moonrise in spring lake park

Holy crap it's been way too long since I posted anything. My compositional moniker slows down with the end of the school year/concert season so it's no surprise. The summer travel season should provide some decent pictures and I'll be keeping banker's hours through the heat writing We, The Boys so I'll have some good stuff to blog about.

I went to a great concert last week at Spring Lake Park High School to hear their band play Moonrise. The concert highlighted music by living composers so there was some great work by the gentlemen of BCM International (Jim Bonney's TranZendental Danse of Joi was amazing) along with a showing of Minnesota composers who were all in attendance. The 3 of us missed the opportunity to take the requisite group photo but Aaron Perrine's Inner Sanctum and Beth Varela's Thank You (commissioned by the band boosters) were great and humbling at the same time. Directors Brian Lukkasson and Nora Tycast have an amazing program.

Afterwards it was homegrown brews and a concert decompress at Herkimer's Pub and Brewery in Uptown.

new gadget

I am the worst when it comes to having the latest technology. Maybe it's a Midwestern mentality, but I'll use a piece of technology until it breaks rather than buy something new that is obviously faster solely because of the money.

Case in point: my printer. I bought a shitty inkjet way back in 2000 and kept it until I couldn't stand it anymore...and that doesn't even sum up how completely insane it made me.

I could only print 3 pages at a time or I had to restart the entire computer (which I bought at the same time as the printer so you can guess how long those 3 pages took to print with the included restart time). It was like having one of those old dot matrix printers I used in my 8th grade keyboarding class.

Requiescat in pieces, my friend (as soon as I figure out how to dispose of you in an Earth-friendly manner).

I recently went to my local Best Buy (a Twin Cities company, by the way) and requested to be taken through the laser printer section. I bought this. I know it doesn't look cool but it works way better than its predecessor.

Not only can this thing put out more than 3 pages at a time, but it can actually print 20 pages in one swath in an eighth of the time it took for my previous P.O.S. to print the aforementioned THREE pages.

I'm in love. Seriously. I know that's lame but a breath of printer-oriented fresh air is pretty nice.

The interesting thing about this particular purchase was that, once I revealed to the salesmen that I was a composer, he launched into a fairly lengthy description of his uncle who occupied the same profession. He even went as far as to write this guy's name down on a Hewlett Packard flyer and request my information so he could look it up. Way cool and way interesting.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Russell Danburg (1909-1994).

Read his bio. Not exactly a lightweight.

Weird that I would run into his kin just buying a printer. I would bet a large sum of money that this guy wrote pencil-in-hand until the day he passed away and his nephew sold a me a printer based on the need to spit out more than 3 pages of music every 30 minutes.

Irony.

Small world.

passages

In my second visit to a state capitol in as many months, I went to Wisconsin last weekend to work with the Festival Choir of Madison on the premiere of Passages: Songs on Octavio Paz. They did an absolutely amazing job with these pieces and, as they are a fairly extensive revision of a previous work, I'm convinced I made the right decision to revisit the song cycle. Maestro Drew Collins is a force of nature with that choir and he is going to make a lot of proverbial hay in town with these 40 singers. It's his first season as Artistic Director but, judging from the concert, you would never know it. Here he is desperately trying to fly as the choir sings:















We went out for dinner after the Friday night rehearsal to talk shop and nerd out with Jesse Chandler-Dreher from Edgerton High School (he'll come up later) about choral music. I wish I could remember the bistro we went to because, despite this poorly-lit picture, this pesto chicken was amazing.















As a member of the Nordic Choir back in my undergrad days, I stayed in a lot of "interesting" places during choir tour. (Nothing beats the German lady in Boynton Beach, Florida whose breakfast table was a wicker contraption made out to look like a balloon gondola complete with a 4-feet-tall, moustache-sporting pilot that creeped the hell out of me.) The choir members that I stayed with in Madison gave me one of the more memorable ones I've ever had.

John and Nancy Foss are 2 of the most amazing people I've ever had the privilege to stay with. They were housing the maestro in the other spare bedroom so, after we all woke up on Saturday morning, there was a tremendous discussion over some coffee and homemade cranberry pie that I won't soon forget. One of their sons is a puppeteer out in California who is currently constructing a puppet version of Kanye West for his next video. That being said, I had a few "roommates." Santa Claus was on the nightstand next to the bed.

Then these 2 were facing the foot of the bed. I know it's totally wussy, but I had to put a shirt over the big one's face before I could go to bed. It was just too creepy.

After a walk around the neighborhood the next morning and some more choral talk, Drew and I headed into town to run some errands. We settled at The Old Fashioned in the afternoon where he wrote some notes and I read the Times.

I had the French Onion Soup with Gruyère cheese and a side of badly-composed picture.

The restaurant and the concert venue were in the Capitol square on the isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona. It's a very beautiful area.

Closeup on the branches. The buds are just starting to come out here in the Midwest.

Jess Chandler-Dreher and the Edgerton High School Choir were included on the program along with the FCM. I had the chance to work with them on The Boy Who Picked Up His Feet to Fly before they performed it during the concert and, aside from my piece, they also sang a beautiful performance of Jesse's I'll Tell You How the Sun Rose which was really wonderful. He set an Emily Dickinson text that I'd never heard and I don't know a publishing company that wouldn't want it. Jesse's a totally cool guy and that school district is lucky to have him.

Post-concert was back at The Old Fashioned. What visit to "America's Dairyland" would be complete without beer...

...and cheese. They had these amazing plates made up of local cheeses. No better way to finish out my time in Wisconsin's capitol.

sousaphone hero

I feel like I read this Onion article a long time ago on a blog somewhere (probably John Mackey's but I'm too lazy to look around) and I just ran into it again. The title is Activision Reports Sluggish Sales For Sousaphone Hero and, if you've ever played in marching band, you should check out the article. It includes this picture.

rochester + meloy

I drove down to Rochester last Sunday to hear some great performances by the Honors Choirs of Southeast Minnesota. I've worked with them before and had a blast but I was unable to see a performance until now. 2 of the 4 choirs had programmed a piece of mine so I was able to hear the Treble Choir perform The Arrow and The Song and the Concert Choir on when god decided to invent with the soprano sax for the first time. I didn't get a picture of either of them in performance but they were both as good as you'd expect from an honor choir (and by that I mean really good). Dan Roellinger did an especially good job on the soprano sax part (which is not easy).

Both choirs performed my piece immediately after they gave out the Perfect Attendance awards so I guess my choral compositions just remind people of being somewhere on time...or something. Here's Michael giving out the awards with the choir in the background. The place was absolutely packed.















On another note, if you're a fan of The Decemberists you should check out the new (live) CD from their lead singer/songwriter, Colin Meloy Sings Live! I just bought it and I can't get it out of the CD player.

happy birthday blog!

So this blog is exactly a year old today. Here's a quick entry (which took me a lot longer to put together than I thought) on the highlights.

Month with the most entries: March 2008
It was a good month.

Single entry with the most pictures: New York - part 2
27 pics total (second place was 18). The Museum of Modern Art lets you take pictures.

Single entry with the most external links: YouTube
16 total. It was a slow blog day. Apparently I had just discovered the Internets.

Best meal: Hands down this one went to New Year's 2008.
Way to go, Chef Newstrom!

Most verbose: Color Madrigals order
Anytime you get a composer talking about their process they tend to pontificate.

Least verbose: Close Up
This photographic exercise was an obvious choice.

Most useless: Run for the Border
For some reason, I felt the need to write about Taco Bell. Of course, the discovery of a "secret" menu item at the border should never be taken lightly.

I've taken (what turned out to be) many trips since I first started this exercise in self-aggrandizing. Here are the times I ventured far enough from the Twin Cities to warrant multiple pictures and/or a blog entry:
Indianapolis
New York City
Lincoln
Seattle
Wyoming/South Dakota
Stinson Beach/San Francisco
Ashland
Milwaukee
Fargo
Sacramento

There have been plenty of premieres in the last year. I wrote about the ones that I could be at:
Sleeping Out: Full Moon
In Magna Symphonia
Color Madrigals, Vol. 1
Color Madrigals, Vol. 2
Renascence
Color Madrigals, Vol. 3

So that's a year. Here's the actual Belief and Technique for Modern Prose by Jack Kerouac that caused me to haphazardly name this blog.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

And, finally, a blurry relic from my teenage years that nobody checked for grammar.

sacramento - last day

My third-and-last day in Sacramento I spent mostly by myself. I woke up nice and late (see last entry) and walked around downtown. I stopped for coffee, switched on the iPod and just walked. According to a native Saramentoan(?) I met, the only major city with more trees is Paris. If that's true it's pretty cool.
















I happened by the Robert T. Matsui United States Courthouse. There is a really cool sculpture "garden" in the plaza.
















There were characters scattered all over the place. The entire sculpture itself is called Gold Rush and is by artist Tom Otterness. Did you know that over 300,000 people came to California during the 1848-1849 gold rush. That sounds like small potatoes but at that time (before the Intercontinental Railroad) that was huge. Below are some highlights from the sculpture.
















Irony, anyone? (The character in the foreground is taking a picture, by the way.)





















How about a weird representation of a Native American woman offering a speared fish (with a hat on?) to an anthropomorphic bear?
















Of course the gold rush was about 1 thing, right? I bet sculpting this was a surreal experience.
















Walking back to my apartment I stumbled across this equine sculpture. Made from duct tape?
















Das Capitol. The governor hangs out here. I was going to go in but, since it was Saturday, there wasn't much to see.
















I stopped at Tapa The World for supper. It's a tapas bar with amazing Spanish and world cuisine.
















I had the pesto sea bass with asparagus and red potatoes.
















The pre-concert lecture went really well and the audience had some amazing questions which were (amazingly!) totally different from the previous night's interrogations.
















One audience member approached me to sign her "composer shirt." I joined the likes of Morten Lauridsen and Eric Whitacre...and I couldn't resist being just a bit over the top (click the picture to see just what I creatively signed).
















After the concert, one of Vox's Advisory Committee members took us out to dinner at the aforementioned Il Fornaio. I had the bleu cheese steak with spinach and smashed potatoes...holy effing hell it was good.
















Halfway through the dinner (and after a long conversation about good Scotch and great wine), Jeff ordered us a flight of amazing single malt whiskeys. I wish I could remember the names of each of these things. The first one was 18 years old and very easy to palate, but the younger ones were much more smokey and distinct. It was absolutely amazing. I wish I could have had them all.
















We finished with the traditional Passing Around of The Desserts. Here's the tiramisu.
















An aerial view of my departure.















Once I boarded the plane a lady asked me if she could switch window seats so she could sit by her co-worker. She promised to buy me a drink (which never materialized) if we moved. It was just an end cap on an amazingly unique experience that, even if I'm lucky, won't be repeated for at least 30 years.

I slept most of the way home. However, I woke up at one point and glanced out the window to see what looked like dozens of lakes under the wing. It turns out (after a second or two of inspection) that they were just cloud shadows. Despite that, it still moved me to take a picture.















My time in Sacramento was absolutely amazing. Vox Musica is a sleeping giant and their audience just gets it. I would be satisfied if they had only done one of my pieces and I can't wait to go back. I hope it's sooner rather than later!