things i'll miss about living in the twin cities: kitty edition

I finally finished the piece for The Esoterics and, boy howdy, I don't remember something being that difficult in a long time. Trying to make a choir fit into the instrumental idiom was a bitch of a problem to solve but, in the end, I'm massively happy with what came out. I even managed to write in a jaunty little waltz right in the middle that I fell in love with. How the hell did that happen? The only problem was that I think I almost gave myself an ulcer from the amount of coffee I was drinking while I was writing.

Although, since Seattle just got voted the most caffeinated city in America by The Daily Beast (the Twin Cities got 14th) and that's where this particular ensemble is based, perhaps it was just life imitating art. Either way, The Esoterics will give a fantastic performance of my new piece, songs about most of my friends, next October and, should you be in the neighborhood, you should stop by.

On the domestic front, I'm just about through packing up my place in Uptown Minneapolis so I can move to Austin. One thing I will miss is this little cat who was always in the first floor window before I left for work. Here's a camera phone picture I snapped of this thing at something like 6:40am.






I don't know what its name was but the consistency with which it was there seeing me off was impressive:

"Meow-meow-meow I'll miss you too meow-meow-meow."

And then, just for good marks, here's a picture of the Twins' beautiful new stadium, Target Field. A friend threw free tickets at me recently so I enjoyed an $8 beer, a surprisingly good veggie burger and a victory by the home team. Boo-yah!

trying to work...don't bother me OR monochromatic cat blog to distract me from writing

What is it with cats? I drove down to my parents' house in bucolic Northfield, Minnesota to get some time away from the frenetic atmosphere of Uptown and their cat, Jack, will not leave me alone. I'm trying to get this piece for The Esoterics done and this guy is taking up half the piano bench.

I like to spread out a lot when I have staff paper to work with but there's a cat-sized spot on the bench where I'm sitting that I can't put my sheets of manuscript. Here's a photo of him from my phone:
















I should say that Jack showed up after my tenure under the Shank roof and, frankly, we've never really gotten along all that well (he bit the hell out of me a few years back)...but he's calmed down a whole lot in the last few years and, for some reason, he seems to like music.

My old cat, Max, used to do stuff similar to this. He was never a lap cat of any sort unless I was writing at my desk.

Just surfing the net? Nope. On the couch.

Working on correspondence? Sorry. Sleeping in the rafters somewhere.

However, if I was intently engraving music with headphones on and coffee in hand he was in my lap purring. It was the weirdest thing.

Rest in peace, little buddy. Your investment into my creative process will be missed.

san juan islands

I recently took a trip out to the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington state for a few days. My younger sister, Caitlin, just graduated from Western Washington University in nearby Bellingham, so the Shank clan gathered on Orcas Island for a few days of R & R.

There aren't many opportunities to experience the nautical culture here in Minnesota (although we do have more than our fair share of lakes) so any time I get to ride in a boat that is used for transportation as opposed to recreation it's a unique experience. The Washington State Ferries are one of the largest fleets of their kind in the world and have been fully incorporated into the state's highway system. How cool is that?

The majority of the boats have names from the local Native American tribes in honor of the fact that their canoes were the first to cross the Puget Sound.




























The villages at the edge of the water remind me of the little towns on the fjords I saw in Norway way back in 2003 (travel reference!).

Once you spend a little time sailing amongst all the islands it's not hard to imagine why people like to live here because, frankly, it's pretty chill. Morten Lauridsen has a cabin on Waldron Island and, from what I understand, the residents there have worked hard to keep any sort of intrusive presence away from it. As such, there isn't a ferry that goes there and no municipal power or water either.

One of the more interesting things about Orcas Island itself is the topography. Here's a Google shot (that's the aforementioned Waldron Island in the upper left there).

It's shaped kind of like a saddle bag and, on the eastern half of the island is Mt. Constitution. It's the tallest point in the San Juan Islands (2,409 feet to be exact...thanks Wikipedia) and offers some incredible views from the summit.

We took some time to hike around the trails as well. They were built by FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression.

There's a national historic park on nearby San Juan Island that commemorates something called The Pig War. My dad and I took a day trip there and apparently there was a dispute or something between the US and the UK over that particular island because there was some confusion over whose it was. Read the Wikipedia article on it if you like and you'll be impressed with its unimpressiveness. Why it's called a "war" I'll never know. No shots fired. Maybe we could call it The Pig Crisis or something like that. The Pig Misunderstanding? I mean, far be it from me to play down any sort of military escalation...it just seems strange is all.

Either way there are some interesting things to see when you're in the park. The British Camp on the north side of the island is in a real beautiful spot. It's also the only place in the United States where the Union Jack still flies.

About a mile away (and up a big damn hill) is the cemetery where British soldiers buried their dead during their 12 years on San Juan Island. This particular tombstone says:

Sacred to The Memory of William Taylor, Aged 34 Years
Who was accidentally shot by his Brother, January 26, 1868
This tablet is erected by his Sorrowing Brother

Yikes. That's a huge bummer.

The American camp on the south side of the island is incredibly spartan and bare compared to the British encampment. No rolling hills. No formal gardens. Just a prairie with some white picket fences and the few remaining structures.

Thanks for the memories, San Juan Islands. I will now tie myself to my desk and finish this piece for The Esoterics. Summer is fun but, at a certain point, I'm just ignoring my responsibilities. Mahalo.

this guy is fastly becoming my newest craze

Someone recently showed me an amazing work by the Dutch composer, Jacob ter Veldhuis, called Paradiso. It's an oratorio sort of based on Dante's Divine Comedy (with the tenor and soprano soloists standing in for the author and Beatrice) that uses all sorts of samples from things that run the gamut between holy roller sermons to astronaut communications from actual moon landings as well as the infamous fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. JTV takes all this stuff and blends it into a work of incredible beauty, intimacy and immediacy.

Where has this work been all my life? Seriously. When something like this is out there it is everyone's responsibility to lead me to it like a horse to water. I feel foolish that Paradiso had been "waiting for me" since 2001 and I had been blissfully unaware and not in on the proverbial secret. It is so good.

Here's a YouTube clip he's posted of the fifth movement, "Heaven on Earth." The work has a video component as well so you get to watch something pretty whilst you listen.

today's entry in inexplicably funny things

Tim Takach showed me this for the first time recently and, if you can tell me why it's so damn funny, I would love to hear your theory...as soon as I'm finished wringing the pee out of my pants.

Mahalo.

a friendly association or agreement OR to work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort

I love collaboration. It's one of my favorite things about inhabiting a creative profession.

Some composers stay within their own little sandbox and become, essentially, greedy about their art. People commission the "next work by So-And-So" rather than, say, the composer writing something specifically for them.

This, I think, is backwards and inherently wrong. It is not couched in the humility of collaboration (which you know my thoughts on) and seems like brow-beating to me. I also subscribe heavily to the "build communities, not empires" notion of being an artist so, clearly, that other way doesn't appeal to me at all.

Collaboration is getting together with others who share your ideals, existing in that ferment for a while and then taking a bit of what this person likes/dislikes and moving that proverbial ball down the field a little further.

Case in point: the new work I'm writing for The Esoterics. The two amazing conspirators I'm working with for this piece are the conductor of the choir, Eric Banks, and an incredible visual artist named Gregory Euclide.

Eric tasked myself and a few other composers to write a choral piece with no words which must be based on a piece of visual art. He is that rare conductor who comes up with a big idea and then just runs with it fearlessly. One look at this ensemble's stable of recordings and it becomes starkly evident that this is something different and amazing which exists outside the tradition of choral music without seeming alien and irrelevant.

I absolutely love this. I love love love it.

The artist I immediately went for was Gregory Euclide. I've known his work for about 5 years now and have admired from afar his ability to paint these incredible "neo-landscapes" (I'm hesitant to use that clumsy, awful term but I have to cast his art in terms of the traditions that come before him) and I was lucky that he agreed to work with me on this project.

That being said, it's obviously tricky when you enter into some sort of collaborative effort with someone else. How are we going to work together? What are everybody's expectations at the outset of the project? Things like that. I imagine that, for a visual artist like Greg, this process might feel like giving some of your favorite toys for other kids to play with. You always hope they get the same amount of care they got from their owner but you never really knew for sure.

Side note: I had a couple of favorite He-Man toys that I was always a bit more greedy with than I probably should have been. But, c'mon, we're not just talking about any old action figures here...this is Thunder Punch He-Man, you guys. You could load his backpack up with little caps and make them explode and spew little plumes of smoke around the room (my mother--for the obvious reasons--only bought me and my brother one pack of those things).

But I digress.

With Greg's work it's become about how I can translate his medium into mine. How does the visual become the aural? Do you just take his gestures and put them down onto the staves and see what happens? Do you take the title of the work and try to make something programmatic about it? Or do you just write the piece of music and then say it's inspired by the art?

With any piece of music you often stare at that blank space where all that stuff is going to go and think, "Okay. Now what?" With choral music you have the added benefit of the text creating some sort of narrative thing that, like a faint road map, you can grasp onto from the very beginning.

But Banks, with his trademark innovation, took that completely out of the equation. So...really...now what?

This is where the collaborative part of the story comes into play. This is where I drive out to Greg's place and talk and talk and talk with him about his art and how it comes to him and, literally, what it's about. This is where the piece actually starts to focus itself.

Now I'm not going to try and articulate all of the things we talked about (they mostly exist in my mind as emotive gestures and concepts that are too deep into too many things for me to lend any sort of words to here anyway) but what I came away with from our three hours together was "the evocation of memory." These aren't specific memories per se but, rather, just the physical experience of remembering something. Déjà vu is way too specific for me to relate this to but it's probably as close as we're going to get. However, one look at his pieces and you know exactly what I'm talking about. Here:

You get the feeling that you're looking at something that you've seen before even though there is very little which is specific about that piece.

So how to translate this into my medium? I'll probably write more about that as the piece gets closer to done because working on it is going to be a bit arduous for me. I've hit on a very specific concept that's going to carry me through so I feel less out of the proverbial deep end and instead like I'm on some sort of adventure.

For now I think I'll have a listen to the amazing album Jónsi & Alex put out last year, Riceboy Sleeps. It turns out that Greg is a huge Sigur Rós fan so it seems an appropriate way to close out this blog entry.

the wedding day jitters

Last summer my friend Eric phoned to say that he had just proposed to his girlfriend, Mary. He and I have known each other for going on 11 years and, since he had told me this was coming, I was truly happy for them. He also mentioned that they wanted to commission me to write something for the ceremony and, since I was in an inspired mood, I sat down in one of the practice huts at Interlochen and banged out a sequence of chords that I was happy with; something proper for a prelude-or-whatever.

Then, earlier this fall, I actually sat down and filled out the sketch a bit. It was based on a 3+3+2 pattern that repeated kind of endlessly so I set about altering the pattern in select places to keep it interesting; dropping/adding a few eighth notes here and there until I was satisfied with what I had.

The piece sat for a while and I mentioned it to him a few times and all seemed well. As the date for the impending nuptials started to get closer I started to ask him about details I was going to need in order to not totally screw everything up.

It was at this point that we met to go see Clash of The Titans. You see Eric is a huge fan of bad movies and whenever one like this comes out I inevitably get dragged to sit through it. The Mummy Returns? He loved it. (I thought it was crap.) Van Helsing? Completely satisfied. (That movie is terrible.)

Before this particular piece of garbage we happened to hit the Tavern on France for supper. Over the course of the meal (they have this insane process where you can make your own burger or pizza) I asked a few more questions about his wedding and this, my friends, is when he said the magic words. Here, let me set the scene:

Josh: So what other pieces are you having during the ceremony?

Eric: Oh, I must've forgotten to tell you. Your's is the only one.

Josh: Really? Uh, where is it?

Eric: It's going to be the processional.

Josh: Really.

Now I don't say this because it gave me a sense of inferiority in the face of all the usual gobbledigook that people process down the aisle to (although it definitely did). I say this because the entire point of the piece I wrote was to not have anything close to a regular pulse.

It would've been almost impossible to process to it. I had written something that was as close to what you could call an "anti-processional" as possible.

So, back to Square One then.

And, seriously, my apologies to Eric for what I'm sure was a pretty frightening (albeit momentary) look of utter panic on my face. I would imagine that, in planning something like a wedding, it isn't comforting to see that reaction pass across the face of someone you have entrusted some sort of responsibility to.

But this should all go to illustrate how useful it is for a composer to learn everything (and I mean everything) about the venue in which their new piece is to be presented. There is nothing worse than writing something into a new work that increases the chances that A) it won't be performed very well and/or B) the audience will be unsatisfied with what they've heard.

I've been writing pieces for other people for 10 years now and there is no excuse for the fact that I should have had the presence of mind to just ask. Live and learn, I suppose.

After our discussion I re-entered the pretentious labyrinth of the compositional process to write something good for Eric and Mary...and I'm really glad I did. What emerged was a much, much better work that has much, much more integrity than the little thing I wrote freezing my ass off in a practice hut in Michigan last summer. In fact, for what the piece's intention is, I would put it up against some of my choral works that have sold tens of thousands of copies. It's not "some little thing" I wrote for a friend's wedding.

The work itself is in an exploded rondo form with an E9 chord in second inversion serving as the ritornello thingy. Here's a shot of the chord structures that I use as my cheat sheet when I play it.















Hopefully I'll get a chance to transcribe it into Finale this weekend. This would certainly be helpful seeing as how the wedding is next Saturday.