some of her producers can play the synths and, if I try to deconstruct it all while listening to a song, it seems like there are just so many tonal colors. It's the same thing as being a master of orchestration...but your orchestra is all manufactured sounds. It cannot be an easy thing to pull off. My personal favorite was the concert opener, "Circus."

I won't review the concert here because it really isn't my place. However, the Star Tribune threw out a good article the next day called "Britney is the ultimate showgirl." My favorite part of the review reads:

"She pranced from ring to ring in skimpy outfits, dangled overhead on the arm of a giant umbrella, cavorted with S&M dancers, paced inside a cage, rode on the back of a tricycle, changed outfits after nearly every number and shook that famous blonde mane."

That pretty much sums it up: a three-ring freakshow of icy dance grooves and a ringmistress with blonde hair. It was just damn good fun on a Friday night and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

However, having written what I've just written I think it's worth mentioning that her music (and lifestyle...my god, her lifestyle) is not for everyone. And, frankly, it's too bad she's gotten a bad wrap. I think this probably illustrates that music is all things to all people, though. What matters to you might not matter to me and vice versa. What you call "amazing gamelan orchestral music" might be a simple curiosity to me.

And, in the end, that's what it's all about. The incredulous look on my "legit" musical friends' faces when I tell them I had a great time at a Britney concert is the symptom of the, shall we say, "genre-fication" of musical consumption in this country at the moment. We often build our self-image around the kinds of music we like and that, in the end, is completely missing the point.

What if all types of music were just fine? It reminds me of the first time someone played a Cannibal Corpse song or a John Cage score for a Merce Cunningham ballet for me and asked me if I liked it. I had to answer honestly that I didn't. But, from the perspective of someone who fights for the legitimization of their own music, I had to say that it just wasn't my cup of soup. I hated both of them (especially that damn Cage piece...at least the CC song had a bunch of swears in it...tee-hee) but I don't think it's my place to say something sucks. If you like it then you like it. If you don't then just turn it off.

Of course that leads to all sorts of "agree to disagree" nonsense which is just a way of not taking a stand on anything. But who cares? It's Britney, dammit! It's Britney!

Weirdly enough, the Met's amazing production of La Damnation De Faust has been playing in the background the entire time I've been writing this. I wonder if Hector would approve of my new love of sweet, sweet Britney. I guess we'll never know.

Work on We, The Boys re-starts in 2 weeks.

greece - part 2

Here's a final blast of photos from the Greece trip. Highlights include:

• a visit to the ancient city of Corinth
• inspecting the ruins in Mycenae
• theater at Epidaurus
• Greek puppies
• the Corinth Canal
• the Acropolis
• grilled squid
• sunset over Athens
• exhibits at the National Archaeological Museum