jay brannan @ lambert's

I went to see Jay Brannan sing a gig at Lambert's here in Austin last week and I am so glad I took the time to go. I've loved his stuff ever since he had that hilarious-but-poignant song on the Shortbus soundtrack and somebody took the time to sit me down and make me listen to his debut LP, Goddamned. He does pretty much every part of the business of being a musician himself so he can actually make a living off his music and that's something that, as a composer, I can definitely connect to. The space he played in was completely sold out but incredibly intimate and, consequently, there wasn't a bad seat in the house. Before the show he was walking around chatting with people and drinking tea so I got a chance to thank him for his song, "Death Waltz," because what it's really about is my struggles with writing music...not whatever it is he thought he originally wrote it for.

Anyway, since it was such a small venue I got to see one of my favorite singer/songwriters from only about six feet away. Totally cool.

Thanks, Jay. Hurry along with a new album, will you?

currently listening

Did everyone get Ra Ra Riot's new album? Holy shit it is so good. "Boy" is probably my favorite song (I'm always impressed when Wes Niles belts out a high B so effortlessly) but "Too Dramatic" (with its little cowbell thing around 2'30") is a close second. I've seen this band twice (in Minnesota and Michigan) but I had to be somewhere on their last stop through Austin. Hurry back!

In further demonstration with just how cool she is, Jocelyn Hagen sent me Rihanna's Loud for my birthday this year. Why have I not been listening to this stuff until now? It satisfies my Need for Phat Beatz really well and I'm excited that I've got four previous albums to wade through at some point. "S&M" kicks total ass and "Cheers (Drink To That)" might be my new favorite Song for Boozin' It Up. Mahalo.

And Ke$ha's new album, Cannibal. Oh, Ke$ha's new album. Damn I love this girl. I've found it's really good music for writing Renaissance counterpoint to. $eriously. "Blow" will knock your brains out and "Crazy Beautiful Life" is actually really heartfelt. When I need to wake up in the morning this album is on repeat.

verdi + jónsi OR not a bad month for kickass shows

The Austin Lyric Opera gave an awesome performance of La Traviata last night which, after a great dinner at Taverna, I had the chance to see. I love opera but I have a bone to pick with whoever it is that's choosing these supertitles: can we please...please...pay someone to do better, more compelling translations of these works. I understand there's a whole "fidelity to the text of the original" thing you've got to deal with but, for the love of god, there is no reason to use the word "succour" when you could just say "help." And don't give me the crap argument that we should expect higher standards from an audience because we're talking about an opera audience. I saw Baz Luhrmann's New York production of La bohème a few years ago and that dude made a concerted effort to make the supertitles something that his audience could relate to. I hate the fact that there is this weird, literary veil between the words and the people reading them and there is absolutely no reason that somebody can't just go in and update those things.

Anyway. It was performed at the Long Center on the riverfront here in Austin and, having never been to that hall before, it was damn beautiful.

I love when architects do stuff like this. It's just your regular shoebox design but they put this gorgeous halo around one facade of the building that really adds something to the aesthetics of attending a concert there. And the interior is just as beautiful. This, however, could not be said for the Austin Music Hall. I went there to see Jónsi last week and, as cool as the building looks from the outside...

...it's nothing but your run-of-the-mill, dirty-ass club with plywood bars on the inside. Despite that fact, it was an incredible show. It was almost six months to the day that I saw him in Minneapolis at The Pantages and that live show is still powerful enough to reduce me to a tearful, hot mess (what can I say...I cry easily...it's the one thing I have in common with John Boehner). They had to alter parts of the production to adapt to what I assume is a more restrictive venue than the theater in Minneapolis and so the backdrop that everything was projected onto never dropped to reveal the burnt down wall behind it. Here, compare:

Minneapolis show last April

Austin

Either way it was totally incredible and I fully intend on buying the go live DVD when it comes out next month.

I know this is totally cliche but I really feel like this is one of those albums that has embedded itself into every part of what my conception is of myself. It feels incredibly autobiographical for some reason and the ecstasy in the music is something I've been trying to capture and put into my own. I feel unbelievably grateful that I got to see Jónsi twice during his tour of the US and I cannot wait for either his next album or when Sigur Rós puts another one out.

Mahalo.

currently listening

I love the autumn music season because it always brings a windfall of new stuff from artists I adore. Guster took their sweet time with this new one but Easy Wonderful was totally worth the wait. I think "Do You Love Me" is probably one of the most optimistic songs I've ever heard (the video is even better) and "Well" digs up all those old Nick Drake LPs and dusts them off for the digital age.

Sufjan's new album, The Age of Adz is absolutely incredible. "Futile Minds" is a throwback to the vibe on the Michigan album but the most mindblowing track on the album is the 25-minute opus, "Impossible Soul." My favorite part is about 10 minutes in when everything falls away into Sufjan's shimmery, auto-tuned voice over a gentle pulse. I am always weepy and introspective after this part and I may have to chop up the file so I don't have to wait 10 minutes every time I want to listen to that one section.

And, last but not least, is the collaboration between Ben Folds and Nick Hornby, Lonely Avenue. The fact that both of these guys can, respectively, write music and lyrics that are so different (compare "Picture Window" with "Levi Johnston's Blues" for starters) is absolutely incredible to me.

one of the more unique premieres i've had

A few weeks ago I took a trip out to Seattle to see the premiere of a new piece by The Esoterics. The circumstances of this commission were quite a bit different than pretty much anything I've ever done since, as I mentioned last May, the piece had to be textless and based on a work of art. The resultant piece was "songs about most of my friends" (titled after an Adam Svec lyric) and the entire trip out to the west coast was, thankfully, just as adventurous as the commission itself.

The premiere itself took place at the Olympic Sculpture Park Pavilion on one of the campuses of the Seattle Art Museum. The park has dozens of modern sculptures placed throughout the path and looks right out onto the Puget Sound.

Inside the pavilion is where they gave the concert and my piece featured a projection of Gregory Euclide's amazing piece, floor bloom drop needles, which he graciously allowed me to use. Here's a poorly-taken shot of how it was projected onto the performance space.

And here it is all by itself. I am so grateful that Greg allowed me to use it for this piece and, having spent so much time with this work in particular, it has become one of my favorite things to look at. He is a legitimately famous artist (Will.i.am. commissioned him, for Pete's sake!) who just happened to be working with me when I lived in Minneapolis and the fact that he was willing to entertain my music being associated with his incredible work is a responsibility that I didn't take lightly. Here's the work itself. Thanks, Greg!

That being said, one of the other interesting things about this concert was that The Esoterics commissioned two other composers (Shawn Crouch from Miami and Bernard Hughes from London) to write a similar piece. They both wrote incredible music which was seamlessly synced up with two different video presentations and, along with pieces by Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi and Artistic Director Eric Banks, there were five world premieres on the program. How often does that happen?

Eric also programmed a previously-written work by Shawn, Bernard and myself for the first half of the concert and, since they sang only the second full performance of my Color Madrigals, the decor on the inside of the pavilion seemed appropriate.

I'm wracking my brain to think of a more unique venue that I've had a premiere in and I'm not coming up with anything. There was a silver tree and some giant red monstrosity right outside.

Here's a shot looking at the pavilion from the sculpture park. It's clearly not the usual place where you would find a bunch of new choral music being performed and, for that reason, it epitomizes the ridiculous amount of fun I had.

This is also the first time that I got to sit in the very back of the audience and watch their reactions to the pieces they were hearing. At the point in my green madrigal where the Keats poetry goes, "Ye tight little fairy just fresh from the dairy/Will ye give me some cream if I ask it?" there was a guy two rows ahead of me whose jaw dropped before he immediately reached for his program to see if the supertitles above the choir were correct. Once he read them in his program he laughed for the rest of the piece (which is exactly what I was going for). Then, at the end of "songs about most of my friends" there was another dude actually headbanging to the last few pages (or at least the non-distracting, classical equivalent of headbanging, that is) and, frankly, I think that's the best compliment I've ever gotten. He had a badass handlebar moustache as well.

Musically, it was an absolute blast. Eric and The Esoterics sang a full 30 minutes of my stuff (they performed the 20-minutes of the Color Madrigals on only one pitch given before the first movement!) and the last time I heard that much of my music in one sitting was a few years back when Vox Musica gave an entire concert of my nonsense in 2008. It's so rare to hear that much of your music back-to-back and, although I can't speak for my colleagues, I would imagine that they're as grateful as I am for such a unique opportunity. Speaking of which, here's the Formal Picture that takes place whenever more than one composer is at a concert. That's Shawn, myself, Bernard and Jaako all suited up for the second night of concerts.

Aside from the concert, there was a whole lot more. The great thing about The Esoterics is that they know how to make people have fun and, during the four days we spent in Seattle, they pulled out all the stops for their visiting composers. Case in point: they took Bernard and I on a tour of Seattle's underground. In the mid-19th century the street level was one story lower than it is now and there are entire city blocks "hidden" underneath modern-day Seattle. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about the "ceiling" in this picture is actually the sidewalk for the legit street above it.

The Seattle Underground Tour isn't really much to look at but, if you're a fan of history, it's perfect because they use the various sites as a vehicle to talk about how Seattle came to be (i.e. a shitload of taxes on prostitution, for instance). Bernard summed it up perfectly when he said, "They make a lot out of a little."

If you've ever been to downtown Seattle you'll notice these grids of glass on the sidewalks. Turns out they're actually skylights for the underground level and our tour guide had us yelling "Help!" at the top of our lungs every time someone would walk across.

Various shots of downtown Seattle.

One of the funnier things that happened over the course of the underground tour was that Bernard told us that he had mysteriously never been to a Starbuck's and, because of this, he wanted to go to one in Seattle because it didn't feel like selling out. Consequently, we made a stop off so the Englishman could have a tea.

How many people get to say that the only Starbuck's they've been to is in Seattle? Interestingly enough, coffee tastes less corporate when you're there because you're, like, supporting the local economy.

After the underground tour two members of The Esoterics took Bernard and myself out to Ivar's for some incredible seafood right on the water. I had the salmon with these crazy julienned pears on a bed of mashed potatoes.

And the view right off our table wasn't bad either. I've been a landlubber all my life so I never get sick of this stuff.

In further evidence of how entertaining The Esoterics are, they took all four composers out on one of Seattle's duck tours. During the event you ride around the city in one of these things (which is skippered by someone who has "personality" and a "sense of humor") before plunging into Lake Washington, sailing around for about 20 minutes and heading back.

It was so much fun. They play cheesy music, the captain wears funny-hats-and-wigs-n'-shit, people on the street look down their noses at you and, in my case, you sing "YMCA" along with Captain Oliver DuRhode (his name is a pun) at the top of your lungs as you pull back into the station.

It's just good, campy fun that you'd have to be an idiot not to enjoy. For instance, every time you see a Starbuck's on the tour you're supposed to shout, "Latte!" Here's Captain DuRhode in his mullet/cowboy hat ensemble he threw on when he started spinning Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again":

We drove by the waterfront location where The Real World: Seattle was filmed and, if you were anything like the 1998 version of me, you have seen this building on TV more than a few times. This was the last season of TRW I watched because, after that, the show just became a caricature of itself and it was more about being young, drunk and outrageous than the earlier, more interesting seasons. That being said, that's totally the spot where Stephen slapped Irene! Me-at-17 was glued to the screen as he threw her stuffed animal into those very waters. What a douche.

While tooling around the lake we also sailed past the house from Sleepless in Seattle...a movie I have never seen. But it's famous so here's the abysmal shot I took with my digital zoom.

The duck tour was a massive amount of fun and I prefer the Composer Picture taken at the end of that journey instead of the Formal One that I listed before. These three guys (and our "Eso" cohorts that came along) were a ridiculous amount of fun and the fact that The Esoterics managed to make a mish-mash of four nerdy musicians from Miami, Austin, London and Helsinki have such a good time together is one of my favorite things about being a composer.

(p.s. I win the competition for who has the most pockets. Don't mess with Texas.)

And if that weren't enough, they gave us all gifts once the concert was over. This might look like an engraved paperweight...

Oh but there's a clock inside! Boo-yah!

So this visit to Seattle (which is legit one of my favorite cities in the entire world) was awesome and, in going through the pictures I took, I found two that personify the pervasively fun time that I had. The first was from a coffee shop right on the Puget Sound where, apparently, the morning guy had a kickass first name and someone had doctored a concert poster for A Fine Frenzy to make him feel even cooler:

(On a side note: I'd like to mention here that I have never been so caffeinated in my entire life. I had forgotten how coffee is so much a part of the culture of this city but I suppose the stereotype exists for a good reason. I usually only drink about a cup a day but I routinely had two or more on this trip. It lead to some very jittery afternoons.)

The other picture is one which I took at Eric Banks's place before the Saturday concert and it epitomizes the fact that I love ironic juxtaposition. One of Eric's cats decided to befriend me because of my warm lap and, in the background is Jaakko Mäntyjärvi. I've loved his pieces ever since I heard a choir sing "Pseudo-Yoik" for the first time...and here he was--all the way from Finland--staring at me from across the room while I took a picture of a cat with a cartoonish expression on its face.

Thanks, Esoterics. I owe you one.

Josh

a thought on musicians and haircuts + Steven Bryant brings the thunder

My life has gone a little apeshit recently due to the fact that I have way too many things to do so my ability to write things here has taken a bit of a hit. That being said I've got a bunch of stuff I want to talk about (including a banner premiere in Seattle, the chance I got to see not one but two different moon rocks in one day and some incredible albums that just came out) but, since I've been inexplicably soaking up new pieces for the harpsichord, I'd like to make the following observation:

World-renowned harpsichordist Elisabeth Chojnacka looks like the Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons (but, admittedly, with more teeth).

But this lady can effin' play. Check out how she absolutely slaughters Górecki's Harpsichord Concerto because it makes me completely willing to forgive the outrageous haircut (skip to about 4'35" for the incredible second movement).

On a completely unrelated note, I heard the premiere of Steven Bryant's Concerto for Wind Ensemble by the UT Wind Ensemble tonight and, holy hell, this piece is brilliant. I would say that he proved why he's one of the most commissioned wind ensemble composers working right now but that would mean that he had to prove it. This piece kicked serious ass and I feel like I may have made a mild spectacle of myself in that I was moved into a quasi-headbang at some point ("spectacle" in terms of a stodgy classical audience, that is).

And a special commendation goes to SB for having what amounted to a trio between contrabass, contrabass clarinet and a contrabassoon. It was like being at a KISS concert and feeling the bass because your ribs are vibrating. So, so, so good.

Junkin and the UTWE are putting out a surround-sound album in the Blu-ray format with this piece on it (it had a large compliment of players surrounding the audience) and, although, I don't own a television and rarely watch any DVDs, I may just have to get myself a Blu-ray player to enjoy this piece and the other two on the album: John Mackey's Kingfishers Catch Fire (probably one of my top 10 pieces ever...right up there with Adams's El Niño) and Joel Puckett's The Shadow of Sirius (which they also played tonight). Both of those works also have instrumental compliments surrounding the audience so it should be an incredibly unique album.

Mahalo.

currently listening + process

Have you all heard Mumford & Sons new album? I'm a little late on this one (although not as late as I usually am) since it came out last February. Someone recently gave me their album, Sigh No More, and it's been on a loop ever since. There is something incredibly visceral and immediate about Marcus Mumford's lyrics and voice that sound like the search for redemption to me. And I know that's way corny to say but sometimes a songwriter will come along and find a way to just tap into that feeling of grace.

My two favorite songs are "White Blank Page" and "I Gave You All." In the former they do this really cool switch between 6/8 into 3/4 near the end. It's a subtle change but it adds something beautiful before the band sings the last phrase a cappella. Go get it!

This album is good listening for the formatting stage on this new piece for The Singers. I get to drink coffee, listen to whatever music I'm freaking out about at the moment and do nothing creative and, selfishly, this is my favorite part of my process. I'm not sure how other composers work but I feel like I have a few distinct stages:

Conception--This is figuring out what the piece will sound like in the imagination (the big gestures, the pauses, the contemplative points, etc.). I think there are some composers who will write extensively during this phase but I rarely do because the final product bears almost no resemblance to these initial scribbles. I feel like maybe this phase is just me getting used to the idea that I'm about to expend a ridiculous amount of energy on something. It's the deep breath before the plunge (to nerdfully quote a movie that I only marginally like).

Writing--This one is self-explanatory and, although it's easy to wrap your brain around what goes on here, it's easily the most stressful part. If something isn't working or you can't get a good seed to start from there can be all sorts of emotional consternation and, combined with an approaching deadline, you've got a possible Combustible Edison.

On the other hand, this part can be incredibly rewarding if you write something really good. If that's the case I usually go back and play that one sliver of music over and over again because it makes all the other fighting that goes on for some other parts worthwhile.

Stitching--I hate this part. I hate it so bad. There is nothing creative about this part and it's not personally fulfilling until it's all over with. It's just work, plain and simple. The shitty part about this stage is that there are often beautiful bits of music left on the cutting room floor; the proverbial blood, sweat and tears of the process. I forget who it was but someone told me once that, "You're not a real composer until you cut out something that you love." Yep. My pound of musical flesh for this particular piece is a gorgeous alto solo I wrote which didn't make it in. I've got it tucked in my back pocket for another piece, though.

Engraving--Easily my favorite part because the music is locked and I'm not responsible for anything creative. As I said earlier I get to be giddy with caffeine and listen to my favorite musique du moment. Hitting the print button at the end of this part is what I live for and I hope that feeling never gets old.

Off to work. Go getcha some Mumford & Sons.

all-state stuff + Samuel Barber and I are in a fight + currently listening

I have lit'rally no idea why this took me so long to blog about but the Minnesota All-State Choir gave the premiere of Your children (are not your children) last August on the campus of Saint Olaf College (which is coincidentally in the town my parents moved to after I left for college those many years ago). That happens to be one of the two places in the United States where a cappella singing started so the atmosphere was ripe for...I don't know...whatever things are ripe for in this case (it was really hot so I'm thinking maybe it was just ripe for being ripe).

Dr. Angela Broeker (of the University of Saint Thomas) was asked to conduct the All-State Mixed Choir this year and, damn, were they ever good. They took my piece for choir and 8-hands piano(s) and tore the roof off the place in a way that few younger ensembles can. Here they are "toasting" in order to keep hydrated.

Angie used this to create a really cool sense of community and as a way for them to share positive things with each other. Consequently, there were some goofy ones (at one point there was a toast made to the fact that one of the singers had on the same kind of shoes as me) but it really served to bond them together during the short time they worked with each other.

The concert was in Boe Chapel on campus. I think it had been recently remodeled or something but this remodel definitely did not include air conditioning. I don't think I've ever seen so many programs being used as fans before in my life.

All that being said, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the young men and women of the choir for giving such an incredible performance, the 4 pianists for dealing with my...uh...four piano parts, Angie Broeker for taking a risk on a new piece for such a weird instrumentation (to her credit she jumped at it) and the people with the American Choral Directors Association of Minnesota and the Minnesota Music Educators Association for calling on me to write this piece. It was a blast!

In the Department of Other News, I have a bone to pick with Samuel Barber. I'm busy trying to learn his Reincarnations for an upcoming performance and I've hit that place in my practice where I'm just angry every time I have to work up the first movement, "Mary Hynes."

Now, difficult pitches I can handle. But when I've been practicing the same few measures over and over and I keep getting tripped up on lazy/ignorant notation it can get pretty serious fairly quickly. I feel like the Barbs has me shouting curse words at my piano every other minute (I get frustrated with myself easily...it's just my cross to bear as a performer). There are plenty of places in this piece that get my ire up when I practice but this particular passage is pretty high up on the list:

Seriously, speak that out. My score has the tempo indication of "Allegro" (What, there were no metronomes in 1940?) but a recording I've got has this at about quarter note = 136.

Now I'm willing to forgive the absolutely ridiculous notion that eighth notes shouldn't be barred together when listed in a traditional time signature because I choose to blame that on the conventions of publication but what I can't get past is the totally idiotic way he places the text within each bar.

And you might say, "Maybe he was going for emphasis on weak syllables as part of the piece." Then you'd probably bring up a bunch of Poulenc's choral works (which I loooove) as an example. To which my answer would be, "Not according to any of the other music contained in this or the other two movements."

Again, I have no problem with the pitches or the rhythms. Those just take practice and, frankly, it's his personal preference and compositional voice and what-have-you. My problem--and it should be said that I know I'm a bit of a Notation Queen--is the icky way he barred those pitches and rhythms which weakens the performance of the piece. In that interest, I present to you the same musical phrase as I would have written it.

See? Now isn't that better? The motives are even broken up so you can visually see what's going on a bit more. I'm certainly not saying I'm a better composer (because duh) but, seriously, go back and look at Barber's original now. Based on where the beat emphasis is you'd think the guy had never spoken a lick of English before. Or, at the very least, he had no idea how to write for a choir.

From my understanding of where these pieces exist in Barber's oeuvre, it's more likely that this style of notation has more to do with the fact that he was unfamiliar with how to write for the voice at the time (I think he was in his late 20s maybe) and, frankly, it looks almost as if he probably wrote the music first and then overlayed the text on it. That drop of a 9th in the bass is unbelievably difficult to do at that speed with vocal chords that size and the huge switch in laryngeal position that has to be made (how's that for nerdery).

But again, I'm not on about the pitches here. So, now we're back to notation as the cause of my woes. This means that SB is off the hook and G. Schirmer is on deck. My score has a copyright date of 1942 on it (and the marks from more than a few generations of singers as proof) so, hopefully, they've changed it in the last 68 years. I've seen scores from Schirmer for some of this older stuff so I'm not holding my breath but that brings up an interesting question: would it be okay if they released a "new edition" of this piece which has been re-barred? Or would that just be a massive faux pas?

Of course, it should be mentioned that this one particular piece is exactly that: a single work by one composer. There are a ton of other mis-notated works out there (I wrote about two of them back in March) and I wonder sometimes who is teaching young composers that it's okay to do this stuff. How many composition students are being rigorously taught notation along with the other important stuff? And if that's actually being taught then who's to blame for the incredible choral work in question being written down like this?

What's the history of notation in this country's musical tradition? There's got to be a book about that, right? If not, maybe I should write it or, at the very least, come up with a curriculum for composition students that includes material on this. That wouldn't be, like, the musical equivalent of going to a Star Trek convention dressed as a Klingon, would it?

There. That's my soapbox over and done with.

So has everyone rushed out and gotten the new Steve Reich album? It's got Eighth Blackbird's performance of his Double Sextet on it and, since he won the Pulitzer for that way back in April of 2009 (read a great blog entry Nico Muhly wrote about the time lapse here), we can finally hear what all the fuss was about. The album also includes his really-good-but-not-my-cup-of-tea piece 2x5 performed impeccably by Bang On A Can.

currently listening

Sufjan Stevens, after what feels like a terribly long four years, is finally putting out some new music (I'm not counting his symphonic poem about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway). He just released the All Delighted People EP and I've been unable to turn it off for the past few days. I'm unsure as to why he's calling it an "EP" (it clocks in at almost 60 minutes) but, seriously, who cares? It's incredible stuff.

When I listen to his music it often feels like a sacred experience to me. Take the track, "For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti" from his Michigan album, for instance. He repeats the phrase "I'd do anything for you" until it feels like a mantra or a kyrie. I feel the same way about the title track from the album in question here which, in its initial incarnation, he expands into a symphonic poem almost 12 minutes long.

That being said, my hands-down favorite track is "The Owl and The Tanager." It's one of those songs in which you feel as if you're overhearing a whispered confession and are given something beautiful because of it.

He'll be putting out a full-length LP in October. Can't wait.

10 recordings OR is this overkill?

So for the past few weeks I've been working on a new piece for The Singers. Between the other composers-in-residence and I, it was my "turn" to write a piece for the December concert series and, in terms of choral music in the Midwest, this usually means it will be a Christmas-themed affair. I've been making the joke for a while now that it's my least favorite time of the year to get commissioned to write something because, inevitably, it's expected that you write something that's either about the Nativity or, if you want to get around writing something "sacred", you can choose poetry on the subject of snow.

I've gone the precipitation route before on two pieces ("winter" and "Snow by Morning") and wrote another non-Jesus piece to a text by Charles Dickens (from, you guessed it, A Christmas Carol). These seemed to work out okay...but you can only ignore the problem that audiences expect to hear a Christian-themed work at these concerts for so long. I'm not a particularly religious person and, for some reason, it always feels a little disrespectful when I try to portray someone else's sense of spirituality through my music and I've shunned writing these things because of this.

The other way I've found to "get around" my problem with using explicitly religious texts is to take a pre-existing tune and fiddle with it a bit. In the choral world these things are often called "arrangements" although, to toot my own horn a bit, mine are quite a bit more involved to be grouped in there with all those Hal Leonard pieces that just take Top 40 things and write extra voice parts for them. These are what we usually consider to be "arrangements." I tend to take more of the route that Stravinsky did with all that Pergolesi stuff in Pulcinella.

On a side note, I got into a discussion about this with Drew Collins a few years ago and he holds the contention that something with that level of difficulty should be called a "fantasia" because it's so much more than just some simple arrangement. I remember him being pretty damn adamant about this but, frankly, that could have been the good beer we always seem to drink whenever we talk about choral nerdery.

But, to be honest, I'm of the mind that he has a legit point. Take Vaughn Williams's's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, for instance. That glorious monstrosity is most definitely not an arrangement, right?

That brings me back to my "arrangementasias" on pre-existing tunes. I wrote one a year for the first two seasons I was Composer-In-Residence with The Singers; "Go, Tell It on the Mountain" and "Gabriel's Message," respectively.

This year I went in a similar route but, in the spirit of challenging myself with something beyond verses and refrains, I decided to do a "deconstruction" of the "Rejoice, greatly!" aria from Handel's Messiah. That piece has a deep connection with the Christmas season and the fact that there is way more musical material than text will stretch my ability to interpret it.

I've got a bit of a connection with this piece (like many, many people do) as the place I went to get my undergraduate degree, Luther College, was mildly famous for putting on a massive production of said oratorio every year (there was also a dust-up about naked soccer as well as Dave Matthews recording a live album there). The Symphony Orchestra accompanied the proceedings, there were cutthroat auditions for the solos amongst the vocal performance majors, any student could sing in the massed choir regardless of experience and alumni were invited back to perform along side them. It ended up resulting in a choir of about 1,000 howling away in the bleachers of the Field House (the only venue on campus that could hold that many musicians and audience members) in a huge spectacle helmed by Weston Noble that really had to be experienced to be believed.

In 2001 I sang in the final choir that was this big and, a year later, was the bass section leader for the much smaller 100-member, auditioned choir that put on the oratorio with the much smaller Chamber Orchestra. I sang that piece for four straight years just for the hell of it (c'mon...it's a blast!) so when I went looking for material to work with for this new piece it was kind of natural for me to stop at Messiah and investigate the possibilities.

I recently blew a bunch of money on iTunes so I could hear some different performances of it and I've currently got 10 versions and 44 straight minutes of this one aria. And let me tell you, Dear Reader (hi, Dad!), they span the effin' gamut of variation.

• The shortest (4'04") is by the Scholars Baroque Ensemble and the longest (5'26") is with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Both of these versions, coincidentally, are the ones where no soloist is listed for some reason.
  
  
• The majority are in the notated key of B-flat major but, predictably, the ones by conductors that are all up in some period performance practice (Christopher Hogwood and John Eliot Gardiner, for example) are in what we would consider A major instead.
  
  
• Then--and here's where I need some help from my musicologist friends--there are some wildly different variations with regards to simple and compound time. The only version I've ever laid eyes on is in simple time where the runs are made up of 16th notes but there are more than a few in my new cache that are in compound triplets for the duration. I'm aware that Handel made a kajillion different versions (read: arrangements!) of Messiah as a whole but it's amazing to me to think that he would've changed the music in such a seemingly profound way.

Anyways...as I've said before my version will be sort of a "deconstruction" of the aria (or at least that's what I'm calling it...think Pulcinella). It helps that the Artistic Director of The Singers, Matthew Culloton, is making me stay rigidly in the a cappella vein of things...even after I begged him to let me add a piano. This has forced me to be pretty creative with how I'm treating the solo parts and, to be honest, it was a good move on his part because I was all professing that I wanted to be challenged.

The text is from the Bible and, as you'd expect from a Handel aria, there isn't much:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee. He is the righteous Savior...And he shall speak peace unto the heathen.

I've decided to call the piece "Daughter Ecstatic" because a) it's seems to me that, at least on the poetic level, it's some sort of command from an angel or something to a girl/daughter (I'm assuming it's probably Mary, right?) and b) that's the feeling that I think Handel was after what with the brisk tempo and vocal runs: some sort of religious ecstasy.

Hopefully I'll get another chance to talk about how this piece is coming together a bit more because I've been having a ridiculously good time writing it. For some reason, I've chosen to compose in the practice rooms six floors up at the highest point of the music building (but that's just my weird need for ceremony in order to write).

Of the 10 versions I have of the aria Kathleen Battle's is probably my favorite (the ornaments at the end of the B section are break-your-heart beautiful). You can listen to the performance in question here but, for now, here she is with my girls Queen Latifah and Alicia Keys performing what I can only assume is the "Suscepit Israel" trio from the Bach Magnificat.

the disadvantage of liking a lot of music...

...is that, sometimes, something slips by before you can get your hands on it. Case in point: the unbelievably heartbreaking beauty of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's voice. I first heard it in the recording of John Adams's El Niño. The eleventh movement, "The Christmas Star," is one of the most emotional things I've ever heard and, when I looked into further recordings, I found out that she died of cancer in 2006. So, so sad.

Here she is giving an extraordinary performance as Irene from Handel's Theodora. I'm sorry I came to this so late. What a loss.

things i'm going to miss about living in the Twin Cities: aquatic edition

There's a chain of lakes that run right through the heart of Minneapolis and one of the cooler things that the city government did was to keep the lion's share of the lakefront property for municipal use. This leads to some pretty awesome running trails and a bunch of really fun, outdoors-y stuff to do right in the heart of the city. Here's an aerial shot I borrowed that shows what I mean.

From north to south you've got Cedar Lake, Lake of the Isles, Lake Calhoun and lake Harriet.

I used to live about a block from where Isles and Calhoun meet so I got to know both of them pretty well. Calhoun is sort of the preferred hangout for families, boaters and beautiful people who walk a round with little to nothing on because it has a ton of beaches. I enjoy running around this thing (it's a bit more than 3 miles, I think) when I'm in the mood to look at said beautiful people but, other than that, it's a pretty boring run due to the ovular nature of the trail.

My hands-down favorite body of water in the Cities is Lake of the Isles. It used to be right in my backyard (only 2 blocks away from my apartment in Uptown!) and is a lot more peaceful than the kinetic, densely populated Calhoun is. The two islands in the middle are nature preserves which you're not allowed to land on if you're boating around in the city's paddle boats or kayaks and there's a flock of geese that nest almost right on the trail (I've been chased by one before). It's got more of an aristocratic feeling due to the mansions lining the parkway that surrounds the lake but it's quite a bit more scenic than Calhoun.

That's all of my reminiscences for now. I would imagine that they're not particularly good reading and, frankly, I put this and the cat thing here more so I wouldn't forget than FYI.

Off to write a new piece for The Singers (and deal with the heat here in Austin). This time around it's a "deconstruction" of an aria from Handel's Messiah (specifically, it's the soprano movement, "Rejoice, greatly!") for their December concert. It's unlike any other "arrangement" I've ever tried to write and, frankly, the fact that I'm unsure of how it's going to turn out is part of why I proposed writing it in the first place. I saw an interview with Stephen Sondheim once where he said that all artists should be a little scared of their next project and I kind of dig that idea.