The Desert Island list

The concept apparently emerged, some while ago, of a musician having a Desert Island list. Put simply, the premise is that you are banished to a desert island but you are allowed to have a record player and up to ten records to listen to. Question: what pieces would you want?

It's a flawed premise, since, if you're on a desert island, where and how do you plug in the record player? But perhaps you can be consoled that you have those ten records — potential energy, as we learned in science class.

The concept is useful if you teach music and about how and why you think it works. I play especially a lot of pieces in my orchestration class, and I not infrequently begin with "this is one of my desert island pieces." Then I get to explain the premise, and since most students nowadays are accustomed to getting their music on their phones, no one asks how it's plugged in. But when I've played one of these pieces without first identifying it, I get a sea of hands, and "Davy, what's that piece?" And, incidentally, I play and describe so many Ravel pieces at the beginning of the orchestration class, one student asked what "Ravel" meant.

I have taught all of these pieces.

I've never written down my desert island list, so I don't even know how many I've said I had. That ends here. Sort of.

Desert Island List, in no particular order.

Ravel Concerto in G, slow movement.

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23, K. 488, slow movement.

Bach Agnus Dei and Dona Nobis Pacem, from the B minor mass.

Bach Brandenburg Concertos 2 and 3.

Mahler Symphony No. 2, 5th movement "Urlicht"

Stravinsky Le Sacre du Printemps

Strauss the 3-soprano ending of Der Rosenkavalier

Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta

Bernstein & Sondheim West Side Story

Jason Robert Brown Still Hurting from the Last 5 Years

I can add many, many more pieces to the list, of course, but 10 is the premise, and even two of the records have two pieces.

Musical ancestry

Several years ago, my former student Jason Uechi sent me this sequence of composers and their students, connecting me somehow back to Bach.

J.S. Bach > W.F. Bach
W.F. Bach > Sarah Levy
Sarah Levy > Carl Friedrich Zelter
Carl Friedrich Zelter > F. Mendelssohn
F. Mendelssohn > Carl Reinecke
Carl Reinecke > George Whitefield Chadwick
George Whitefield Chadwick > Horatio Parker
Horatio Parker > Roger Sessions
Roger Sessions > Milton Babbitt
Milton Babbitt > Uncle Davy

Coincidentally, I got the George Whitefield Chadwick (my great great grandteacher) Medal from New England Conservatory when I graduated.

This same composer also proferred an alternate history.

Cherubini > Halevy
Halevy > Saint-Saens
Saint-Saens > Faure
Faure > Boulanger
Boulanger > Marion Bauer
Bauer > Babbitt > Uncle Davy

Notes for the composer career lecture

Beff and I taught at Cortona Sessions in the summer of 2016, and boy was it hot, and boy was our room and all of our composer sessions hot.

We appreciated that one of the features of the festival was a day off to visit Florence, with all train fares covered, and another day off to tour the Brunello region. Mike Kirkendoll, who is was in charge, is a wine buff, and he has friends in and around Montalcino. Heck, the second winery we went to gave us lunch and let us use their pool.

This is the view from the second winery. Those are all Brunello grapes.

And we were more or less on our own for non-breakfast meals, and getting stuff in Cortona was fun (despite the very steep and long walk into town), and there were so many excellent restaurants there for dinner.

I was put in charge of one of the two-hour group sessions for the enrolled composers, and I decided to give a composer career lecture, using all the facets of composer life that were germane as far as I could tell. So I compiled some notes about what occurred to me as important, and I was ready to riff on them to fill up the time — though clearly what I had to talk about could take up two hours or a whole semester, or anything in between. I was ready for it, with the topics neatly laid out on my iPhone.

Then, of course, Mike decided to usurp an hour of the session to talk about piano writing to the composers. It didn't bother me that he cited me a lot as having done some good piano writing, and I had scores and recordings to broadcast to them of the stuff he brought up (there was a mini USB video projector available, and even given the hotness of the room, it seemed strangely lo-fi). But that wasn't why I was there.

So in the one hour now available to me, I went through the topics pretty fast, not getting to all of them, and I didn't quite do my job that day. Except for broadcasting pdfs of my own music. Which, now that I think of it, wasn't my job.

I have posted my notes on the book of face and twitter occasionally, getting plenty of comments and questions. I have still not had the opportunity to do this presentation completely and in the time for which it was designed. Plus, I have added to it over the years. I was at Yaddo with Marilyn Chin in fall 2017, and we got into some deep conversations about how much our careers were shaped less on what our training prepared us for, and moreso on things that happened serendipitously. We even exchanged long e-mails noting some nice things that happened to us professionally and tracing all the serendipity that led to those things. So I added serendipity as one of the topics. I don't know exactly how to talk about career serendipity at this point, but if I am ever asked to give this talk, I'll try to figure it out.

Here's the current state of my notes, subject to more change as they occur to me. I called it Iron Composer because I used a topic from a fun exercise at Cortona Sessions and typed over it all.

I'm told the two most important points open and close the presentation.

Update: in February 2021 via a zoom substitute, I (finally) had a 2-hour slot to give this lecture to composers at Eastern Carolina University — thanks to Ed Jacobs for asking. I did get it into two hours, and the serendipity topic was fleshed out (lots of anecdotes), taking 45 minutes — Using logic and odd connections, I proved that serendipity was in most of the logical steps between There was another composer at NEC with a similar name to mine (1979), therefore ... to ... I was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2016).

What Milton actually wrote

 In January 2011, Milton Babbitt died and I was conscripted by New Music Box to write an in memoriam article about him. The piano concerto I was writing exactly at that time ended up being written in his memory; I had been thinking of dedicating the piece to him as a 95th birthday tribute, but this is how things go.

In that article, I mentioned that I had already written birthday pieces for him, every tenth year just like clockwork. I had dedicated my big wind ensemble with ten clarinets piece Ten of a Kind to him as a gift for his 85th birthday, and in that article I paraphrased his written response to receiving the score as best as I could remember it (I was writing it in France). Ten of A Kind is very big and very complicated, and the "President's Own" did an amazing job with it.

I have just located a scan of the actual letter he sent, which just goes to show that he did tend to keep going when he wrote you friendly letters. I had not remembered him calling me "Dear, Dear David"; I also had not remembered that he told me he had nominated me for something.  And so almost twenty years later, here it is. It seems to be the only letter I have from him that doesn't end "As ever, Milton".

(9/21/00

Dear, Dear David:

Can you ever forgive my unforgivable delay in responding to your birthday offering? But it has not been the best of times (indeed, this summer ranks among the worst).

Your incredible composition tempted me to take out my clarinet and play all of the parts; I, then, reminded myself that I hadn't played the clarinet in sixty years. Really, I can't wait to hear it, since my ears are even older than my clarinet embouchure (EMBOUCHURE!).

I trust I haven't made your life more messy by nominating you for a Charles Ives(!) Living at the Academy.

Love to both of you from both of us,

Milton

P.S. Not only can I not count the ways in which I am grateful, I cannot even count the notes.)

The summer I came back.

This is the St. Albans Citizens Band, together with what must have been a hastily assembled chorus, at a rehearsal for a Bicentennial concert. Thus the picture was taken in the summer of 1976. This is not the summer I came back. This picture was recently posted on Facebook, which is what brought me to make this post. I don't remember a single thing about the Bicentennial concert.

I recognize a few of the people in the picture. Mervin Kaye, who owned Kaye's shoe store and was the St. Albans mayor for a number of years, is the first chair clarinetist. Right in the center of the shot, with a trumpet in his lap, is Branch Warner, of the family that owned Warner's Snack Bar. Which is where I worked that summer. I'm in the row in back of Branch, four people to the right (to his left). I have some hair. Ed Loomis, the band's director, is the furthest to the right. Larry and Grace King are in the chorus, close to the door — Gracie is my godmother. Click on the picture to see it a bit bigger.

This was the summer between my high school graduation and the start of my undergraduate degree at New England Conservatory, and I was making milkshakes at Warner's and writing furiously. On a trip to a doctor's office in Burlington my father made, I purchased the Gradus theory textbook by Leo Kraft (as I was earning $1.75 an hour at Warner's, and I was flush, flush, flush I tell you! with cash) and I did me some learnin'. And even some sketchin'. I wrote some Hindemith-type fugues, and a few fantasias on Gregorian chant tunes — because the opening of Norman Dello Joio's third piano sonata is in the text, and the author identified the opening melody as derived from a chant. Many many years later the beginning of that chant accidentally became the head motive of John Mackey's Wine-Dark Sea. I seem also to have tried my hand at inventions. I must have been kind of cocky, since my sketches are all in ink. I also arranged my Gregorian chant fantasia for woodwind quintet, which goes to show I hadn't had any sense knocked into me yet.

Also, I played organ at my sister's wedding that summer. Note I'm not using the pedals. Also, behold those socks.

The Citizens Band played weekly concerts on the bandstand in Taylor Park in St. Albans, and they were a very social affair for the members. People listened either from lawn chairs or from their cars, and at the end of every piece the people in cars honked their horn as a stand-in for applause — one of the few times I've known anyone to honk their horn as approval of something. Every once in a while we played an actual classical tune — Poet and Peasant Overture comes to mind (I remember making a "Franz Von Suppé Sales" joke) — and of course the experience of being in the mass of instruments and figuring out how they were used in a piece was valuable. Since I was going to be entering a program in music composition, after all.

The trombone section was pretty good, and I alternated between first and third — I had reasonably good high notes, but I also had an F attachment, giving me some extra low notes.

More than four years earlier, I was one of the eighth graders invited (as the entire class was invited) to do a day at the high school to see what a high school schedule of classes was like. We had already registered for high school classes, so it was kind of like a dry run. The science class sure was a long way from the band room.

Of course I was mad about music then, too. In sixth grade I had been given the privilege of playing in the high school district festival, and the music was so much better than elementary school band music that I kept (uh, stole) my folder of parts, got a reel-to-reel recording of that concert, and played along. Over and over. Oh, also, I was considerably smaller than the other trombonists. My sister would probably like to take this opportunity to mention, or complain, that I also played Bridge Over Troubled Water on our piano over and over and over. And over. It's in E-flat. Somehow my father was able to afford to buy a small electronic organ with an octave of pedals for me to play with (they probably hated it when I experimented on the pedals with the bass line from It Better End Soon on Chicago II). This being 1972 technology, eventually all the G-sharps stopped working. Also, some time around then, the piano in the house was tuned for probably the first time ever. The tuner noted that the piano was low by a half step, and retrospectively I'm glad I don't have perfect pitch. When I figured out Linus and Lucy on the piano, I played along with the TV in A. The tune is really in A-flat. Where the fingerings are far, far easier.

But as high school was looming, eighth graders had to get serious about their upcoming schedules and sign up for classes. My father was insistent that I take the drafting class because I needed to start getting skills for, you know, making a living. Unlike, say, music. Which was fine, but the class met at the same time as band, so on my mock day, the music teachers wondered why I wasn't doing any music class. Apparently my reputation preceded me. I had pretty much resigned myself to not doing music any more, or at least not doing music much. Because you know, marketable skills. In the elementary school final concert in eighth grade I played 25 or 6 to 4 and Colour My World on trombone, with the music teacher at piano and Jim Hoy on drums. I had figured that was my swan song, even though I didn't know what that meant at the time.

That summer I started playing in the St. Albans Citizens Band and the Enosburg Band — my father's friend Carl Eller played sax in that band and he gave me rides to the gigs (20 miles from St. Albans). So inventions, fantasias, fugues, milkshakes, and community band. Oh, and Carl also gave me a badass shortwave radio, which obsessed me for a little while.

And this summer is when everything changed. I had had such a great time playing in those concerts, making friends with grown-up musicians, figuring out orchestrations from context, and cracking bad music jokes that I decided I loved music too much to leave it. And especially to leave it for a drafting class. So I negotiated with my father — he knew how music-obsessed I was, and he okayed me taking band instead of the drafting class, as long as before I graduated, I took the class.

So I came back. Discovered that the band uniforms were wool, and I'm allergic to wool. So I had my special pair of band long johns, which were kind of a nuisance for the warmer gigs (such as marching in the Dairy Festival parade). We marched in the Veteran's Day Parade every year, and I was always in the front row on a corner, because slide. Also, it's kind of cold in Vermont in November, and I remember one marching practice where it was cold enough to freeze my slide in place. Luckily I knew the music well enough so I could determine where the notes of the B-flat harmonic series would fit in.

On the first day of classes of high school, Verne Colburn, the band director, welcomed me "back", and within a week he noticed I was not tonguing right — the way my jaw moved when I played was the clue. For four years I had never tongued a single trombone note. I essentially did paw, paw, paw when I played rather than ta, ta, ta. Then at that moment I became an actual trombone player, even though it felt weird for a while. Especially because it meant I would eventually be able to double tongue. Though I guess I had four years of experience getting ready to play Papageno, should I have needed to.

And of course there were the music festivals. Vermont All-State and All-New England. I entered Vermont All-State's composition competition with a piece for my high school band, and it lost. Then in my senior year, I won. With a different piece. To the right is a picture of all the All-State competition winners in 1976 (most of them for performance, but most of the front row for composition), and I am sitting just left of center in the front row, not knowing that I was going to marry the woman on my left in a little more than thirteen years.

1972 was thus the summer I came back. I have to credit the St. Albans Citizens Band, the director Ed Loomis, and the excellent and fun musicians in the band for helping me convince myself that music was really my thang. Yes, I am still in music because of a community band. Oh, and as it turns out, I might earn more now than I would if I had a job that required drafting skills.

I never took that drafting class.

Skylines

Blue Griffin Recording recently released the Iridium Saxophone Quartet's Skylines album in digital form, and my Compass is on it in a truly wonderful performance (Prism Quartet also released a recording on their own label). Iridium is one of the ten saxophone quartets in on the original commission. True to form, Orchard Enterprises immediately placed static tracks on YouTube; also true to form, the metadata has no information about the composers of any of the tracks. Here you go.

It's not an anthology

... but it's cool being collected with the two H's. Whee!

We're excited to take part in International Sheet Music Day on Saturday, August 18! You can find this limited edition collection of piano miniatures by @MarcAndreHam, @FredHerschMusic, & @ziodavino exclusively at @Schmitt_Music, @Remenyi_Music, and other fine retailers on 8/18. pic.twitter.com/JnSiaJV6zT

— Edition Peters USA (@EditionPetersUS) August 10, 2018

Cleveland Rocks

It's not often you get asked to do a residency where they are doing six premieres of your work, but it happened to me. Once. Keith Fitch, who is all the composition all the time at Cleveland Institute of Music, invited me to do so (he had also invited me in 2009, at which time I also said yes), and he scoured my list of works for stuff they could do.

The quality of playing for mod music there ratcheted up quite a bit in the intervening time, so all the performances are stupendous. And did I mention six premieres? Well, read further, or eat a mushroom, or both.

Maria Paola Parrini chose five préludes from my list of unperformed ones, and did a spectacular job. I especially like Bump, though I don't remember writing it, and it's a dumb title. The sketch is here. Click on "YouTube" to watch on YouTube, and then click on SHOW MORE for a list of titles and clickable links to navigate from one prélude to another.





Then was the premiere of Breakdown, a piano quartet that had been commissioned by the Verge Ensemble just before they folded. There is dreamed music in this one — it's the heavy glissandi in the middle — and that dreamed music sort of takes over. The commission had been set up by Dan Visconti, who subsequently titled a piece Breakdown, and my jazziferous breakdowns are what give the piece its title.



Finally, Arabesques I Have Known, which was not a premiere, was something I wrote in order to use two toy wind keyboards at the same time. There's the green Andes keyboard, and yes, the cadenza in the third movement is improvised, as well as the melodica, which tends to do little canons with the clarinet. Because Davy. At the premiere by Boston Musica Viva, one audience member spontaneously applauded after the second movement, but that's okay. The third movement reminds Gusty Thomas somewhat of Hyperblue — all those manic unisons — and she's right. Click on YouTube to watch on YouTube, and then click on SHOW MORE for the movement list and timings.



This is the finale of Arabesques I Have Known, which has the two toy wind pianos in it, and makes me laugh every time.

Current colloquium rotation

These are currently pieces I play, in different combinations, at presentations and colloquia I am asked to give. You can check out a far larger collection here. Below there is a little bit of perfunctory text preceding each piece.

Martler (Étude #14, 1995-96) Beff and I were both at VCCA and I finished the piece I had gone there to write earlier than expected. So I had a few extra days to start something else, and I chose to write a piano étude. We had been listening to fragments of Martin Butler's Jazz Machines during lunches we had together, so I decided to try and emulate that piece's opening texture. I placed my hands in the low register of the piano and improvised some fast dyads and wrote them down, all the while not knowing what the piece was about. After a short while I started crossing my left hand over the right, and after I had done that a few times, I knew the piece was a crossing hands piece. Martler was our nickname for Martin then, as it is now.

Narcissitude (étude #79, 2007) I was between pieces and felt like writing an étude. I did my usual thing of asking various pianists to suggest ideas for études, and Michael Kirkendoll suggested mirror études, in which the hands mirror each other. I wrote a slow one (Upon Reflection, #78), with both hands moving slowly and mirroring each other together, but I wanted to let it rip with a fast one with an additional premise: the hands mirror each other but they are not synchronized. Indeed, in most of the piece the left hand lags behind the right by just one (fast!) note. Technically speaking, then, this is a mirror canon, and what it is, too. Check out the silly cross-hand ending.



Fists of Fury (étude #25, 2000) Marilyn Nonken had given a great recital at Miller Theater which included my first two études, and the presenter decided to give the concert the silly title Fists of Fury. In the concert, Marilyn used her fist only once, at the end of my E-Machines, and was a little depressed about her concert's name. Indeed, the NYTimes reviewer liked the concert but said it had a dumb name. So to cheer Marilyn up, I wrote her a piece with that title that actually calls for the use of fists. In it, the beginning theme of Beethoven's 9th symphony is quoted in finger-pedaled notes in the last section of the piece, and in the middle, the rise from the extreme low register of the piano quotes one my études she had played on the concert. Note this piece doesn't use the nose.



Quietude (étude #97, 2010). This is the third étude whose constraint is that it uses only one kind of chord — the dominant seventh chord (the other two use half-diminished seventh chords and major triads). I unfold them mostly in falling arpeggios, à la Schumann, but I use block chords as well, and occasionally you hear two of them at once (a polychord). I dedicated the étude to Augusta Read Thomas, a very close friend, and who had dedicated one of her études to me.



Absofunkinlutely (étude #68, 2005) One of the strands in the études is so-called vernacular styles, which began when Amy Briggs asked for a stride étude. Eventually I included bop, rock and roll, tango, prog rock, and polka as étude premises as well. This one was precipitated by yet another trip to the well of great étude ideas by Rick Moody — he suggested funk licks, and behold, this one is based on two fairly generic funk licks. It is also a slightly wild celebration of no longer being chair of my department.



Violin Concerto #2 (2016-17). As composer-in-residence for the New England Philharmonic, I was asked to write a violin concerto for Danielle Maddon, the concertmaster. I always try to find screwy compositional problems to solve when I write for the orchestra, and one such problem occurred to me: how about a concerto movement where the soloist and string sections play only pizzicato? Whee! That means only the winds (and percussion) can sustain notes. So that first movement is in four basic sections: 1. establish the premise with rising pizzicato figures 2. forest of pizzicati in the sections 3. reestablish rising figures with a 3-part texture (a) long-line melody in winds b) soloist and violin sections combine into a superviolin c) violas, cellos and basses create rising lines that move from section to section, and the time between those lines gets closer and closer) 3a. transition 4. alla chitarra (like a guitar) for soloist and first violins over a pedal E. The second movement is a creamy little thing emanating from an oscillating figure in clarinets designed to be unoctatonic. The finale is a traditional barn burner in compound time that ends by bringing back the beginning of the first movement, and then leaving the soloist hanging as if it were Wile E. Coyote after the ledge he was standing on crumbles away.



Natura Morta (2015) is a piano quartet commissioned by Network for New Music for a Milton Babbitt at 100 celebratory concert. It's in three sections with the incipit upbeat gesture turned into something thematic in the middle section. Before I started writing this piece, I listened to a lot of piano quartets by 19th and 20th century composers, and was struck that so many of them were romantic, heart-on-sleeve hyperexpressive pieces, without very much lighter music at all. Since I was writing a celebratory piece, I was interested in writing something different from that, and I used that dichotomy to shape the first section of the piece: there is a light, coloristic, rhythmic music that begins the piece, but the strings, one by one, leave that music for romantic, slow, expressive music. That leaves the piano as the only one doing the lighter music. Eventually they trade gestures and at the other end, they agree on a more vernacular music. After a recapitulation of sorts, it gets loud and fast — mostly because it was written by me. For those playing along at home, natura morta means "still life". Alas, the group has taken down the video.



Entre Nous (2016) is a rather substantial piece for oboe and string quartet. This is the final movement, a scherzo. All the materials come from the opening tutti, and the two-note bouncing figure that is everywhere comes out of the slow movement of Beethoven's piano trio Op. 70 #2.



Zephyrs (2013) is the first movement of Dance Episodes, my fifth symphony. At the time I was interested in trying to write music for dance — or even a full-length ballet — and this was the first thing I wrote as a way of demonstrating what I could do. An interesting thing formally in the piece is an early detail that gets exploded into its own section — that of a single note expanding into a chord via glissandi. Tristesse is the third movement, a slow, sad one, in which I imagined a solo dancer gradually joined by a second, third, and fourth dancer.





Piano Concerto #2 (2011) Rob Amory approached me to commission a piece -- my wildest dream, whatever I wanted. I chose a piano concerto for Amy Briggs, with whom I'd been working for nearly a decade. I asked Amy for a list of things she would want in her concerto, and it would be my job to make them all fit together. Her list included the opening texture of Martler, beginning in medias res, ritornello structures, textures like the Bach keyboard concertos, and jazz, among other things. I was to write the whole piece at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. The day before I left, I dreamed a late 19th century piece with chorus and orchestra with a chromatic turn on the words, "the postcards are traveling home," and since I always use music I dream in a piece if I can remember it, the chromatic turn has a big role in the piece. Thus the first movement starts with and returns to the Martler texture. The second movement is an elegy in memoriam Milton Babbitt, with the Bach stuff in the middle. The finale is the jazz movement, and has a substantial cadenza.







I wrote three piano préludes (yes, préludes and not études) for Sarah Bob. The recordings she made of them are below.

Mind the Gap (prélude #18, 2012) came about because Sarah was hired to be the pianist in a recording of my Stolen Moments with BMOP, and there are a few monster solos in it. After the recording session, she said she wanted to play the first solo as a solo piece, and I said it was middle music -- it didn't have a beginning or an ending. So she said WRITE THEM THEN. I did. Ghepardo (prélude #48, 2015) has a name Sarah chose: Book V titles are Italian names for animals or insects: she choose cheetah, which is her son's favorite animal. I remembered Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom's episode on the cheetah, where the family of cheetahs mostly lounges around the water hole, only twice doing the really fast cheetah thing in action shots -- so my piece is structured thus. Wayo (#51, 2015) is a nonsense word that was spoken by Sarah's daughter (the titles of book VI are nonsense words), and is a slow passacaglia based on a 3-bar theme. The conceit here is imagining what Sarah's daughter would see and hear in her bassinette.







Etruscan March (2007) (also first movement of Cantina, for wind ensemble). This is a march movement for band.



Dream Symphony (2003) When I am asked if I ever write slow music (since I tend to play fast music for people because it has a lot of notes), I play the last four minutes of my third symphony, written for string orchestra.



Ecco eco (Étude #77, 2007) was a response to a suggestion of an "echo" étude made by Corey Hamm. Corey may have been thinking echo phrases like in Baroque pieces, but I took it literally. In the piece, chords echo, the rate of echo changes, they overlap, and sometimes there are Doppler shifts. This is a really, really hard piece.



Not (Étude #74, 2006) This is a speaking pianist étude using a minimalist text by Rick Moody. Adam Marks, a former theory student of mine, who was writing a dissertation on speaking pianist pieces (there are quite a few of them now), asked if I'd write one for him. I did. Rick's text slowly assembles the text Not happy with it, not lying down for it, written as a screed against the (W) Bush administration.

In which I pretend I can read music, because nametag