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.

definitely one of the most fascinating things i've ever seen

If you don't have The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey on your Netflix queue you need to get it on there...like...yesterday. I'm probably late to the game on this one but I just watched it and it's spellbinding; Spencer Wells is seriously amazing. I feel like trying to translate some of his intent and concepts into music. They are overflowing with the positivity and the notion of service.





















(p.s. If I were to try to tell you what this movie is about I would probably come across as more of a nitwit than I usually do so, for now, jump over to Wikipedia and find out for yourself. You will have no choice but to watch and be completely intrigued by it.)