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.