tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83386814212224063482024-03-15T21:09:47.627-04:00zio davinoRandom musings (or rather specific ones) by David Rakowski — composer, pizza maker, failed trombonist, ex-font maker. Also a kind of stand-in website.zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comBlogger106125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-56786847213357293292021-11-24T11:06:00.006-05:002022-12-05T08:35:10.532-05:00Musical ancestry<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Several years ago, my former student Jason Uechi sent me this sequence of composers and their students, connecting me somehow back to Bach.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">J.S. Bach > W.F. Bach<br />W.F. Bach > Sarah Levy<br />Sarah Levy > Carl Friedrich Zelter<br />Carl Friedrich Zelter > F. Mendelssohn<br />F. Mendelssohn > Carl Reinecke<br />Carl Reinecke > George Whitefield Chadwick<br />George Whitefield Chadwick > Horatio Parker<br />Horatio Parker > Roger Sessions<br />Roger Sessions > Milton Babbitt<br />Milton Babbitt > Uncle Davy</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;" /></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Coincidentally, I got the George Whitefield Chadwick </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">(my great great grandteacher) </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">Medal from New England Conservatory when I graduated.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">This same composer also proferred an alternate history.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Cherubini > Halevy<br />Halevy > Saint-Saens<br />Saint-Saens > Faure<br />Faure > Boulanger<br />Boulanger > Marion Bauer<br />Bauer > Babbitt > Uncle Davy</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-78487409210291730162020-12-20T15:10:00.008-05:002024-01-20T13:24:34.544-05:00Notes for the composer career lecture<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Beff and I taught at <a href="http://www.cortonasessions.org" target="_blank">Cortona Sessions</a> in the summer of 2016, and boy was it hot, and boy was our room and all of our composer sessions hot.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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 <strike>is</strike> 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.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGkTqAVamNywg4gw2D09m-LlOti6Inz_dGpXwAj0MY9F6_k8yTn4CkRghtgyF6Kyu8Gx9Lockq0f73v-AdSy8N31rUdvaJRkGfjGjcdmPLeEhLdDVK1EL-NWHoyLPshJV291nWSE7gIgAW/s3048/IMG_1631.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1031" data-original-width="3048" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGkTqAVamNywg4gw2D09m-LlOti6Inz_dGpXwAj0MY9F6_k8yTn4CkRghtgyF6Kyu8Gx9Lockq0f73v-AdSy8N31rUdvaJRkGfjGjcdmPLeEhLdDVK1EL-NWHoyLPshJV291nWSE7gIgAW/w667-h225/IMG_1631.JPG" width="667" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">This is the view from the second winery. Those are all Brunello grapes.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">So in the <i>one</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I have posted my notes on the book of face and twitter occasionally, getting plenty of comments and questions. <strike>I have still not had the opportunity to do this presentation completely and in the time for which it was designed</strike>. <i>Plus</i>, I have added to it over the years. I was at Yaddo with <a href="http://www.marilynchin.org" target="_blank">Marilyn Chin</a> 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 <i>serendipitously</i>. 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Here's the current state of my notes, subject to more change as they occur to me. I called it </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">Iron Composer</i><span style="font-family: georgia;"> because I used a topic from a fun exercise at Cortona Sessions and typed over it all.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The two most important points, though, open and close the presentation.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir20yWPcSR9syEl_sXO-Q_LtPRflPbOUoylqNKQfPKZNiVAFtZryQdzZD4rPgBFlQaVQsVuYGOivGyRThk1tYP4bz7aFnAfCg5QdeSPHgbOC7Rvo98WbL3iXsb_k-dQu3My5oaVNSmS-5d/s2002/Screen+Shot+2021-02-14+at+9.59.45+AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1918" data-original-width="2002" height="666" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir20yWPcSR9syEl_sXO-Q_LtPRflPbOUoylqNKQfPKZNiVAFtZryQdzZD4rPgBFlQaVQsVuYGOivGyRThk1tYP4bz7aFnAfCg5QdeSPHgbOC7Rvo98WbL3iXsb_k-dQu3My5oaVNSmS-5d/w696-h666/Screen+Shot+2021-02-14+at+9.59.45+AM.png" width="696" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><span style="color: red;">Update</span></i>: 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 <i>There was another composer at NEC with a similar name to mine (1979), therefore</i> ... to ... <i>I was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2016)</i>.</span><p></p>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-77442263907076512052020-08-14T14:01:00.006-04:002020-08-15T15:55:37.587-04:00What Milton actually wrote<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> In January 2011, Milton Babbitt died and I was conscripted by New Music Box to write an <a href="https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/as-ever-milton/" target="_blank">in memoriam article</a> about him. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z75riUVfcH0&list=OLAK5uy_lzhFto51cWcnOoBtMNh8ArrOzo71ulEGg&index=6" target="_blank">piano concerto I was writing</a> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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 <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_ntglS6raA2-qailwhYFlJ90QkgZ9b4PKQ&fbclid=IwAR2--jSVA02B9u51tnzemlKNMt32f2KV_OHIhSaTDbDDvoB2xKwqaBQay2M" target="_blank">Ten of a Kind</a></i> 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). <i>Ten of A Kind</i> is very big and very complicated, and the "<a href="https://www.marineband.marines.mil" target="_blank">President's Own</a>" did an amazing job with it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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".</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7hZ8gZwjhBoDk-MoDcWFy9sNJUrfnpp3U4qqniTf5RFhYuCeLbp2BI8w_gvt0lZ4uaIu7yNQn3ceIye0VbtiA6W2hDS1O_N2-T3TEsv3bqDX35KEzYe_nwwv9TYVfwkrCM6h6XwRlk9EH/s2048/Screen+Shot+2020-08-14+at+1.45.22+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1763" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7hZ8gZwjhBoDk-MoDcWFy9sNJUrfnpp3U4qqniTf5RFhYuCeLbp2BI8w_gvt0lZ4uaIu7yNQn3ceIye0VbtiA6W2hDS1O_N2-T3TEsv3bqDX35KEzYe_nwwv9TYVfwkrCM6h6XwRlk9EH/w551-h640/Screen+Shot+2020-08-14+at+1.45.22+PM.png" width="551" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">(9/21/00</span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">Dear, Dear David:</span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">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).</span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">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!).</span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">I trust I haven't made your life more messy by nominating you for a Charles Ives(!) Living at the Academy.</span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">Love to both of you from both of us,</span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">Milton</span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">P.S. Not only can I not count the ways in which I am grateful, I cannot even count the notes.)</span></i></div><p></p>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-39462230173005906622020-03-24T09:20:00.004-04:002021-05-11T08:09:37.463-04:00The summer I came back.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is the <a href="http://citizensconcertband.org/" target="_blank">St. Albans Citizens Band</a>, 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 <i>the summer I came back. </i>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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 </span><a href="http://warnerssnackbar.com/" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;" target="_blank">Warner's Snack Bar</a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">. 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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<a href="http://www.ostimusic.com/" target="_blank"> John Mackey</a>'s <i>Wine-Dark Sea</i>. 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.</span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghdm9XnyVjHeJtmY1X82NA0TphNfzZuP4GiyKdetPxK_N_kbR9PHi2RgNiDAT2-mpmTXyHCbk1hfp3CrRd1lHGxzCrHUUYMt9zS0sWKpVAWrnJdhjNziaPQ8VrFJz2kUUMjs86vUM6GecU/s1600/ORGAN_1.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="623" data-original-width="518" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghdm9XnyVjHeJtmY1X82NA0TphNfzZuP4GiyKdetPxK_N_kbR9PHi2RgNiDAT2-mpmTXyHCbk1hfp3CrRd1lHGxzCrHUUYMt9zS0sWKpVAWrnJdhjNziaPQ8VrFJz2kUUMjs86vUM6GecU/s320/ORGAN_1.JPG" width="266" /></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Also, I played organ at my sister's wedding that summer. Note I'm not using the pedals. Also, behold those socks.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 <i>approval</i> of something. Every once in a while we played an actual classical tune — <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3_aM_s0R1U" target="_blank">Poet and Peasant Overture</a> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Of course I was mad about music then, too. In sixth grade I had been given the privilege of playing in the <i>high school</i> 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. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Over and over.</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">Bridge Over Troubled Water</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 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 </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">It Better End Soon</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 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 </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6zypc_LhnM" target="_blank">Linus and Lucy</a></i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">1972 was thus <i>the summer I came back</i>. 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I never took that drafting class.</span>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-73797191929014310852018-10-24T08:24:00.005-04:002019-11-29T11:13:34.580-05:00Skylines<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Blue Griffin Recording recently released the Iridium Saxophone Quartet's <i>Skylines</i> album in digital form, and my <i>Compass</i> is on it in a truly wonderful performance (<a href="https://www.prismquartet.com/" target="_blank">Prism Quartet</a> also released a recording on <a href="https://www.prismquartet.com/recording/paradigm-lost/" target="_blank">their own label</a>). 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.</span><br />
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zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-60731266810050249762018-08-10T07:25:00.000-04:002018-08-10T07:25:08.751-04:00It's not an anthology<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">... but it's cool being collected with the two H's. Whee!</span><br />
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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 <a href="https://twitter.com/MarcAndreHam?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MarcAndreHam</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/FredHerschMusic?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@FredHerschMusic</a>, & <a href="https://twitter.com/ziodavino?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ziodavino</a> exclusively at <a href="https://twitter.com/Schmitt_Music?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Schmitt_Music</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/Remenyi_Music?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Remenyi_Music</a>, and other fine retailers on 8/18. <a href="https://t.co/JnSiaJV6zT">pic.twitter.com/JnSiaJV6zT</a></div>
— Edition Peters USA (@EditionPetersUS) <a href="https://twitter.com/EditionPetersUS/status/1027707927623356417?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 10, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-75421046680746109892018-05-29T20:24:00.003-04:002020-01-01T14:13:56.823-05:00Cleveland Rocks<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 <i>all the composition all the time</i> 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.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Maria Paola Parrini chose five préludes from <a href="http://ziodavino.blogspot.com/p/piano-etudes-and-preludes-not-yet.html" target="_blank">my list of unperformed ones</a>, and did a spectacular job. I especially like <i>Bump</i>, though I don't remember writing it, and it's a dumb title. The sketch is <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/xpxxi2i528lldm5/Bump.pdf?dl=0" target="_blank">here</a>. 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.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="415" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Isy8lDkEEAo" width="720"></iframe><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Then was the premiere of <i>Breakdown</i>, 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 <i>Breakdown</i>, and my jazziferous breakdowns are what give the piece its title.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="415" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bHXXcURSnq4" width="720"></iframe><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Finally, <i>Arabesques I Have Known</i>, 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 <i>Hyperblue</i> — 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is the finale of <i>Arabesques I Have Known</i>, which has the <i>two</i> toy wind pianos in it, and makes me laugh every time.</span><br />
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<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="415" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/faIFZo-_pqA" width="720"></iframe>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-7157963242262067692018-03-17T10:45:00.003-04:002022-08-18T10:03:45.222-04:00Current colloquium rotation<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 <a href="http://ziodavinomusic.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">here</a>. Below there is a little bit of perfunctory text preceding each piece.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Martler</i> (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 <i>Jazz Machines</i> 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 <i>about</i>. 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. <i>Martler</i> was our nickname for Martin then, as it is now.</span></div>
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Narcissitude</i> (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 (<i>Upon Reflection</i>, #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 <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_canon" target="_blank">mirror canon</a></i>, and what it is, too. Check out the silly cross-hand ending.</span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Fists of Fury</i> (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 <b>Fists of Fury</b>. In the concert, Marilyn used her fist only once, at the end of my <i>E-Machines</i>, 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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LTpbbnZhDw" target="_blank">doesn't use the nose</a>.</span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Quietude</i> (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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egAl_p0beIo" target="_blank">half-diminished seventh chords</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2yB_ephKLk" target="_blank">major triads</a>). 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.</span></span><br />
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<i>Absofunkinlutely</i> (étude #68, 2005) One of the strands in the études is so-called vernacular styles, which began when Amy Briggs asked for a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noavrzXz_Ak" target="_blank">stride étude</a>. Eventually I included <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erRvYIrDC2o" target="_blank">bop</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F5gvgmG_Go" target="_blank">rock and roll</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPgbIdts4Bg" target="_blank">tango</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs-TlQudt-g" target="_blank">prog rock</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=23&v=_ti4gJoZFCA" target="_blank">polka</a> 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.</span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Violin Concerto #2</i> (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 <i>and</i> 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. <i>alla chitarra</i> (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.</span></span><br />
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<i>Natura Morta</i> (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, <i>natura morta</i> means "still life". Alas, the group has taken down the video.</span></span><br />
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</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Entre Nous </i>(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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXZKNx6NLtU" target="_blank">slow movement</a> of Beethoven's piano trio Op. 70 #2.</span></span><br />
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</i></span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Zephyrs</i> (2013) is the first movement of <i>Dance Episodes</i>, 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. <i>Tristesse</i> is the third movement, a slow, sad one, in which I imagined a solo dancer gradually joined by a second, third, and fourth dancer.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Piano Concerto #2 </i>(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 <i>jazz</i> movement, and has a substantial cadenza.</span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I wrote three piano préludes (yes, préludes and not études) for Sarah Bob. The recordings she made of them are below.</span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Mind the Gap </i>(prélude #18, 2012) came about because Sarah was hired to be the pianist in a recording of my <i>Stolen Moments</i> 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. <i>Ghepardo</i> (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. <i>Wayo</i> (#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.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Etruscan March</i> (2007) (also first movement of <i>Cantina</i>, for wind ensemble). This is a march movement for band.</span><br />
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<i>Dream Symphony</i> (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.</span><br />
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</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Ecco eco</i> (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.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Not</i> (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 <i>Not happy with it, not lying down for it,</i> written as a screed against the (W) Bush administration.</span><br />
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<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="460" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WuTdr08lxiE" width="720"></iframe>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-54402066841694449102017-06-30T10:41:00.000-04:002017-08-17T11:23:30.481-04:00In which I pretend I can read music, because nametag<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-10692039299892169522017-05-27T21:08:00.001-04:002017-05-29T13:18:14.036-04:00My Naumburg speech<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">In 2006, I was elevated (if that is the word) to the Walter W. Naumburg Chair at Brandeis. At the time, all new Endowed Chair people were feted at events honoring them, at which the Provost and Dean attended; the Provost did the introducing, and there were refreshments afterwards. This doesn't happen any more, and I kind of wish it didn't happen then.</span></div>
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Nonetheless. I wrote and delivered a speech. Here's what happened.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I don’t do a lot of public speaking — actually, I don’t do any — and I’ve certainly never been called on to give a talk before such an accomplished and erudite crowd such as has gathered here. I did read somewhere, though – or maybe I saw it on TV – that public speeches are supposed to begin with a joke. And since this is such an accomplished and erudite crowd, I realize I can’t use just any joke – all the ones I know are either beneath such an accomplished and erudite crowd, or are musicians-only. So I made it my summer project (along with a few other things) to make up just the right joke for this occasion. For such an accomplished and erudite crowd. I don’t mind saying I’m at least as proud of this joke as I am of the piano quintet and the flute trio I wrote this summer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Before I tell it, I should let you know that the joke has been test-marketed. I was at the artist colony Yaddo this summer, and I ran it by the writers, visual artists and composers who were in residence there. Maybe fifteen percent got it right away. Another fifteen percent got it after long pensive stares. The other seventy needed it explained. The same seventy percent said it wan’t funny anyway.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I then test-marketed the joke to my Music 103 class at Brandeis. There was a 100 percent laugh response. Which goes to show you: Brandeis students are incredibly sophisticated — either that or they’re really good at sucking up to faculty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I realize that it’s too late now to <i>start</i> with a joke. So I’ll just tell it, and move on.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s no “eye” in Oedipus.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’m honored and humbled to be awarded the <i>Naumburg Chair</i> in Composition. The composers who have preceded me in it are in the history books – literally. Irving Fine, Arthur Berger and Harold Shapero represented the American neoclassical school along with Copland and they were represented in a substantial portion in the textbook I had when I took music history as an undergraduate in 1977. Fine’s <i>String Symphony</i>, Berger’s <i>Septet</i>, Shapero’s <i>Symphony</i> – all received serious disquisition. And I must note here that I had very significant encounters with the music of all of them as part of my undergraduate experience. In particular, I sang in the New England Conservatory chorus when it toured with and recorded Fine’s Hour-Glass Suite (I could probably write out the “White Lily” movement from memory); and I went nuts over Berger’s Septet when the NEC Contemporary Ensemble played it – I bought the score and record and studied it pretty closely on my own. Yehudi Wyner wasn’t in my book in 1977 but the work he did after coming to Brandeis – the <i>Horntrio</i> and the piano concerto in particular – most certainly has put him in the latest edition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">These are pretty daunting shoes to fill. By comparison, I feel like a beginner, someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing.For once I can say I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants and not sound pompous. Hmm, actually, I can’t.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I also want to say that I am honored to serve in the same program that has had as faculty Seymour Shifrin, Eddie Cohen, Conrad Pope, Allen Anderson, Marty Boykan, Eric Chasalow and Yu-Hui Chang – every one a composer of great distinction, personality, originality and imagination. Despite our program’s small size, we continue to be one of the most distinguished in the country. And the unfailing support we have had from Brandeis has been crucial in gaining and retaining that distinction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The first Naumburg Chair was awarded to Irving Fine when I was one year old. Now I’m more than twice that age, and I am tickled to report the fact that, full circle, I am now teaching Irving Fine’s granddaughter, Nina Hurwitz, in music theory. Nina declared a music major last week, on the composition track – I wonder what it’s like to enter a building and every time be greeted by a bust of your grandfather, always with the same expression. And by the way – Nina laughed at the joke. No “eye” in Oedipus.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Many thanks to Palle Yourgrau, the first Chaired professor to give such a talk as this, for his advice on what to do in mine. I can only hope one day to know as much music as he does — he already knows at least as much philosophy as I do. I’m going to say a bit about my formative years, and sorry about this, I’m going to get a little technical on occasion. Then there will be a little video.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I want to start by relating a personal story about the beginning of my formal education in composition. I came to New England Conservatory in 1976 as a composition major from St. Albans, Vermont, deep in a dairy farming region, not exactly wild about the arts, and a city economically depressed since the railroad business it used to do moved to Canada. I knew very little music, but my ears perked up at the gentle “modern” music I played at music festivals – what I was writing in high school blithely imitated that music. When I got to NEC, I was told that composers sang in the chorus for two years, and that I would have to audition to sing a really tough piece that was being done with the Boston Symphony in a mere month and a half. It was a large atonal piece called “Chronicles” by a composer named Seymour Shifrin from some nearby college called Brandeis. In the audition I had to sightread some frightfully disjunct lines with difficult rhythms, but I made it through, and I was admitted into the chorus. Lorna Cooke deVaron drilled us mercilessly, got us to feel and sing the lines as real melodies, stopped often to tune the strange chords, and slowly whipped us into shape. It was a real challenge, especially for the voice majors who would rather have been singing Mozart arias, but the more we rehearsed, the more natural the music felt. Eventually we were ready to sing our part for the composer. A nice looking man came to a rehearsal, sat in the back and nodded and smiled while we sang, and afterwards said only, “Thank you. I know it’s hard. Bravi.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Then were the not enough rehearsals with the BSO and Ozawa. Hearing an orchestra in front of us playing that music that we had hitherto associated only with a rehearsal piano was quite amazing. The way the last movement moved to the final eight-note chord – an A minor seven in the men’s voices – I had the G at the top – and a second inversion E-flat minor 7 in the women’s voices was glorious. I had heard nothing like it before, and there’s no adequate explanation for the feeling of singing that note, being in the middle of the big sonority, and knowing, just knowing it is right, in every sense of the word. The week after that performance I changed my writing style completely. And the cool chords from <i>Chronicles</i> were still in my head and were all over what I wrote. That last chord – I’ve used it or a derivation of it at least ten times. If not a hundred.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I tell that story to emphasize how much an encounter by a young musician with just one piece can change everything. The experience I had with Chronicles and other pieces is always in the back of my mind when I teach pieces in music theory or music appreciation, and it is most gratifying when I am able to be the one who changes someone’s ideas about art, about music, or about life — with something as simple as an encounter with a piece of music. I suspect that my story of becoming a composer is very much like that of many others – you hear a piece you like, and imitate it. Then you write that piece over and over until you hear another piece with stuff you want to steal, and incorporate that, and so on. Every once in the while the encounter is so intense as to cause an epiphany. <i>Chronicles</i> was one such piece for me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A few words about my DNA. There is no history of musical aptitude on the Polish side of the family. Indeed, my father was tone deaf, which made singing hymns in church something of an excruciating experience. His father grew up in Warsaw; the reason the family moved to America was that in 1918 my grandfather had a, um, difference of opinion with someone in a poker game, shot, and killed him. Shortly he was living in Springfield, Massachusetts raising a family. He scrimped and saved to send my father to Northeastern University in 1940 to study chemistry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The English branch of my mother’s side of the family came to America in 1823, a Mr. Benjamin Hill who was brought from London to teach at a new conservatory established in Rochester, New York. His daughter Julia was a piano prodigy who toured the European continent at age 14, played for royalty and the great musicians of that time. When she turned 21, the city of Rochester gave her a piano with the stipulation that she present a free recital on it. Then she married, stopped concertizing, and began the domestic life that made <i>me</i> possible. Julia’s granddaughter sent her daughter – my mother – to BU in 1940, to major in vocal performance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">My parents met at a mixer, went out for two years, and my father was drafted. He spent the second world war in Burma, by his account mostly getting drunk on grain alcohol. After the war, he finished his degree and moved to my mother’s hometown to take a job at a paper mill. The two offspring who preceded me into this world were forced into piano and violin lessons, which they hated – my brother told stories of being chased across a playground because he had a violin case. My parents learned their lesson: the baby – me – would not be forced into music lessons. It was a good move.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So my sister, older by 6 years, apparently had no friends her own age to play with: she spent her play time teaching me to read music, to play the piano, and to read – I have no memory of not being able to do any of those. We had a piano in the house, and I tinkered endlessly. We also had a meager collection of classical records – just the stuff that the local supermarkets sold as weekly subscriptions to the “World’s Greatest Classical Library in Your Own Home!” Nonetheless, the only classical music we ever listened to at home before I got to college was Mussorgsky’s <i>Night on Bald Mountain</i> and <i>The Messiah</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For school band, I picked up the trombone and became serviceable at it without practicing much. I got good enough to go to All-State and All-New England festivals, where I had my first encounters with so-called modern music. In retrospect it was very tame stuff, but at the time it perked up my ears, simply because it was different. When I learned that our All-State festival had a composers competition with actual money prizes, I wrote a piece – my first piece ever -- for my high school band – it pretty much stole all the licks from what I played at music festivals, and it lost the competition (I got to conduct the premiere with my own high school band, and the third clarinetists were all drunk) – but I got hooked. I asked my band director, Verne Colburn for advice on where to find new strange music that I should be listening to, and he gave me his Time-Life collection called <b>Music of Our Time</b>. I find it hard to believe that in this day and age Time-Life would do something like that again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There were a lot of different styles of music on that compilation, but the very, very modern pieces by Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez stood out as completely unlike everything else. I was mesmerized by them, even though I didn’t really understand them. And I listened to them over and over. Mr. Colburn also lent me his theory textbooks, where I read about some of the technical aspects of this weird music, but had no idea how to imitate it. I did some pretty serious wearing out of grooves, though.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Then came my encounter with Shifrin’s <i>Chronicles</i>. I knew what to do next.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">My undergraduate years were spent mostly acquiring technique and learning pieces. I would listen to pieces like the <i>Rite of Spring</i>, Messiaen’s <i>Chronochromie</i>, Berger’s <i>Septet</i>, Davidovsky’s first <i>Synchronism</i>, study the scores, to try and figure out what was in them that I could steal (you’ll note this preoccupation a lot with composers. Stravinsky is said to have remarked, “good composers borrow. Great composers steal”). I wrote music by the bushel, and I wrote it very fast. Most of it was complicated, and most of it was about technique alone. Which is to say, if anyone asked me what I was trying to “do”, or what my piece was “about”, I would present a disquisition on where the notes came from.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Then in my junior and senior years both my parents died, a little more than a year apart. My mother’s struggle with depression ended when she took her own life; and my father died when the car he was driving struck a train at an unmarked intersection. In the time after my mother’s death, my father and I got much closer, which made his passing even more tragic for me. I stopped writing music for quite a while, and when I did write it came out very slowly. I don’t know, maybe I was finished with learning mere technique and now I realized that what I really needed in music was – something to say. Or maybe what I really needed to learn was enough technique to express grief.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It turns out I didn’t have to wait very long for my answer. When I got to graduate school, Berg’s opera <i>Lulu</i> was being produced at the Met, and Princeton grad students were allowed to sit in on the rehearsals. I made it to six of them, getting to know this glorious opera really well, and in the last rehearsal, I had my epiphany. At the end of the opera, Lulu is forced to London to escape the law and becomes a prostitute. Her three clients are played by the same singers that played her three now-dead husbands, and the music associated with those characters returns. If you know the opera at all, you know that her third client is Jack the Ripper – yet he looks like Doctor Schön, the only man Lulu ever loved. While the gorgeous “love music” plays, Lulu and Jack yammer about the price of the trick. The many layers of meaning and irony to this scene and the music itself somehow overwhelmed me, and when the opera finished I was so full of emotion that I literally could not move for several minutes. My compatriots seemed to be similarly effected, as the car trip home was uncharacteristically silent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For a graduate seminar on the opera, I analyzed the “love music” which I just mentioned, and found it to be so tightly constructed that you could bounce a quarter on it. Moreover, the melody was written simply by repeating, several times, the rhythm that is associated in the opera with death – yet Berg’s treatment of the melody with the accompaniment made it sound anything but repetitious. What I think seeped in gradually from listening to this music was a sense of how <i>counterpoint</i> works in music, most specifically what is called in music theory the “fourth species” of counterpoint. Put simply, a tone is stable with its surroundings, and sustains while the surroundings change, thus making it unstable, or dissonant. The tone then has to move in order to fit with the new surroundings, which then change again, etcetera. Imagine by analogy being in a space and being comfortable, and the space itself changes to something forbidding, and you don’t belong. You have to move to where you belong. The continual artful use of such a device is part of what makes great music move, and is a big part of what gives it, for me, affect and expression. Berg had figured out how to get that affect in an atonal context, and I thought that was revolutionary.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I know it’s boring to talk continually about acquiring technique, but this was a big one for me. Without technique it’s hard to say anything with eloquence; but technique by itself is worthless if an artist has nothing to say. Meanwhile, while I was figuring this stuff out, everything I wrote for the next ten years bore the unmistakable imprint of Berg. Within a few years I had written an elegy for strings for my parents that worked – I had learned how to write good slow music. It is the first piece I wrote that “worked” from start to finish without any dead moments. Now I just had to figure out how to write music of other speeds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">After graduate school I did crap word processing jobs and wrote very little music. I had decided not to try for a teaching job, but then another Brandeis connection comes in – a job landed in my lap. My friend Ross Bauer, with a PhD from this department, was leaving a lectureship at Stanford for another job at the last minute, and he recommended me to replace him for a year. I was offered the job on my 30th birthday, and I decided to try a year of teaching to see if it was for me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I think you know what the answer was. By virtue of having to figure out pieces of music in order to teach them, I rediscovered stuff I hadn’t thought about for years. Since I was engaged with music full time, I was drawn back to composing in a big way. Soon I wrote a big Romantic symphony that all my friends called “Berg’s Third Symphony” – my friends aren’t very subtle – and when I finished, another Brandeis connection came calling: Rhonda Rider, who used to be the cellist of the Lydian Quartet, got her piano trio to commission me. I don’t know why, but the music that came out had an unusual rhythmic freedom, very strongly referencing the rhythms and gestures of be bop and even of rock and roll, yet harmonically it sounded like me. I had figured out how to write fast music. Moreover, it was fast music with <i>fourth species counterpoint</i>. With this piece I think I found my voice – at age 33. 33 is the number on the Rolling Rock bottle. Coincidence? I think not.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’ve brought the story up to 1991 and don’t have much more to say about my development as a composer. I have been constantly looking for new challenges, and ways to grow as a composer, and I’m fond of saying the only way to do that is to approach each new piece as if I don’t know what I’m doing. Because, as I have found out the hard way, convincing myself I know what I’m doing leads to laziness, sloppiness and to repeating myself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Speaking in such abstract terms about music, which is already abstract, is getting tedious, I think. Rather than talk a lot more, I’d like to share with you a teeny sliver of my music.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I have several parallel strands in my output – there’s the serious, long pieces; the not as serious serious smaller pieces; pieces for children; and a whole mess of piano études. Piano etudes are for me sort of a compositional playground. I enforce very strict rules when I write one: it must be written quickly (within six days), have no a priori ideas about its form, and something once written down cannot be revised. An etude is by nature an obsessive piece, so by trying to do as much as I can imagine, and quickly, that is about just one thing keeps my chops sharp. And because the pieces are written so quickly, I feel like I can have as much fun as I want. And explore different aspects of piano virtuosity – make no mistake, these are really hard pieces. Some things from the etudes have made it into my larger pieces, but I’d have to do another technical disquisition to say what.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To date I’ve written 73 piano etudes. More are on the way. I’m going to play the 14th, called Martler, on a video screen for reasons that will become apparent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Traditionally etudes are about some particular aspect of piano technique – parallel intervals, pedaling, broken chords, particular accompaniment figures, specific fingering patterns – and one class of etudes is about crossing hands. It’s not uncommon to find piano music in which the right hand plays an accompaniment figure and the left hand switches back and forth between bass and treble, thus crossing over the right hand. Probably the most well-known crossing hands piece is found in the movie of The Music Man in the scene that sets up the song “Goodnight My Someone”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I wrote <i>Martler</i> at an artist colony. Both I and my wife Beth were resident at the colony, and we showed each other our sketches daily. On the second day of writing my piece, Beth suggested I slyly quote something I might have played when I was in a rock band in high school. I protested, but I liked the challenge of sneaking something nearly incongruous in there. So I quoted “Smoke on the Water” and hid it within some long notes in a very busy texture, and I showed it to Beth. She said the quote should be more obvious. Well, I couldn’t take my really subtle quote back – remember, the rule is no revisions – so I then made a second, more obvious quote. It is okay for you to laugh if you recognize it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Writing an appallingly virtuosic piece for crossing hands means that there is not only musical structure to think of (by the way, the two dueling tonics of A and E-flat are suggested by the first two sonorities of the piece, which fly by like the wind), but also the ballet of the hands themselves. So it ends up being a very visual piece. It is a real treat to watch an artist of the caliber of Amy Dissanayake play this piece – I have been very lucky to find players of her artistry who like to play my music, and who can pull it off with such fierceness. You will note that about two-fifths of the way through Amy stops looking at the music and plays from memory. Amazing. The video was made at the American Academy of Arts and Letters after Amy had spent three grueling days making a CD of 22 etudes of mine, all of them with similar technical demands, and she did this performance because the recording engineer asked to watch the piece being played.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">By way of conclusion, I simply want to say, somewhat tautologically, that I want to make music that is everything that it can be. I’m sure my colleagues share that philosophy, and it has been my teaching philosophy as well. My new goal in life – now that I wrote my joke – is to write something so good that the <i>next</i> Naumburg Chair says in his or her speech that it was one of his or her formative pieces. Or at least that he or she could bounce a quarter off of it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I want to thank Marty for hosting this event, and Rick Silberman and Trudy Crosby for taking care of the logistics. I also want to thank Adam for giving me the courage to wear this tie. I want to thank Brandeis, for throwing wonderful undergraduates into my classes and for the support and space it’s given me in the decade I’ve been here. The last ten years have been the most productive and exhilarating of my life. I’m honored to be awarded this Chair, but still I ask for your patience with me. I’m still learning.</span></div>
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zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-55508657669396406042016-03-26T14:35:00.002-04:002016-12-23T15:11:16.601-05:00Midlife on the edge<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I believe I was four years old — meaning it was 1962 — when the <i>rules of life</i> were read to me. I didn't understand at the time that this was the only time I would hear them, or even what <i>the rules of life</i> meant. I was pretty busy filling a little pail with sand and then emptying it, and figuring out which shoe went on which foot. It might also be noted here that I didn't know the names of colors yet (I failed those first few quizzes in kindergarten the next year), so any of the <i>rules of life</i> that included a color in them zipped right over my head. For all I know, a Blue Christmas is included in one of the <i>rules of life</i>, and if so, I've had only part of the life for which I was destined.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I hadn't remembered that I even knew the <i>rules of life</i> were until my first midlife crisis. I was 42, and the most outwardly outward sign of said crisis was the fact that I had recently purchased <i>Elton John's Greatest Hits</i>. Elton John! I always hated Elton John's songs in high school, with the exception perhaps of <i>Levon</i>, and to a lesser extent <i>Bennie and the Jets</i> — not that I actually liked the song, but I could play the opening couple of bars at the piano, and that always made me instantly popular in high school. Yes, popularity was simple — and fleeting — in those times. And there I was, with Elton John's Greatest Hits. Which, all these years later, registers zero plays in iTunes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And our band <i>The Silver Finger</i> had <i>Levon</i> on its playlist. People never danced to it, because, you know, Elton John.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">One of the rules of life was <i>there will be exactly one midlife crisis.</i> I mean, how many times can you buy albums from your childhood with music you didn't like? It turns out that's not a rhetorical question. The answer is <i>almost five</i>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So about a decade later when the second midlife crisis kicked in — this one was milder than the first, and I already had a whole buttload of CDs with shitty 70s music — I was a bit amused. Amused, too, that I recognized that it was another midlife crisis. Hey, I had German measles when I was 5 and red measles when I was 16 — if there can be two measleses, there shonuff can be two midlife crises, right? I think the chief activity of this particular one was wondering how many other of the <i>rules of life</i> were also wrong or even misspelled. At this point, I also remember that the rule of life <i>riding a bicycle is like riding a bicycle</i> was there just so there'd be something <i>meta</i> and <i>silly</i> in the list. And <i>when turning left in traffic, be sure to leave room for others to go around you</i> is apparently one that's not on a lot of other peoples' <i>rules of life</i> list. In the second crisis, I do remember spending a lot of time wondering <i>whatever happened to cereal boxtops?</i> Caused in no small part, I guess, by the fact that I don't eat much cereal.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Beff probably said it best: <i>You should never be the Chair</i>. That has nothing to do with anything, but it can't be said enough. Actually, it's a nice mantra. I was <i>the Chair</i> once, and it was positively just about the least good year of my existence. Worse than red measles. Except no year-long scarring on my legs.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">That does it. <i>You should never be the Chair</i> is now a <i>rule of life</i>, officially. Something needs to hold the place formerly occupied by <i>riding a bicycle is like riding a bicycle</i>, and this is it. Now when some well-meaning person at work turns on the guilt machine, I can fend it off with my <i>rule of life</i>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Accolades</i> do not cause midlife crises. That was not an <i>official rule of life</i> (in 1962 I didn't know what the word meant, so it's possible it was supposed to be one), and as it turns out, it's a good thing. Because I currently am going through the third midlife crisis, caused in no small part by an <i>accolade</i>, and it's the sort of accolade that is a kind of hump that sharply divides your life into <i>my life until now</i> and <i>the rest of my life</i>. No one said <i>accolades</i> didn't speak in vague and generic terms.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This crisis is kind of a happy crisis, as it turns out. The hump aspect has caused me to look back, mostly in soft focus, at the teachers and colleagues that had no small part in enabling the accolade. One of the first things I did when the accolade was made public was to write to my high school music teacher, Verne Colburn simply to thank him. And I was surprised as I was writing it just how many details I remembered from those four years. It turns out much was retained from the years 1972-76, even in soft focus. It turns out "thank you" takes two single spaced pages. Yes, that's a <i>rule of life</i>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Here is a picture from 1974 — staged for the newspaper — of Verne handing me a $50 check as my prize for playing the first movement of the Gordon Jacob concerto — Verne was actually the accompanist in the performance — as Cindy LeBlanc, Steve Rainville and Bob Barker — also owed 50 bucks — look in in wonderment, and probably no small shock, at the gold rope that inexplicably encloses my left shoulder. Which probably has something to do with why it looks like I don't know what to do with my hands.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I have resisted the urge to write to others to thank them, as it turns out the list is pretty long, and at a certain point it starts to look creepy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Another rule of life was <i>you can take as long as you want to get to the point</i>, and a lot of posts in this blog, including this one, have happily followed that rule. There has been no <i>grudging</i> following of that rule here, not ever, never.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And so without the benefit of an <i>actual segue</i>, we come to Paul Lansky. That took a while, didn't it? Paul is getting the same accolade, and for all I know he's pretty busy doing the soft focus thing, too. The <i>it's about time</i> thing truly applies in this case, though it's rarely expressed in italics. And we go back to 1980, the year I entered graduate school.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Put as succinctly as possible (too late), Paul singlehandedly transformed computer music from squeaks, squawks, and long passages of amoebas arguing to something living and breathing and with a sense of humor. He gave personality and humanity to computer music, and I know, that hardly sounds like me talking there. But his music is personal, has a unique voice, and is instantly recognizable as his. What's more, when he got tired of doing computer music — upon which his reputation was based — he simply walked away from it. Wow.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And the first time I met him I remember rather vividly. In January 1980, Mac Peyton advised me that I should visit Princeton, where I'd applied for grad school, saying it might increase my chances, and piling on guilt for not already knowing that. So I hastily covered myself in polyester (being allergic to wool is a bitch) and took the train to Princeton, with a new fresh recording of my Dylan Thomas setting for baritone, two trios, and offstage horn that wasn't in my application. I don't remember much about my half-day spent being a nuisance in the music building, except when I met Paul. The first thing he said was, "I feel like I know you already, since I've listened to your music." Slobbering slightly, I told him I had a new tape for my application, and he said, "let's listen." He liked it, and made special mention of the offstage horn (I did not know at the time that he had been a horn player, and that he sometimes got paid for playing horn).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">At the time I was writing a bigass septet that I thought would be played by a Boston group, and it was complicated and notey and full of instrumental tricks lifted from Martino scores. And when I took the computer music course taught by Paul my first semester, one of the first things I did was to make a squeaky squawky computer representation of the opening of that weirdly complicated septet. It had all the notes and rhythms in exactly the right place, and it sounded like really big amoebas arguing and throwing dishes at each other. Paul's wry comment about the realization? "That's not your piece."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">At a later stage in the writing of said septet, I took it into lessons with Milton Babbitt and with Paul. I showed a big chart of pitch fields, motives, and long range voice leading to Milton, who said, "This tells me everything." I showed the same thing to Paul, who said, "This doesn't tell me anything." This was exactly when I knew I had chosen the right graduate program.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">For my next trick, I decided to try and demonstrate that if choirs sang in tune, they would go out of tune — a tautology that Ezra Sims was fond of. With the computer, I had, for the first time, micro-control of pitch; thus did I take a few tonal chorales I had written for my sister's church choir, and programmed them in such that fifths and thirds were pure; over the course of just eight bars, the chorale, having pure intervals and being perfectly in tune, went flat a little more than a quarter tone. When I explained this and played it for Paul, he said, "I don't think you're doing what you really want to do."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">He was talking about my <i>turgid and notey</i> compositional work of the time. And it's the wisest thing a composition teacher said to me. About fifteen years later, I realized he was right. Because Davy is a slow learner. <i>You're not doing what you really want to do</i>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Since I had demonstrated facility with the computer — I learned the EXEC and EXEC2 macro programming languages on the IBM 3081 available to us all — I soon became Paul's teaching assistant when he taught the computer music course. Of course, a lot of the programs I wrote simply typed a naughty word back at you when you typed their names, but eventually I got good enough to write a program that would move the cursor in a search to the correct place rather than refreshing the whole screen and moving the cursor — one that Paul asked for, since he did a lot of work from home on a slow modem.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And slow. Computing was slow and cumbersome then, but at the time we didn't realize it because it was cutting edge. In the first class I TA'ed, Paul showed us how to do LPC -- linear predictive coding, it turns out (what did you think it meant? Lollapalooza Pooping Constantly?). Our minds were selectively blown by the power that it gave you to change pitch and speed independently of sampled sounds. But the sampling itself was cumbersome, and using LPC was also cumbersome — since the only storage option for such stuff at the time was very large digital tapes, upon which we would put our data, and then truck over to another building entirely for playback to see if what we tried worked. Making microadjustments meant another trip to return the tape, changing some numbers, getting the tape back, repeat.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Given all that, Paul's Campion Fantasies, which were quite recent, and available on vinyl, were miracles. While the rest of us were busy giving voice to amoebas, Paul was busy making beautiful and nuanced music. This track here was one I listened to over and over, being as I've always been a big fan of tight scoring. It was probably the first piece of electronic music I heard about which I didn't immediately think <i>Boy that must have been a lot of work</i>. And hey — here is Paul doing Whitacre before Whitacre was doing Whitacre. Being that said Whitacre was 8 years old at the time.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">One of the other movements of this piece has an incredible moment where you hear the words "But still ... but still but still ..." where there is an opening up of ... well, of something I won't try to mansplain. Paul simply called that movement <i>an apotheosis of the comb filter</i>. Yeah, he was doing études before I was. And it's about more than comb filters.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">One of our graduate colleagues had a <i>Commodore 64</i> that he brought to our rented house once so we could play around with the goofy speech synthesis program. We played weird games wherein we would type numbers and use them as parts of words (for instance, <i>fornik8</i> and <i>0-bber took my jewels</i>), and then we got the brilliant idea to use the robot voice as the message on our answering machine.</span></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">You've reached 609-448-9214. Davy is bouncing on his bed. Martin is doing LIMEY things. Beth is playing with the cat. Please leave a message.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It sounded really dumb, just the kind of dumb that grad students think is really funny. Shortly thereafter, we got a string of messages left on the incoming message tape. <i>Hee hee, hee hee it's just Lansky. I wanted to hear it again. </i>*click*<i> </i><click><i>Hee hee. Lansky again. </i>*click*<i> </i><click><i>Hee hee. Hee hee.</i></click></click></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Soon after we had gotten a cat (it was an abandoned cat given to us), we discovered or rediscovered that we were all allergic in varying degrees. So when Paul came to visit us once, we were complaining about sneezing and sniffling, and Paul told us <i>One thing you don't do is you don't rub them in your face.</i> It was very good advice.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Paul's kids (Jonah and Caleb) were very small at the time, a fact that most people attributed to them being very young, and he brought them to the end-of-school-year picnic and softball game the department always had. I recall having to pitch to a very small Lansky in one game, and of course you want the kids to get a hit. He hit the ball maybe 6 feet, and I made a special point of fielding the ball badly and throwing to first base wildly so he would get on base. I think Paul must have liked that, or at least I hope he did. I also think he scored.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">For one semester, I was the <i>worst ear training teacher ever</i> for Paul's theory class, and to that end, I got to see him teach a few classes. He was relaxed and straightforward, with nary a Roman numeral as far as the ear could hear. There were lots of what-ifs to show why the final composer choice was a good one. And, well, I teach theory that way, too. Except for the part about the Roman numerals.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I always looked forward to the first lecture in the computer music course when he described what sampling was. He would gesture at one of the speakers in the classroom, speculate what it would be like to have the ability to write down the exact position of the vibrating part of the speaker as fast as 28,000 times every second, and then be able to recreate that sound by spitting those numbers back at the speaker. And then he explained Nyquist frequency as being like the wagon wheels in old Westerns that seem to spin backwards. Brilliant. And since LPC worked a lot with <i>formants</i>, he explained how formants are how we understand and differentiate vowel sounds, and he did an ee-ow-oo-oy-oo-ee thing with his own voice to demonstrate which partials were being attenuated when he changed the shape of the inside of his mouth. Indeed, he made a cassette of himself doing the same thing, every once in a while interjecting <i>oo-eee-oh-oh-ah</i>...<i>eleventh partial</i> ... <i>ee-oh-ee-oooh-ee</i>...<i>thirteenth partial</i> .... which, if it were a commercially recorded piece, I would buy it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In one of our lessons, and apparently after a long slog with a complicated dissertation, Paul got all cosmic and asked me, "What would your music be like if you didn't have octave equivalence?" I was silent just long enough to make it look like I had some idea what he was talking about, and said, "It'd be different. That's for sure."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">At the end of my stay in Princeton, I established a dossier in the office, just in case I ever wanted to apply for a teaching job. I asked for letters from all of the faculty for the dossier, and Paul's came in pretty quick. When I was about to embark on <i>the four unpointful years of part-time word processing jobs for hardly any money</i>, I checked with Didi Waltman in the office about the dossier. She said <i>Yes, and here's your letter from Paul</i>. She looked over it, and nodded, and nodded, and remarked, "Ooh. 'a natural rapport with students!'". So yes. I guess Paul wrote me a nice letter.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Paul and I kept in touch — we always had lunch when I was in town for whatever reason, and that was perhaps a good thing. Because, you know, I had a dossier, and suddenly I found myself with a teaching job, and Paul gave me very good advice on negotiating salary — twice. The teaching jobs really wanted me to have a doctorate, and for that I needed to write a dissertation. Which I had done once, really crappily. The reader I had inherited was a sumbitch, and had no helpful hints about how to write a dissertation that he would like. He simply said no, not really, don't think so, this sucks. So you see I was at loggerheads.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And then out of the blue, Peter Westergaard and Paul wrote me and offered to lift me out of the diss doldrums, calling my situation in the letter <i>Poor Fit With Reader</i>. And by the way, they did that, too, with Beff, who had the same reader and the same problem. So Paul was my new reader. He, too, admitted that what I'd written sucked, but he actually told me why, and how to fix it. Woo hoo! I needed a thesis (facepalm) and I couldn't just describe things and let all my observations just evaporate. So he suggested a thesis, I ran with it, and <i>I wrote my fucking dissertation</i>. I'm pretty sure I would not be typing this as a doctor if Paul and Peter had not intervened.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And in the meantime — several of the chapters of my dissertation became lectures in theory classes. Indeed, <a href="http://www.ziodavino.net/2010/09/whats-it-all-about-claude.html" target="_blank">this post</a> and <a href="http://www.ziodavino.net/2010/08/whats-it-all-about-wolfie.html" target="_blank">this post</a> are adapted from things in my dissertation. Thanks, Paul. Dissertation: born, 1989. Filed, 1996. R.I.P. And the sumbitch? No hard feelings (not really). In gratitude, I promised to let him know he was a stud at least once per year for 16 years — which was the time from matriculation to Doctor — and I did.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ever since we killed off the diss, Paul and I send music to each other (I have a lot of CDs from him in my collection and he probably has every one of mine) and we make nice comments about it. We have a mutual admiration society going, and I especially like listening to (and watching) the percussion ensemble music. It's inventive and fun, and, if I may, <i>efficient</i>. I have used the online videos in my orchestration class.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And then I was paid the ultimate compliment: he dedicated a piece to me (I had dedicated <i>Scatter</i> to him in 1991, so in this case, I still win).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Our most recent encounter was lunch two years ago in Princeton, where Beff and I had come for a thing with the Institute for Advanced Study. It was good to see him for the first time in quite a few years, and we asked him to pose with John Phillip Sousa, which I had procured from the US Marine Band. I'm glad he obliged. The reason he looks so relaxed is that he is mere months from retirement.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And now the accolade. I'm thrilled to share it with my teacher, my mentor, my dissertation reader, my friend. <i>It's about time</i>. When I wrote him to congratulate him, he responded, simply, <i>I'm proud of you.</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Thank you, Paul.</span></span>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-23866702421756635392016-02-13T15:35:00.000-05:002016-02-13T16:23:35.523-05:00And then I was anthologized<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipeNewGUoDOCx21_PssXfoZvB88fLAt0_yb_-E0kGC1A7t4ISlwzEq5XGZB2aIkXyYNxQUhJci_GnD4pImgA3PUOuVW68xfaZwjaR-CoY7tFbxKJ0v2DKOBzWVTjWNwdb3uyF6KKrzn2ve/s1600/IMG_0791.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipeNewGUoDOCx21_PssXfoZvB88fLAt0_yb_-E0kGC1A7t4ISlwzEq5XGZB2aIkXyYNxQUhJci_GnD4pImgA3PUOuVW68xfaZwjaR-CoY7tFbxKJ0v2DKOBzWVTjWNwdb3uyF6KKrzn2ve/s400/IMG_0791.jpg" width="300" /></span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yes, anthologized. Whenever I think of the word <i>anthology</i>, I think of the e.e. cummings poem quoted in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/12/opinion/mr-t-mr-g-and-mr-h.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">this article</a>. What rhymes with <i>anthologist</i>? Well, <i>gist</i>. And <i>mist</i> and <i>missed</i> and <i>du bist</i>, and <i>tryst</i> and <i>list</i>, and, and, and ... </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So the fourth edition of Steve Laitz's <i>The Complete Musician</i> (Oxford University Press) textbook is being rolled out, and it features an anthology of music used in the text, plus some other pieces with piercing study questions. I'm not aware that there is much in the way of analysizationness of the later music in the anthology. And the living composers tucked in at the end are Sam Adler, John Corigliano, Joan Tower, Tan Dun, me, and Gusty Thomas. Woo hoo! That order isn't random: it goes by date of birth. Which makes me the <i>penultimately youngest</i> composer in it. What rhymes with <i>penultimately</i>? Well, <i>ultimately</i>. And <i>ately</i>, though that's not a word.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The prose in the actual textbook is quite good, and the organization and splainin' of concepts very, very good. I've been saying I would use this textbook for Theory 1 when it came out only because my music is in it. As it turns out, I think I'll use it for Theory 1 because it is so very good. And have I mentioned that my music is in it?</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjADGVXXIFJd_ZC8k-v05sWzAI0GzI2sUyXarwiMeLEZAKwpXDpEDj7IGUYvYgxICJqTxC5qpdv1uqb1eZI8jpeWd9vqTvX9fUZfsf8WIUtUd4O7h0shH5J54ezRL75erBGeaBOl3STB6aq/s1600/IMG_0793.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjADGVXXIFJd_ZC8k-v05sWzAI0GzI2sUyXarwiMeLEZAKwpXDpEDj7IGUYvYgxICJqTxC5qpdv1uqb1eZI8jpeWd9vqTvX9fUZfsf8WIUtUd4O7h0shH5J54ezRL75erBGeaBOl3STB6aq/s640/IMG_0793.JPG" width="480" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It also turns out that on the first of the two pages talking about my pieces, my name is spelled three different ways, including the correct one. Though just to be helpful to OUP, I might start using the other two on occasion.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Incidentally, the two pieces are the 84th and 85th piano études. That makes them consecutive.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When this was being assembled, I was asked by Steve to do a substantial piece analyzing or otherwise talking about the two études. And it did take me some time, since I don't write about music, and I certainly don't write about <i>my</i> music other than liner notes and program notes. Of course, writing about your own music is like Photoshopping your own picture — I always end up with hair, and oh, what happened to that big forehead wrinkle? So I thought those notes would be included in the anthology, but mostly they were referenced by Steve's study questions. Firstly, though. Karl Larson's premiere performances of them from so long ago, thanks to YouTube. I blogged about making the trip to Mass MOCA to record this performance <a href="http://www.ziodavino.net/2010/07/beats-hell-out-of-midi.html" target="_blank">here</a>. Of all the YouTube videos made with an iPod Nano, these are two of them.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And now with all that in mind, here is the silly text that I wrote on this assignment. Yes, the pieces are related — did you notice both starting on repeated Ds and ending with low C# and high D and E? Now you did.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">What’s Hairpinning</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;"> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Diminishing
Return</i> are part of a series of a hundred études for piano that I composed
from 1988 to 2010. The études started out as compositional respites
—playgrounds where I could monkey around with ideas and play games with notes when
I was stuck in a larger piece. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were
little obsessive pieces designed to cultivate compositional spontaneity, in
contrast to the larger pieces, which took a lot of thinking and planning, and
lots of revising.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I set up four rules for
étude-writing: composition time is limited to six days (because that’s how long
it took to write the first one); they are obsessive about one thing, which is stated
on the score; there is no <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a priori</i>
formal design; and revision is not allowed (only restarting the composition is
allowed). The rules encouraged a sort of seat-of-the-pants compositional
thinking that I found refreshing, and which affected my thinking in larger
pieces. A lot of the études tended to follow a simple formal arc of expositional
music, developmental music, and a crisis (an accumulation of texture, notes,
and/or dynamics that create tension and a need for an explosive resolution) that
spawns a kind of return. Both <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What’s
Hairpinning</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Diminishing Return</i>
follow that design.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The études, too, presented
me with the opportunity to develop a way of thinking harmonically (through
trial and error) that eventually brought me to a lot of what hipsters like to
call jazz chords (I have a clarinet quintet entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Take Jazz Chords, Make Strange</i>), and I grew to love and embrace the
open, third-saturated sonorities in particular voicings because they sound
great on the piano. Plus there is a wide palette within such sonorities of
degrees of perceived dissonance, and they tend to be very suggestive of a
harmonic direction, of a place to go next. I have never used so-called jazz
chords functionally (it’s more fun to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">make
them strange</i>), but at times it has felt like I was inventing new functions
for familiar chords — old wine in new skins. Both the pieces at hand are rife
with jazz chords, not the least among them the big cadential chord of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hairpinning</i> in bar 56 and the sharp
chords in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Diminishing</i> at bar 61.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In this space, I am wearing
two hats: I am playing the role both of composer and of theorist; they are very
different animals. As composer, I invent a kind of maze and discover a path
through it that makes sense to me at one particular point in time; as theorist,
I step back and get a third person aerial view of my former self making the
maze and the path through it, and I try to make decisions about how I made
decisions. I rarely remember anything about the actual act of composing except
for intentions going in. Since the point of writing the études was to cultivate
spontaneity, it is likely that at least some of what Rakowski-theorist is
telling you about this music concerns creative decisions that were intuited
rather than deeply considered (or at least Rakowski-composer <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thought</i> he intuited them). In performing
them, in listening to them, and in analyzing them, though, there is little
point in making a distinction between the two. That wall is porous.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Also note that I use the
words <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">breathe</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cadence</i> in the ensuing text. These
pieces clearly hew to the tension-and-release model, and they breathe like
living organisms. Cadences (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cadere</i>,
to fall) are for me where there is an arrival, an exhalation, a release of
tension, which are accomplished in several ways: an accumulation of texture to
a goal moment, a slowing of harmonic rhythm, a voice-leading goal achieved, or
a number of other ways. Cadences are also hierarchical: some are weaker than
others, and feel like places to breathe that are on their way to stronger
cadences, which may articulate structural points.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I consider thee two pieces
to be a related pair. Both open with repeated D4s, and both end with the same
sonority of C#1 D4 E5.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They both hang on
to the repeated Ds for a significant portion of the piece before a thickening
of texture and increase in dynamics create a kind of crisis and pushes them
out; they both expand registrally in a slow and deliberate way; and in both the
harmonic rhythm is slow to start, and much faster in the developmental music.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">What’s Hairpinning</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">’s premise is of strands of equal repeated notes
with dynamic swells (a sort of appropriation of the pulsing chords common in
Adams and Reich); the strands can go at different speeds simultaneously. The
strands also swell independently, sometimes making a counterpoint of as many as
four different swelling voices. The effect is that of a slow, pretty chorale
that thickens and thins, with a kind of out-of-focus melody outlined by the notes
emerging in the swells. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hairpinning</i>
of the title also applies to the way the texture hairpins from one to as many
as six voices and back several times in the piece.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The piece seems to consist
of three large breaths followed by a final exhalation — or three sections and a
coda, articulated by large-scale swells. Each of those swells starts with a
single voice and expands to four, five, or six voices, and recedes back to one
voice. Each mains section is more complex than the previous one, meaning that
what I call the crisis moment (the moment of maximum textural thickness and
dynamic complexity) ends the third one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The first section spans
mm. 1-22, is harmonically static, and starts and ends with repeated Ds in
eighths. Eventually repeated dotted eighths are added. A six-note quasi-diatonic
chord that happens to be contained within the D Lydian scale is the only
harmony, fixed in register — N.B. I thought of this as a harmony with a
particular neutral quality rather than a composing-out of a scale. Single notes
and double notes swell, perhaps implying some sort of melody. The section ends
when the notes of the chord are gradually stripped away and its opening D in
eighths is heard by itself again.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The second section, mm.
23-38 adds some new complications. The armor of the fixed-register chord is
slowly dismantled, (while D4 stays put), first with the introduction of G4
(paired with the familiar G# now spelled as A-flat) in 23, given a swell as it
descends a half-step to the familiar F#. The descending half-step will become
motivic, as G-F# happens again, seemingly dragging down the higher C# to C with
it in 28, making a weak cadence. Things get stranger when G#3 at the bottom moves
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">up</i> to B-flat, where a new high point,
E, happens. The texture expands to four parts, then five, then six, new notes
are added, C# sighs to C, a new lower extreme of F# is established, and it too
sighs the descending half-step to F; at the same time, the C moves to B,
creating a cadential confluence on what can only be described as a strange chord.
While this has happened, the number of swells has increased, and the swells have
sometimes crunched together. That chord in 37 feels cadential yet strange — it
is made up of B-flat major 6/4 triad with a first inversion E minor triad above
it, which is a more active sonority (and an octatonic one) than the D Lydian
that introduced the piece, and it feels as if it’s on its way rather than a
goal (like a half cadence), and especially more active than the whole-tone
sonority in 36 that we passed through on the way to this octatonic moment. The isolated
repeated G#4s in eighths that emerge pile on the strangeness — it’s the first
time the opening D4 is absent, and there is the feeling that we’re not very
close to the beginning any more.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The third section (mm. 39-61)
is the most complex, as it adds a new pulsing rhythm of quarter note triplets
to the mix, while also expanding registrally and texturally, often with as many
as three independent simultaneous swells (which is pretty hard to play). In
this section the descending half-step explodes into all the voices, eventually
spawning a long passage in which all parts are doin’ it, and pretty fast, in mm.
52-55. This seems to create the greatest instability — given how fast the parts
are moving in comparison to the first third of the piece, when they didn’t move
at all — that it creates a mini-explosion solved by the stasis at m. 56; this
would seem to be the piece’s biggest cadence; the sense of arrival here is
further enhanced by the new low extreme of F2 and by the fact that the swells
in the parts are temporarily no longer independent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I felt this arrival chord had
to be held onto for a long time in order to balance the rather long stasis with
which the piece began, so it holds on for six whole bars. When it finally
finishes its business, the opening D — which has been suppressed for so long
and only got into the chord in the sneakiest possible way — emerges, but now
it’s slower than it used to be. I probably thought of that as a pretty obvious composer-signal
that we’re just about done and we’re in a coda — or that metaphorically the
D-machine has been ground down by the gravity of the piece and it can’t go as
fast any more.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">All that remained, in my
mind, was cleanup, and more stasis as the final counterweight to the opening.
The D stays around to the bitter end, never changing speed, and contextualized
within voices in other parts that spin out a little bit of the descending motion
motive in parallel ninths, from 63 to 67. Bar 67 feels cadential, like the end.
The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actual</i> ending, what with the suddenly
very low C#1 sustained and a brief E5 way up top is meant to feel a little bit
WTF — recapturing bits of the opening harmony, but in the wrong registers. I
decided this would be picked up in a subsequent étude.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Diminishing Return</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;"> was written while I was pounding my head against
the wall about the opening of a very big piece. Thus did I bring back the
repeated D thing from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hairpinning</i>,
but this time as a wild-eyed, take-no prisoners virtuosic piece of extreme
crazy. I had already been using fast fadeaway repeated-note licks in several
pieces, and this was a new way for me to use them — simple, short, caveman
gestures which, as the stated premise of the étude, were everywhere. As is
frequently the case with gestural premises, what starts as foreground turns
eventually into a kind of accompaniment, on top of which another layer emerges.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The sectional division is
pretty clear, as sections are articulated by immediate textural changes. The
first, expository, section — which establishes the premise, hangs onto a
fixed-register harmony for a long time before slowly punching its way outward —
spans bars 1 to 34. The second, developmental, section also begins stuck in
register, but with octaves being the hip new thing, and, finally, an opening up
in harmony and register that expands faster and faster, especially in the bass,
to the downbeat of 56. The crazy rising passage that follows is transition to
the coda, which starts in bar 62.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In my mind’s eye, the fast
fading repeated note gesture were like blobs of paint flung at a wall and
spattering. Using lots of them overlapped would not only be virtuosic and it
would not only sound cool, but it gave me a visual sense of what was going on.
Thus after the fadeaway gesture is established on that same D and harmonized
only with B a third lower, I added the next layer: sforzando chords that were
like paint guns that also shot splatters, and that created the piece’s harmony
— and a really cool looking spatterwall.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The sforzando chords
create what is, at first, static harmony — arpeggiation of an octatonic
sonority around D. Once I had all these balls in the air, I simply played with
trying to move the harmony, one voice at a time, as if this were a slow chorale
(which in the deepest sense it is), at first around the pedal D, then
displacing it, and then returning to it. As in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hairpinning</i>, the register remains quite constricted even as the
sforzandos become more frequent and wilder, yet none of them represent
something cadential; the piece is failing to take anything but the shallowest
of breaths. By m. 31, the opening D has been pushed out, and it is as if a
crazy melody is trying to emerge in the left hand. The failure of the melody to
emerge, along with the very shallow breathing, created a crisis and an upbeat
for an explosive re-emergence of D, this time in octaves. The piece takes a
big, big breath, and thus does this feel like a sectional ending.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The second section starts
in m. 35 when that D re-emerges, now paired with octave C#s a minor ninth lower
(rather than higher, as at the outset). This was a conscious reference to the
ending of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hairpinning</i>. Octaves
starting the fadeaway gestures were the next level of difficulty for the
pianist, to which, beginning in 39, brief octatonic motives were added in the
middle finger group of the right hand while the Ds continued.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The static D-C# that
starts this section was felt like a traditional pedal point — one that begins
as a stabilizing tone which is eventually pushed out by being made dissonant.
It felt like the gestures and the shifting octatonic harmony were creating a
big need for release — which finally happens in 44 when the C# moves to C
natural. This moment felt like such a dramatic release that, from here, things
changed quickly. The frustrated left-hand tune tries starting again in 46, and
eventually the repeated notes in the right hand break apart into zonky
descending bebop licks, in 49 — that’s the melody that was trying to emerge in
the first section, and finally it is able to do so. The bebop licks continue
unfettered, making their way down to the bottom of the instrument, thus
creating another crisis (there’s no room to go any lower, is there?) that
reaches its apex on the downbeat of 56. In response, the piece very
methodically picks itself back up, overlaps rising fadeaway gestures,
culminating in two explode chords in 61.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It seemed like the only
possible thing to do next was return to the opening, fragmented, as a coda,
with a tail of bebop licks going down again. This time the licks stop at C#1,
to which D and E, as in the end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hairpinning</i>,
tail off, creating a parallel ending to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hairpinning</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I find it rewarding to
listen to these two pieces in sequence, in either order. It feels like looking
at two faces of a many-sided polygon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p>_____________________________________</o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p>And so that is literally what I wrote. That's what was written, and by me.</o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p><br /></o:p></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p>Wait, I was anthologized? That rhymes with <i>hypnotized</i>. And <i>recognized</i>. And, and, and...</o:p></span></span></div>
zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-50549399876155278552016-01-16T10:04:00.002-05:002016-12-11T19:18:54.930-05:00Études Volume 3<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">YouTube made this playlist — the third étude CD on Bridge. Liner notes will be found a ways down <a href="http://www.ziodavino.net/p/blog-page.html" target="_blank">here</a>. You can also view this playlist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnBKN18cF4k&list=PLgu-cn1zji4NNDBJ1B2YlmTQyw6U61u_5" target="_blank">on YouTube</a>, where you can see the entire list.</span><br />
<br />
<br />zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-62948806672112088202015-11-18T09:42:00.000-05:002015-11-18T09:43:51.971-05:00Metadata is forever<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So Michael Lipsey commissioned a bunch of us to write hand drum pieces for him about a decade ago, he concertized with them and recorded them, and the recording made it onto all the streaming services — with the usual host of metadata boo-boos.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To wit, my piece for talking drum and tabla which I called <i>Mr. Trampoline Man</i> (me so funny) got entered into the metadata as <i>David Rakowski</i>, by composer Michael Lipsey. Want it fixed? Never gonna happen. Metadata is forever.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Also of note. YouTube autogenerated this movie for reasons unknown.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qqhZ_DzBsjo?rel=0" width="853"></iframe></span></span>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-56255391305491906522015-07-21T08:20:00.004-04:002015-07-21T08:26:21.753-04:00Ten of a Kind<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My first band piece since high school, and I benefitted from Michael Colburn's advice "don't write a band piece. We have lots of band pieces. Write your music, for band." You need ten virtuoso clarinetists in the same room, which doesn't happen all that often. As Beff noted, "even the alto clarinet part is virtuosic."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Not only did I get paid to write it — the guys in the production room did the parts, and I got a free trip to Lucerne (the one in Switzerland) at taxpayer expense. for the 2001 WASBE Conference. What I remember most was a complicated coffee maker right out there in public for anyone to use. So I did. Also the instrument collection at the former Wagner summer house (we saw the staircase where Siegfried Idyll was premiered) and the Picasso museum — mostly late-in-life pornographic drawings from Picasso's dirty old man period.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is the edited studio version, recorded in 2001 at George Mason University. It also appears on my Martian Counterpoint album on Albany records.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is an idée fixe-cantus firmus thing in all the movements. Its most obvious manifestation is the double reed solo in the B section of the third movement. It's also the trumpet melody in the fanfare that opens the whole piece.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>I. Labyrinth</b>. This movement was written last, thus it benefits from knowing everything else that's going to happen in the piece. It also has a whole bunch of metric modulations, and some pretty apeshit writing at the end.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>II. Song Stylings.</b> This was the first movement written, and thus the tune that emerged became that cantus firmus thing. It ends with an expanding chord progression, the last being ten notes. The two notes not in that chord become the opening tutti of the next movement.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>III. Yoikes And Away</b>. A scherzo about overstated climaxes, each more overstated than the last. The last gesture is like Daffy Duck slamming into a tree and then sliding down it. Hence the title.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>IV. Martian Counterpoint</b>. Some of the most complicated counterpoint I've ever written. Of the bass clarinet solo in the middle, the original player said "you must really love or really hate your wife." The ending reprises the ending of II, lingering on that ten-note chord, followed by a silly flourish to end.</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XRWDc0jsJh4?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-689013781106283352015-06-24T10:28:00.001-04:002015-07-15T13:17:29.754-04:00The Bogan songs<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These are my first published songs, and were the first vocal music I had written in 10 years. 1989, when these were written, is a very long time ago, but it didn't seem that way at the time.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Judy Bettina was my colleague during my year at Stanford, and we hit it off. So she asked for songs, and this is what happened. The third song, <i>To Be Sung on the Water</i>, took a very, very long time to write because I kept chucking stuff — and thanks, of course, to Ross Bauer, for whom I played an early draft of that song, and his reaction was lukewarm. "Not up to your usual standards" is how I remember it being phrased. See, that's what a good composition teacher does. Ross was not my composition teacher.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And it turns out the song is pretty. Plus it has one fractional time signature.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Cassandra</i> was originally written as an unaccompanied song, and I heard Judy do it that way swimmingly soon after I wrote it. The lush textures of the other two, though, convinced me I should add a piano part to it. Which I did, while keeping the vocal line exactly the same. And adding more wedges to the counterpoint at the end.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Late</i> might have been loosely aggregate-based, I don't recall exactly. Marty Boykan liked it, and assigned it as a generals piece in about 1991. So three papers have been written on it. One of them speculated that I like pop music.</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8uFeD2OKZqc?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-70752510479260986232015-06-11T15:20:00.002-04:002017-03-14T15:58:12.572-04:00The interval études<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">One of the what's-the-étude-about strands is intervals, as in Debussy's piano études. Here are a bunch of them. Missing from this cavalcade is <i>Twilight</i> (on melodic thirds) since there is no video or auto-generated video on YouTube.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Seconds </b>(N.B. this is the first étude video ever shot. Note butterfingers camerawork)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Et2I73TA_Hs?rel=0" width="640"></iframe><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Thirds</b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3yOg7bGdGoU?rel=0" width="640"></iframe><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/B_cuUisnjRw?rel=0" width="640"></iframe><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">no video or recording of <i>Twilight</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Fourths</b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xv7C5JGV5vo?rel=0" width="640"></iframe><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Fifths</b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5n7BnUtZc0Q?rel=0" width="640"></iframe><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Sixths</b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N4K8pQPuAu8?rel=0" width="640"></iframe><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Sevenths</b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WAJnJngRP6g?rel=0" width="640"></iframe><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Octaves</b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9HP4gTzWoKo?rel=0" width="640"></iframe><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/89gBbuzQDXk?rel=0" width="640"></iframe><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Ninths</b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TX2puwD8quU?rel=0" width="853"></iframe><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Tenths</b></span><br />
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</span><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EEiH88JGI98" width="853"></iframe>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-13648341565084187392015-05-04T16:54:00.001-04:002015-05-05T15:26:57.572-04:00Zio davino dot net<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This blog now has its own domain, <a href="http://www.ziodavino.net/" target="_blank">www.ziodavino.net</a>. Not that there's anything wrong with that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Incidentally, check out the mobile blog. It's my new tumblr/old mobile blog. Its new URL is <a href="http://www.uncledavy.com/" target="_blank">uncledavy.com</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The music blog is now at <a href="http://www.ziomusic.net/" target="_blank">ziomusic.net</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And my old, classic blog is <a href="http://www.davidrakowski.net/" target="_blank">davidrakowski.net</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">All of them for less than the cost of a bottle of Brunello.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">davy@ or zio@ any one of those domains will send an e-mail to me.</span>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-42450466496856540202015-04-28T11:32:00.000-04:002015-05-05T07:03:56.157-04:00I can arrange that<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And then there is the issue of <i>arranging existing pieces</i>. A lot of composers make a special effort to go to a Polynesian restaurant just for the <i>Pu-Pu Platter</i> so that there is plenty of resonance when they <i>pooh-pooh</i> the notion of arranging arrangements. There is, after all, a cult within a cult within a cult within a cult of composition-by-buttstik in which the music and the ideas for the music flow from <i>the nature of the instruments themselves</i>. You know, you don't write open-string double stops for saxophone — am I right? Am I right? Ich hab' recht. Kein scheiß.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The other thing, of course is the spelling of pooh-pooh. If you poo-poo something, then literally it is scheiß, and if you pu-pu it, well, at least there's a lot of variety in cuisine, and it's largely bite-sized. But in the pooh-pooh spelling, are we setting up a Winnie-Winnie situation? Very small minds want to know. Which is why I'm glad I don't want to know.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Well, okay. Famously, lots of Bach's music is <i>transcriptions of his other music</i>. For you see, he was a cult within a cult within a cult, having never broken through to the <i>fourth level</i>. Beethoven orchestrated one of his piano sonata movements in order for it to serve as incidental music (thanks, <a href="http://dalitwarshaw.com/" target="_blank">Dalit</a>). And how many of us would know <i>Pictures at an Exhibition</i> without Ravel? Hey, we had a whole pile of supermarket classical CDs in the house (bound together on metal rods and secured by flywheel screws) and, though we never listened to it in the house (Judy Collins and Bobby Vinton singing in Polish were on auto-repeat), I do remember seeing that there was a composer in the pile whose name was Moussorgsky-Ravel. A hyphenated name from the old country. And incidentally, I added a syllable in my mind: Mussogorsky, possibly a relative of Piatogorsky, who, at the time, I hadn't heard of. And the last two syllables? Pronounced exactly like the last two syllables of <i>unravel</i>. As in, at the time, Saint-Säëñs was the <i>Un-Ravel</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the fifteen minutes spent on copyright issues in grad school, you learn that arrangements are <i>derivative works</i>. If composer B arranges composer A's work for different forces, then composer A owns the copyright on composer B's arrangement. Composer B can fret and fume about non-payment for all his or her work, but since the underlying music belongs to Composer A, so do all the arrangements of it. To wit, when I was an undergrad, a colleague-in-undergradness wrote Bernstein's publisher to ask if there were a saxophone version of the clarinet sonata. The publisher wrote back saying no, but they'd give him $100 (or something like that) if he would arrange it. Which is a lot more than if he had taken the initiative to make the arrangement and then just sent it to the publisher. In which case, the publisher would have been within their rights to send him a <i>MWA ha ha It's All Ours Now</i> letter.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I first arranged something of mine way back in high school. I had written a pretty, <i>auf-Persichetti</i> piano piece that I would play whether or not anyone was within earshot. A clarinetist and a saxophonist from our church, thinking it cute that I was <i>a composer</i> <i>now</i>, asked if I'd write something for them to play together. Rather than revealing the truth that they both sucked as players, eew, I arranged the <i>auf</i> piece, and made sure I was never <i>within earshot</i> when they played it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Then somehow through conservatory training, and the prevailing gestalt, I joined that cult within a cult within a cult within a cult. It was a lot of work to do that, since I had to learn four different <i>secret handshakes</i>. My handshakes brought <i>all the boys</i> to the yard, and that was just weird. That <a href="http://www.edition-peters.com/product/modern/duo/ep67267?TRE00000/" target="_blank">violin and piano</a> piece I wrote for Ken Sugita? WOW, was it all about the violin and about the piano. It was serious, and full of thought. Thought oozed from every pore of it, and even though the "ugh" was silent, it was something experienced by all who looked at it. For it was one of those pulseless, highly syncopated things using lots of ink that, in 1979, were supposed to get awards.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yes, ink. Not toner.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And then I got into Tanglewood.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">On my, uh, <i>seventh try</i>. Each try was a different year, by the way. I didn't send in seven applications all in the same year. Because that would be silly. And expensive.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Good things come to <i>them what waits</i>.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQdOdH132xFW-ow_uN1Jy0pXd01cHGO34pGo0PUYx1nPQvICiLCoqYxvp3w39W5cqWlWW9AG_sR5tEz717Luvl7BybpA3uOQLJc0idfp_AzXCVfwACkHKYHwbmwIJkdAc9WMLpW6HYRL-k/s1600/twood18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQdOdH132xFW-ow_uN1Jy0pXd01cHGO34pGo0PUYx1nPQvICiLCoqYxvp3w39W5cqWlWW9AG_sR5tEz717Luvl7BybpA3uOQLJc0idfp_AzXCVfwACkHKYHwbmwIJkdAc9WMLpW6HYRL-k/s1600/twood18.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Russell Hershow, Theodore Antoniou, T'wood premiere</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And it was well known by me that a piece of mine would be played at Tanglewood by <i>some of tomorrow's stars</i> (tomorrow was only a day away, at the time), and by lots of them if I wanted. I wanted a performance of a big piece! Size mattered! But full orchestra was out of the question, and my one orchestra piece (the one I wrote in order to have an orchestra piece for grad school applications) sucked anyway. So, quickly and without much thought, I arranged the violin and piano piece for violin and a chamber orchestra of eighteen instruments. Why eighteen? Because I thought I could reuse it if I ever got into the Johnson (now Wellesley) Composers Conference, and I used pretty much the whole complement of instruments available. Greedy me. I was taking all the complementary angles I could.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicSN2jaZi5O65JAP5kUrXXlUVu4axu4vz9wpHtgYmzzghLOjkpp9SjE_BLjxu0f4PGNRFbQWypvn6tU7Oaxu3wH_BoacKrXlb9chG0GBX0y5As_oUMznDrTRIeQHghwwwpCfqloHhZ68j6/s1600/twood19.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicSN2jaZi5O65JAP5kUrXXlUVu4axu4vz9wpHtgYmzzghLOjkpp9SjE_BLjxu0f4PGNRFbQWypvn6tU7Oaxu3wH_BoacKrXlb9chG0GBX0y5As_oUMznDrTRIeQHghwwwpCfqloHhZ68j6/s1600/twood19.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Davy takes bow after premiere. 1982.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So of course the instrumental writing was full of <i>overwriteyness</i>, but it got played, and played very nicely. The soloist was but 18 at the time, and now he plays in the Chicago Symphony. And there were two or three nice things in my arrangement, including a breathing place where a D# seemed to resolve to E in an A-majorish atonal context.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But only eight minutes of music for those big forces? Was I crazy? (One word answer: <i>ask again later</i>. Yes, that's three words because I'm a heavy tipper). So I made up a story. <i>This is the finale of a concerto</i>. Yeah, that's the ticket. <i>The finale of a concerto</i>. They bought it!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And, oh, by the way. When I got back to graduate school after Tanglewood, I wrote two more movements to go in front of it, which became known as the <i>first</i> and <i>second</i> movements. And by the time I did go to the Composers Conference the next year, there were <i>two</i> movements for them to play. With Rolf Schulte as the soloist! For a while that recording was my big (literally) hit, and it was on cassette. Good things come to those whose big hits are on cassette.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Years later, CF Peters took the violin and piano piece for publication, it got engraved, and sold almost, oh, 37 copies. It's a big score. Since I signed over copyright, that meant they also owned the concerto — because it is a derivative work! At the time, when I was seeking resumé lines, it was cool, because two new published works turns out to be twice as many as one new published work. With STEM in place now, that ratio is under review.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And the issue of arranging? Assigning arrangements of piano pieces for various instrumental forces is the way I (and billions of others) teach orchestration. One fine February vacation when I only had a few blank working days to spare, I decided to orchestrate my <i>Zipper Tango</i> piano étude, possibly in the future to be a demo piece for Orchestration of <i>How I Did It, See?</i>. Which was immediately and unexpectedly weird, because I was hearing saxophone for the opening tune, and saxophone is an "extra" in the orchestra (they don't get tenure). Thus were gears shifted for me (in my head), and I arranged it for band instead. Even though the only band music I'd written to this point (other than in high school) was stuff with ten clarinets going apeshit all the time.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And then, dammit, that opening tune kept going higher and <i>outside of the saxophone range</i>. So I got to demonstrate, for myself, that <i>handoff thing</i> that I always talked about in Orchestration. Sax hands off the tune to clarinets, rolls right, and the clarinets gain 4 yards. The play is now under review. Then, metric modulation, oh baby. Because bands do metric modulations <i>all the time</i>, right? Or at least soon they would. Because, you know.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I sent it to Michael Colburn at <i>The President's Own</i> for his feedback. He said a 3-1/2 minute band piece doesn't have legs (and it would be weird if it literally did, and if it did, how many would there be?). If it's part of a set that's 10-15 minutes, well, then he said the band, and other bands, might give it a go. No, he didn't suddenly become British.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Moosehead Pond in Maine</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And so that summer (we were vacationing on Moosehead Pond in Maine) I revisited the four existing so-called vernacular études — tango, bop, stride, rock and roll — and arranged them for band as best I could in the mornings, given the size of my brain. Of course, since Peters owned the rights to the piano études, thus did they also own the rights to the new derivative work. Woo hoo!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And the band premiered it/them at the Midwest Clinic that year. They sprung for a schmancy hotel room for me and Beff, and I got to introduce it, standing there as if I wore a suit regularly. At the event, I met Donald Hunsberger (woo hoo!) who went out of his way (he had to step around an oboist) to praise <i>Ten of a Kind</i>, and we were off.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Incidentally, I didn't hear a runthrough before the premiere because the Marine Band's plane was co-opted by a General who was certain he needed it more. Thus were they a day late to the festivities, arriving just in time for the sound check.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Years later, Michael recorded the piece for a whole CD of piano pieces arranged for band, and today the band posted the recordings on Yout' Oob. How good are they? When he sent me the second edits for commentary, my comment was <i>We fall off the edge of the earth</i>. He probably thought I was talking in code, and he was polite enough not to send a return e-mail containing only the text "????".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Here they are in all their glory: the band arrangement of each étude, followed by the original piano piece. So there. Thanks to the vagaries of Yout' Oob, it's possible to listen to both the arrangement and the original simultaneously, if being so inclined to do so is something you are right now.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Zipper Tango</i>, tango-étude on grace notes. Originally written for Amy Briggs's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tangos-Piano-Amy-Briggs/dp/B0040Y7F8M" target="_blank">tango project</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Bop It,</i> bop étude. Geoff Burleson asked for it after I'd written a stride étude.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Strident</i>, stride piano étude. Amy Briggs asked for it. (In the arrangement, I cop to harmon mute abuse and especially to vibraslap abuse)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Moody's Blues</i> (suggested by Rick Moody), rock and roll étude, Jerry Lee Lewis style, on repeated chords.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And they all rolled over, and one fell out. I use it in Orchestration as an example of arranging piano music for band. Winnie-Winnie.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="color: red;">Post Scriptum.</span></i> I was asked, but not in the passive voice, about <i>orchestrating a piano glissando</i> into band. Here's what I did. Thank goodness for the miracle of cut and paste in Finale.</span><br />
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zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-74432942292610507552015-03-03T21:55:00.000-05:002015-05-22T09:49:30.163-04:00Fists of Fury. Fists of Fury. Fists of Fury. Fists of Fury. Fists of Fury. Fists of Fury. <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Just sayin'.</span><br />
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</span></span>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-26572203885941168352014-11-15T10:37:00.001-05:002014-11-15T10:37:49.138-05:00The earthlink site is dead. Or frozen. Or something.<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I'm no longer updating <a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~ziodavino/album1_001.htm" target="_blank">my old, old website</a> (begun in 2002), so the big red links from that site's opening page now point to this blog, and to other things related to this blog. The pages are still there, but not referenced from the opening page, because, you know, stuff. And a lot of the pages are now here, referenced from the list on the right.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Also, I like pickles.</span>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-41281888494912869642014-06-30T12:14:00.001-04:002014-12-16T20:41:48.193-05:00Hyla lick maneuvers<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Fuck.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I don't want to have to write this.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">FUCK.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My dear friend Lee Hyla passed …</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Fuck.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My dear friend Lee Hyla passed away at the beginning of June. Besides being a very dear friend, he was also one of the most intriguing and original composers out there, a composer imitated (usually badly) by many — and a great guy to hang out with.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Shit. Fuck.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When I heard, I was at Yaddo, at work in the Stone Tower. Beff called. The studio is deep in the woods at a place where cell phone signals go to die. To hear Beff, I had to go outside onto the bridge connecting the Tower to the hillside.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"It's all over Facebook. Lee Hyla … died." At this moment, it was like I was watching myself get that news, not getting that news. This is such a cartoon thing. No way it could be true. No way it should be true. Crap, he's so young, he's my friend, I knew he had been ill and had pneumonia, but…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I was on Facebook early that morning, and not a word.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Fuck. God damn fucking fuck.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It really didn't sink in until I hung up, took a walk through the Yaddo woods to clear my head, and got back into the studio. It was a bit much to bear. I checked e-mail in this cellular hell, and several emails were there about Lee. It was true.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The best — and only — way to forge ahead was to bury myself in work, which I did, immediately. I was writing a song cycle, and was at a verse break. Right there — exactly where I was in the music — is where I applied a synthetic Lee Hyla texture to the piano part. I.M.L.H. means what you think it means. It's not as good as Lee Hyla, but it doesn't have to be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Tributes (not so much different from this one, but mostly shorter) started to appear pretty quickly, on blogs from his students and friends, and a bunch of astonishingly cogent, intelligent, and serious obituaries appeared in Boston, New York, Chicago, and online.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I don't intend here to try and splain the hell out of Lee's music, nor duplicate the kinds of stuff already said elegantly and in great quantity in many places. Though I don't mind saying that <i>Pre-Pulse</i> is one hell of a great piece, the string quartets are masterful, <i>Howl</i> is a scarily good piece, the <i>Piano Concerto No. 2 </i>is killer; even the smaller pieces like <i>We Speak Etruscan</i>, <i>Mythic Birds of Saugerties</i>, and <i>Wilson's Ivory Bill</i> are pieces I've returned to often. Beff played <i>Mythic Birds</i>, so I heard her practicing it a lot. The house tended to shake when she played the repeated low notes after the squawky punk lick that is a signature of the piece.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yes, Lee brought vernacular into the serious music world. He wasn't the first, but he opened doors that no one knew existed. Yes, he brought eclectic collections of licks together into the same piece. What no one has talked about (and I don't intend to, much) was the brilliant, micro-timed way he sculpted fractured continuities. His pieces turned on a dime, and even when the fracturing had been happening a while, each new one was surprising and fresh. Proportion, phrase length, breathing, microtiming — Lee was a master at working out the nuts and bolts that made everything sound so natural and inevitable. Long whole-tone or octatonic swatches of stasis, in-your-face loud stuff that had a few things seemingly wrong with it, sleight-of-hand climaxes — trademarked Lee effects, but that's just description. The stuff composers care about and are uncomfortable talking about because it doesn't make for good dissertations — Lee did all that stuff, worked hard on it, and made it sound easy. And didn't talk about it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In fact — several times I have had graduate composers in lessons whose work I would read through, pause, and simply say, "if you're trying to do the Hyla thing, let me give you some actual Hyla to listen to." As it turns out, stealing from Lee Hyla was pretty easy to notice (it never stopped me, however). But if you're going to appropriate, let's see how it's really done. Otherwise, you get bad Hyla, or really good fake Hyla. Which is better. I also would try to give advice to how to work out timings and breathing. Yes, breathing. As an exercise, go listen to any Lee Hyla piece and listen to how it breathes. Now listen to the timing of events laid over it. Pretty cool, huh?</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Oh yeah. And <i>Wilson's Ivory Bill? </i>The antsy, angry dialogue between the live piano and the field recording of a squackety bird is one of the funniest, most serious, most amazing and inventive things I've ever heard. If I had thought of that, I'd be giving CDs of it to <i>everybody</i>. And there would be a link to the sound file in this blog post.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And the <i>Polish Folk Songs</i>. If they went on all day, I would be happy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But I want to talk about Lee Hyla, my friend.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I had known of Lee, but was innocent of his music, for quite a long time. In the late 70s, Ezra Sims had told me that Lee was one of the most interesting young composers to watch, and that he was doing things that reminded him of Varèse. I liked Varèse. Fractured continuity and all, bigass scowly music. Never cracked a smile. Ever. Lee was doing the New York thang, and lots of people mentioned how cool he and his music were. As far as we knew, he cracked a smile.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I remember exactly when I first met him. I taught at Stanford in 1988-89 (this is how I remember the year), and was informed I was a finalist for the Rome Prize that March. My interview with the jury was scheduled in New York about a week after the phone call came (and it was the day before I was interviewing for a job at UC Berkeley — the story of doing a job interview after two redeyes is for another post, and hopefully one I never write). That year they had two composer fellowships and four finalists, who all interviewed. They had tried to set it up cleverly such that there were two waiting areas, and so none of the finalists would come into contact with the other finalists, thus keeping that information secret. Gossip spreads like wildfire in the community of Composers Who Think They Shoulda Got It Instead. Well, they apparently got backed up, so there were Lee and me, in the same waiting area, both waiting for our interviews. Lee started the conversation, and it was a normal, pleasant, easy conversation. No gossiping, no shop talk. Just how nice it was to meet me, he'd heard some of my music and liked it, we talked about mutual friends, and we wished each other luck.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That year, Lee and I were the two losers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lee's music was getting out on recordings, and I heard <i>Pre-Pulse Suspended</i> live, and was completely bowled over by it. Lee got the Rome Prize the next year. I was a finalist again in 1994 and did not win. And I was a finalist in 1995 and <i>Lee was on the panel</i>. I won.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We were both interviewed for a job at NEC in the early 90s, shortly after he got back from Rome. We conversed about it through intermediaries. Thus did the Boston phase of his life start. Mine started not so long after.</span><br />
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I really got to know Lee when we got some serious hang time at the MacDowell Colony in the summer of 1998 — we overlapped for about three and a half weeks. He was great to talk to at dinner, and was very good with questions at presentations (I'm more the keep it quiet and be thought a fool type). Several times he asked to borrow my car, and now that I think of it, he's the only person besides me and Beff to have driven that old 1991 Dodge Spirit. I was in Omicron, Lee was in New Jersey.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Quite frequently when I was around Colony Hall in the mid-afternoon, returning my lunch basket (they're strict about that), Lee could be spied with an intense expression, holding binoculars and a book, saying nothing, and spiriting into the forest in every which way. Yes, he was a serious birdwatcher, but he kept it to himself unless pressed. I asked one night which birds he had seen, and the three he listed were ones I'd never heard of.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lee's star turn, and one of his most memorable moments for me, happened on July 4. The colonists had decided to make it a short work day and hold a sort of barbecue-county fair thing in the afternoon, including croquet, a sack race, a three-legged race, and a tug-of-war. The teams were composers, writers, visual artists, and of course the composers won the tug-of-war because Carter Pann was there.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nicholas Dawidoff, representing the writer team, decided to kick off the festivities with a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner on his saxophone. It started out simply enough until at the first repeat, Lee started coaching him, loudly and ostentatiously. "That's right, babe, bring it home!" "This next phrase, give it your all!" "Yes! That's how to do it." "Now pull back one last time" "build, build, build.." "show us whatcha got, show us, Nicky!" … and then from on his knees, Al Jolson style, he coached the last phrase with stereotypical Hollywood director fervor. "Bring it home! Bring it home! That's it, that's it!" I think the SSB took longer than normal because of Nicky's laugh breaks.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Colony asked Lee, me, and Anna Weesner if we would mind doing a little outreach to the Walden School — a fantastic summer composer program for younger composers just a little west of the colony — and we did so. Lee played <i>We Speak Etruscan</i> among a few other things, and one of the Walden composers, smiling brightly, asked Lee if the piece was supposed to be funny. Lee gave a very complete answer: essentially yes, there was humor in his music, sometimes it was intended, and if you the listener think it's funny, then follow through with that in listening to the piece. He then deferred to me and said that I wrote funny pieces, too. I probably said aw shucks.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I also remember that after David Del Tredici's presentation, he remarked that it was uncanny all the different ways he had to sustain tension. Now that was a smart comment.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When I first got to Brandeis, I was asked to do a public panel with Lee, Peter Child, and Randy Woolf, having to do with something about something, and on a Saturday morning. Before it started, Lee said, "you'll do a lot of these here, and the questions are always the same. It doesn't actually matter what you say." Yes, we got a question about humor in serious music. And so on.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lee and I and Beff and Kate — Kate! — started doing things socially after this point. Kate Desjardins is a painter who also taught at NEC, and she is a whole lot of fun, too. They got a lovely place at the top of an extraordinarily narrow staircase in the North End, with a great sun porch thing in the back, and we often did dinners with them at restaurants in the North End. Lee had an encyclopedic knowledge of them, which was evident when he presented our choices for the evening. He really liked octopus and squid.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I believe Beff stayed in their place one night when she was on her way somewheres and we hadn't moved to the area yet.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Meanwhile, the four of us on the comp faculty of Brandeis were asked to write celebratory pieces for the Lydian String Quartet for Brandeis's 50th anniversary, in 1998. I had been hearing Beff practice <i>Mythic Birds of Saugerties</i> a lot — our principal residence was still Maine — so I had those licks in my mind, as well as those in <i>Pre-Pulse</i>, when I started the first movement of my piece. There was a budget to bring in a fifth performer, and since I wasn't getting paid to write my piece, I added Beff, thus keeping the available fundage in the family.</span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="200" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/51593458&auto_play=false&hide_related=true&show_comments=false&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="60%"></iframe></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Thus did I start with some antsy licks that I thought were Hylaesque™ (if nobody has trademarked that word, I hereby do so now). The piece ended up being in three movements, and I seriously considered calling the first movement <i>Hyla Lick Maneuvers</i>. It wouldn't have been my worst title. Listen above.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lee had, of course, written several brilliant quartets for the Lydian Quartet, and it astonished me that he came to the performance of my piece (<i>Take Jazz Chords, Make Strange</i>). The Quartet had told him I wrote them a really hard piece (I didn't tell him anything), and he said he wouldn't ever miss a Rakowski premiere if he was able to go. It turns out Rakowski is me.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Also, right around this time, he started calling me Davidy. Every e-mail began "Dear Davidy," …. Also, he noted that the Polish pronunciation of his name was Hee-wah.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Once we had finally moved to the area, we had a standing invitation to the legendary yearly New Years Day party every year. It lasted just about all day, Lee wore a bathrobe, and spent nearly all of it at the stove, making pierogis and soup and other such things (this picture to the left is at one of the Chicago parties. Gusty Thomas sent it) It was of course a wide mix of artists, and it was at one such party that I discovered my favorite pickle! Kate made an hors d'oeuvre plate that included Smak pickles. I immediately grilled her on what they were and where she got them, and it turned out to be a small Polish market in South Boston close to a red line station. You better believe I went there, and quick, and bought all the Smak pickles they had. I'm like that.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEZsZMhH9GCVtqfpOlRx41_a8FlbVXC5RYxG9tkJ5BcpBTW60Q0sbrXNy1Hk_9L6PdC1VvHRPlolRwWTNTNUhTTLVhfpizdbTH9QESV5sNfgZh5k1PO2ZYVOloSX5TV7M2oDz-veHWJS7E/s1600/Buying+pickles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEZsZMhH9GCVtqfpOlRx41_a8FlbVXC5RYxG9tkJ5BcpBTW60Q0sbrXNy1Hk_9L6PdC1VvHRPlolRwWTNTNUhTTLVhfpizdbTH9QESV5sNfgZh5k1PO2ZYVOloSX5TV7M2oDz-veHWJS7E/s1600/Buying+pickles.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Beff made sure to take a picture, with her 2004 phone, of me buying the pickles.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We also remember nice conversations with people we didn't know, and being lobbied very, very hard by a composer of cabaret songs to give up names of performers who would be interested in the songs.</span><br />
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</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We also started getting invited to shows where Kate was exhibiting artwork. Our first show was in the South End, walkable from Copley, and since we're not visual artists and not familiar with the lingo, we actually started practicing generic things to say when we saw it. "Kate, your work has a certain QUIETness" was a big hit. It turned out to be marvelous work, actually, at the time somewhere between painting and drawing, so it was pretty easy to say nice things about it. I suppose it had a certain QUIETness about it, too. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We thought one of the characters looked kind of like Amy Briggs. We loved it. She gave it to us. I think. This picture was taken at an exhibit with a 2004 phone, unsurprisingly in 2004.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Kate eventually had a large work at the deCordova Museum, not so far from us, as part of a big themed exhibit entitled <i>Pretty Sweet</i>. Kate's large painting was right behind the ticket taking. We decided to make an evening of it: Lee would take the commuter rail to Lincoln, we would pick him up, we'd all see the work privately before the museum closed, and then we'd have seafood in Maynard at the Quarterdeck. But I screwed up. The Lincoln station is actually two stations, one for eastbound, one for westbound, and I was too dumb to have figured that out. Waiting on the eastbound side, we wondered why Lee wasn't on any of the trains. Well, he was about 300 feet away, wondering where the heck <i>we</i> were. Lee called Kate from a pay phone, Kate left a message on our answering machine, Geoff Burleson was in the house and heard it, and he called my cell to say Lee was waiting at the station. Now that's a hell of a relay network.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Now I know about the other Lincoln station. We found Lee, hightailed it to the museum, but the lights were out and it had closed. We found Kate, though — who remarked that now there was sufficient evidence for them to get cellphones — and we drove to the Quarterdeck, in the dark, and in the dense fog. We almost hit a deer that sprang across the road suddenly (Beff wants to make sure I mention that we all had kind of a freak-out), but we got there, had great food, and the evening was a success. Also, no shop talk.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Since Lee hadn't seen the exhibit in person, and had no wheels to get out there, it was up to me to go when the museum was open and document it with my lovely Nikon Coolpix. You can see all the pictures of the exhibit on <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/95918572@N03/sets/72157633768585372/" target="_blank">this Photoset</a> on flickr.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lee loved teaching at NEC, but they didn't give him paid time off to write — no sabbaticals like at a research university. So he schemed various ways to get something like a sabbatical. He got an offer for a full-time job from a university, and his reward for not taking the job was some paid time off. Woo hoo! Thus in 2004-5 there was the need to find replacements to teach Lee's students, and I was such a replacement. Yes, I was a surrogate Lee Hyla. Twice! More on that later. So I taught two very good students on Monday afternoons that academic year (while I was Chair), at what might be called a <i>discount rate I only offer to alma maters</i>. I enjoyed being on the faculty of my alma mater, and I especially enjoyed the <i>not going to meetings</i> part.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4oAkyzdfFECBcs9CGpb9f7TBrgxFFOyZ-p8ymWtgSL5Mv0zXTAXoP2IZOm2YLlrPuXyw6zx4I6_mjRPABxAcMkICdF0qfC0860Wdt4163f-NaomtzEgU4NuddsbOh8AwZiBdzRt3dFQbr/s1600/Lee+at+gallery.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4oAkyzdfFECBcs9CGpb9f7TBrgxFFOyZ-p8ymWtgSL5Mv0zXTAXoP2IZOm2YLlrPuXyw6zx4I6_mjRPABxAcMkICdF0qfC0860Wdt4163f-NaomtzEgU4NuddsbOh8AwZiBdzRt3dFQbr/s1600/Lee+at+gallery.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lee at Kate's opening</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In 2006, both Lee and I got offers from Northwestern and for a time we imagined how cool it would be to be teaching in the same program. I didn't go, but Lee did (duh). His remark was "three-quarters of the work for one and a half times the pay. A no brainer." Thus did Northwestern become the top of my you-should-apply-to list. Meanwhile, though, NEC started offering sabbaticals, and Lee took one in the year before he started at Northwestern, in 2007-8. Thus was I again a surrogate Hyla, and thus was I able to recruit <a href="http://travisalford.com/" target="_blank">Travis Alford</a> to Brandeis. For you see, Travis had gone to NEC to study with Lee, but he ended up in his second year with me. Pretty disappointing, huh? Also, Mike Gandolfi managed to get them to pay a non-alma mater rate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Of course I was at the farewell concert that NEC gave for Lee, and it was a very classy one, with some great performances. There was a well-catered reception preceding it, and I got a little bit plastered before the concert started. When I say a little bit, I mean something else. So I had the whole concert up which to sober (I was driving home)</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, and I gave </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Wilson's Ivory Bill </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">a one-person standing ovation. It was well-deserved. Also, I was a little plastered.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lee's exit to Chicago coincided with Beff's desire to get a four-wheel drive vehicle — a Subaru, specifically — for her weekly drives to and from Maine. Thus we were getting rid of our Camry, which had 226,000 miles on it. When we ditched our Dodge Spirit years earlier, Lee mentioned that he would be pleased to accept a car we were getting rid of, even though he hadn't owned a car in many years, and they used Zipcar when they needed one. So we gave him the Camry, and I made up a bill of sale that overstated the price he paid for it by a dollar (it said he paid a dollar, and I presumed he'd pay Massachusetts sales tax on that amount). Then Lee needed sage advice on what car ownership in Massachusetts means, and it turned out to be complicated: he had to get it insured before he could register it, and then he had to pay sales tax when he registered it, at the RMV. It was very complicated, especially when in the midst of moving, and especially since they charged sales tax on the Blue Book value of the car and not on what he actually paid. Sales tax was about 300 bucks, as I recall.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Then, new title, registration, new plates, and insurance document in hand, Lee and Kate came over for another delicious lunch, and a complicated handoff. Kate wanted to make sure that before she drove it to Chicago it was in tiptop shape. So first I explained to them, in the driveway, how to use the cruise control, and I handed over all the maintenance documents we had. We drove in two cars to Acton Toyota, and Kate asked for "the once over". While that was happening, we drove in the available car to the Quarterdeck for lunch (it was great), and back. They said the car was in excellent shape, but one light had to be replaced, for $112. Kate looked at me accusingly, and I told her I'd give them double their money back if they didn't want the car. Then I pointed left out of the Acton Toyota driveway, said "Route 2 is a mile in that direction and go three quarters of the way around the rotary to go towards Boston", and off they went. Since I rode in that same car in Chicago three years later, apparently they made it safely. Kate had reported that she drove it to Chicago solo, with all their plants.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And every e-mail from Lee after this time had a brief report about "the Rakmobile". Dear Davidy, the Rakmobile is doing fine and serving us well.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And right around 2004, we started writing recommendation letters for each other — Lee was itching to spend a semester of his leave at the Camargo Foundation, which asked for letters. It's tedious for middle-aged guys to find even older people to recommend them for artist colonies (or worse, their students) and other residencies, and they all want letters. But hey, I wrote maybe a dozen letters for Lee, and he maybe two dozen for me. I applied to more residencies, apparently. "Hey, look, this guy got a <i>Hyla</i> letter!" "Who the fuck is this guy writing for Hyla?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In 2005 I was a Master Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and when it was time to leave, Jim Frost asked me for recommendations for future Master Artists — specifically composers who were very different from me when possible. I gave them a substantial list topped off by the two composers with the shortest names: Lee Hyla and Kyle Gann. Damned if both of them weren't Master Artists the very next year. After Lee's session was over, he e-mailed me to say he had a great time, and thanks for the recommendation. I had not told him I recommended him.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In 2010, Lee was asked to curate a concert of the Chicago Chamber Musicians on the Saturday of Super Bowl weekend. This turned into a fun and busy trip, as I stayed at Lee and Kate's new place — a loft carved out of an old factory — and got to be a passenger in the back seat of the car I had driven to Maine and back so many times. It's a lovely place with very high ceilings and a few rooms carved out for sleeping and studios. So I had the couch, which was comfortable. I remember Kate driving us to a seafood place they liked, and it was quite good. They wouldn't let me pay. And I remember the concert itself. Lee was charged with introducing the concert, which had Lee's flute and piano piece, <i>Voice of the Whale</i>, my <i>Hyperblue</i>, and something else. Lee simply said, "these are pieces that blew me away the first time I heard them and changed my thinking about music." High praise indeed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lee had secured a colloquium at Northwestern for me on the Monday after the Super Bowl, which left us with Super Bowl Sunday to do stuff. So we did a Super Bowl party at Gusty Thomas and Bernard Rands's place! Adam Marks, Stacy Garrop, Amy Briggs, and Joe Francavilla were there, too, as evidenced by the cheesecake shot (also Kate, who must have taken the picture). I didn't care who won. Lee apparently did.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Overnight it snowed 10 inches, but I was able to get to the colloquium, and in a cab to the motel near the airport I'd stay in before my early flight. Yes, what I remember about this trip is seafood, a great compliment, Super Bowl, and snow. Lots of snow.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lee and Kate were in town in June 2011, apparently having finally sold their place in the North End (I could be wrong), so we went out for tapas on Newbury Street. I brought my brand new iPad to show them my Camargo pictures, and I took this picture to show them how I had an app to Monet it, to van Gogh it, etc. Little did I know this would be the last time I would see him.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Last fall I was asked to judge some scores for the Red Note Music Festival, and Lee's name was dropped in the e-mail asking me. He was to be the composer in residence for the festival, and he was also judging scores. My student Emily went to that festival, and when she got back, I asked her how Lee was. She said he looked old and frail, he walked very slowly and fell down once. She thought he was in his 70s (he was 62). She also said she'd heard he'd had pneumonia. I was hopeful that he would be on the mend. Lee did write a letter for me in the fall, and uncharacteristically quickly. "Dear Davidy. Consider it done."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Toward the end of May I was at Yaddo, retrieving e-mails from the baby internet they have in the library there, and there was a missive from Kate, sent to a list. Lee has pneumonia again, but is up and conscious and thinks he has to get to a concert. They are micromanaging his blood pressure. When he is better we hope to get him on a list for a liver transplant.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Whoa.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I asked Kate to keep me informed about everything, no matter how small.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Then the news from Beff.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Fuck.</span></div>
zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-82950667700486177872013-09-01T16:38:00.000-04:002013-09-05T08:05:38.003-04:00Waiting online<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Three years ago when this blog was in its infancy — and growing much faster than it's growing now, but without anywhere near as much hair — <a href="http://ziodavino.blogspot.com/2010/08/then-i-went-downtown-to-look-for-job.html" target="_blank">I posted</a> about composer <i>faux pas</i> ...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">... wait, what's the plural of <i>faux pas</i>? Because, like, you see, in French <i>faux</i> is already plural, even though it describes something singular, and, and ...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">... about composer <i>fauxs paux</i> as they relate to physical applications for jobs. Some of the points are also germane to applications for things like the <a href="http://barlow.byu.edu/Pages/index.html" target="_blank">Barlow grant or commission</a>, the <a href="http://aarome.org/" target="_blank">Rome Prize</a>, some artist colonies, etc. In sum, it's a list of simple things to do to avoid making the people evaluating you <i>cranky</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is currently a transition happening in the field toward online applications. Which changes things.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">First, all <i>scores</i> and <i>score samples</i> will have to be digital now. Usually that means PDFs (which are easy to make in the standard notation programs); which, if your hit tunes are all <i>hand copied</i>, it's time to buy an <i>autofeed scanner</i> to make those gorgeous and very, very large multipage PDFs.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I just counted: including the one that currently doesn't work, Beff and I have five <i>autofeed scanners</i>. We rule, but only in a world with <i>very strange rules</i>. It's probably good news that the <i>fifth</i> one we got does <i>more</i> but was <i>forty percent</i> of the cost of the second one, and <i>sixty-six percent</i> of the cost of the first one.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Wait, why do we have <i>five</i>? Sigh, here's why. 1) an <i>early autofeed</i> scanner/color inkjet printer for online class handouts. <i>Ahead of the technology curve, </i>and it was one of the first ones available. 2) wi-fi networked <i>laser</i> printer as well as copier and scanner 3) wi-fi networked laser printer/scanner/copier for the house in Maine 4) large format <i>tabloid</i> (or "ledger") size scanner/copier, the least expensive of all of them 5) scanner/copier for the summer place for all users of the place.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One cool thing about the tabloid scanner is that I can now scan all my old sketches, being as I do my writing on my <i>Mikey Paper</i>. So called because it originated with hand-drawn 11x17 score paper made by Mike Gandolfi in 1980. So I have posted a bunch of sketches <a href="http://ziodavino.blogspot.com/p/sketches.html" target="_blank">right here</a> on this <i>bloggy thing</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Thus. If there is ever a competition involving <i>sketches</i> and submissions that is <i>online only</i>, I am covered. I won't have to go back to them and rewrite them on letter-size paper, or reduce them on a copier, or cover them with sand and do a little dance.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But now there's lots and lots of <i>online submitting of materials</i>. I haven't had to do much submitting yet, (I've been busy sighing that I'm too busy sighing that I'm too busy sighing — wait, gotta reset the feedback loop — I've been busy sighing that work keeps me away from doing much cool stuff you can apply for) but I have certainly been on the other end — the guy who is charged with the evaluating via online applications, and who hates <i>stuff that makes him cranky</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The advantage to online submissions and judging is that nobody has to call a meeting and figure out, by trial and error, when all the <i>evaluating people</i> are available. The <i>evaluating people</i> get to do it at their leisure, in their <i>jammies </i>or<i> jodhpurs</i>, spread across how ever much time it takes, with domestic animals in their laps, even. Also said <i>evaluating people</i> probably don't know who the other <i>evaluating people</i> are, so there aren't <i>impasses</i> when, say, there is no more popcorn. On the other hand, there is also no <i>horse trading</i>. That's an expression.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So. Then. As a sequel to that much earlier post, I write this to add a few little bits of advice to composers compelled to make online applications for stuff. Some online applications ask you to upload everything to their server, while others ask you to provide URLs where your stuff can be found, i.e. your website or a cloud service. Thus, some of the advice is more apropos to the latter type.</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="color: red;">Scores that look sucky when printed look exactly as sucky as PDFs</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. Fix notation, don't let notes and accidentals collide with barlines, don't let the scores get crowded. Make the score </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">beautiful</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. The good scores stick out (because there are so few of them), and make </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">evaluating people</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> smile just a little.</span></li>
<li><span style="color: red; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Check your mp3 before you upload it</i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (or put it in your </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">own space</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> where the evaluating people are going to access it). Don't presume evaluating people are so busy they're not going to listen to all of your six-minute movement and cut it off before the movement is done. That's amateur hour stuff.</span></li>
<li><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="color: red;">If you give a link to your score, make it a direct link to the score</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. How cranky do you think </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">evaluating people</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> get when your link is to your </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">website</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> and they have to fish through your </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">oh so artsy</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> interface to find what they are supposed to evaluate? Answer: </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">infinity</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. The same applies to mp3s on your website. Also, if your score is on a download-for-money website, don't give </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">that</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> link and advise </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">evaluating people</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> to "click on </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Preview</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">".</span></li>
<li><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="color: red;">If you use a cloud storage service, learn what the interface looks like to evaluating people</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. I have encountered lots of Dropbox, box and google drive files as well as other services that I didn't recognize. I prefer </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">box</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> above all the others because there are preview options both for PDFs and mp3s. With dropbox and google drive, the </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">evaluating people</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> are compelled either to </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">download</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> your files before you can view/listen, and then later must muck around the hard drive in order to delete them — don't presume that </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">evaluating people</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> are going to be so in love with your work that they'll want to keep it </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">for all time</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.</span></li>
<li><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="color: red;">For sound files, SoundCloud is the bomb</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. Simple interface, no downloading, and there's a pretty picture to look at for </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">evaluating people who like to do it stoned</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.</span></li>
<li><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="color: red;">Remember when you've referenced a file in an application with a link in a cloud service</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. Don't delete those files from your dropbox, box, Copy, google drive, etc. before the stated deadline for notification. Because </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">maximum crankiness</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> ensues when the link to your score or sound file yields </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">THE FILE IS NOT FOUND</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. Evaluating people are quick to hit <span style="color: blue;">DELETE</span> <delete>in this case. That thing where </delete></span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">evaluating people</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> are concerned about you as an artist and about your forgetfulness and they don't mind emailing you to let you know it's missing and they have the time to wait days for you to put it back and email back about it — that only happens in </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">old movies</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. And in </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">imaginary old movies</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, at that (I watch a lot of those).</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Now, see I <i>get cranky</i> just writing about <i>getting cranky</i>. Le feedback loop, c'est moi.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="color: red;">Update:</span></i> it turns out we have <i>six</i> autofeed scanners. I got one of the first HP printers that let you print directly from an iPhone or iPad, and it's a color inkjet that just happens to include autofeed scanner. Not that the autofeed wasn't important. It was our Vermont printer for two years before we converted to laser. Currently it is in the guest room, and when you turn it on it screams <i>my ink is really old!</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="color: red;">Update 2: </span></i><a href="http://www.classicalmusicisboring.com/archive/2013/08/cmib00715.html" target="_blank">This post</a> from<i> classical music is boring </i>brings up yet another issue in online applications.</span>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-29353191992762904582013-05-23T12:08:00.001-04:002014-10-17T13:36:59.254-04:00How can we stop him? His glamour increases!<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have just been doing a <a href="http://ziodavino.blogspot.com/2012/07/you-gave-me-such-start.html" target="_blank">familiar yearly task</a>, except <i>responsibly</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But <i>lemme splain</i>. Two steps forward, three steps back. Then, seven steps forward, six steps sideways, you put your left foot in, three steps back. <i>Yahtzee!</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have been playing the part of <i>Glamour Boy</i>. How glamourous is it? Why, it's the continental spelling, with the extra "u", of glamour! And it's because I have a <i>composer in residence</i> title. Or maybe it's <i>Composer In Residence</i>, or <i>Composer-In-Residence</i>. They all function the same, except in spell checkers and Yahtzee.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.nephilharmonic.org/composer-in-residence/" target="_blank">As they say</a>, I am the <i>Composer in Residence</i> for the smallest orchestra in the United States that has such a thing. Or, uh, such a person. Now there's a distinction. And boy, does it come with <i>glamour</i>, a word I promise to use a lot less.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Starting now.</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">First and foremost, it's a title once held by <i>Andy Vores, Mike Gandolfi</i>, and <i>Peter Child</i>, among others. That means something already. Hey, one of those guys has two names that are five letters each. I'll never have that distinction, except maybe some evenings when I've had too much to drink, and a taco.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And the pay? Less than one <i>mortgage payment</i>. Even our new <i>shrunken</i> mortgage payment since the <i>refi</i>. But there is the, you know, <i>g-word</i>. <i>I have a title.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The coolest thing about the job is that I can write a piece a year for the orchestra, they will perform it, and I will get a very good recording. Since they've played several of my pieces already, I know they are very good, and I know where the strengths are. And since it is a community orchestra, I get to write stuff that <i>maybe other orchestras will play</i>. I haven't written a nested tuplet in many, many years — this is not where I'd start doing that again.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And indeed, I chose to write a piece with the working title <i>Dance Episodes</i> for next season. It's programmed for May 3, 2014. And not a note of it exists yet.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There will be <i>thrown bows</i>. That's an expression.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Why <i>Dance Episodes</i>? One of these days I'd like to write a full-length ballet. With intermission, and everything (I presume popcorn sales will fund the commission). This will be an opportunity to get ten or fifteen minutes of my feet wet for such an endeavour. Note the continental <i>extra "u"</i>, and the really awkward mixing of metaphors there.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Better yet. Whenever I write for the orchestra, I get remunerated to the tune of <i>two mortgage payments</i>, with a little leftover for popcorn. Even at movie theater prices.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That's in addition to my usual stipend. And what do I do for that stipend? I use the title, and I do the prestigious <i>call for scores</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yes, that's another very cool thing about the orchestra. They have a yearly call for scores, and one of the submissions is chosen to be on a regular program the following season. It's a very, very nice opportunity, and the performances are always very good. The winning composer gets a nice line on the resumé, an orchestral royalty, and a free bag of popcorn.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I made that last part up. I'm going with <i>themes</i>, you see.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">An excellent opportunity like this <i>call for scores</i> looks, to young composers, like one in a long list of many opportunities. Yes, there's a ton of opportunities for composers, and all of said composers are advised two things: take advantage of as many of them as possible, and steel yourself for rejection. It's one of very few instances where it's proper to use <i>steel</i> as a verb. The homonym used there would sillify the sentence greatly.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Having done these opportunities myself, back when I <i>shaved regularly</i>, I know how much work it is to put the entries into these opportunities together. And now that I <i>shave less regularly</i>, I give a lot of advice over e-mail to students, former students, and former former students on what to include in such a packet, and what kind of presentation to make. Surprisingly, every answer is different. Because, duh, every student and former student has written different pieces. It's my job to know those pieces. But secretly.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Is the past tense of steel <i>stool</i>? As in, I <i>stool</i> myself for rejection? But I kid.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Or do I?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Being on the entrant end of such things carries with it all kinds of anxiety, into which going will not be done by me here. Any composer reading this will know that of which speaking is done by me. Plus, it's pretty expensive.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Being on the other side of the process, though. I've served on plenty of panels, and it's a responsibility I take very seriously. I don't play favorites, I recuse myself from conflicts of interest when possible, and I always let everybody have popcorn before I take any. And most of these panels have been administered by an entity far greater than I, who can afford an administrative layer that can deal with the complexities of a call for scores (or a prize, or a commission, or a bag of really expensive popcorn).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To wit, <a href="http://barlow.byu.edu/Pages/index.html" target="_blank">one of the opportunities</a> on whose panels I served had a whole layer of administration, from paid staff to multiple interns to do the grunt work. Submissions arrived and were logged and classified, materials were numerically organized, interns did the playback during the judging, and after the decisions were made, all the materials magically disappeared, as if by fairy dust. And the judges went out for an expensive meal.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And given that that opportunity has such vast outreach, not to mention reputation, the ratio of applicants to winners is very, very high. That's a lot of rejection letters to produce.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I didn't care. I was at the expensive meal, and boarding a plane the next day. I really liked the way they mixed the salad dressing <i>right in front of you</i>. Later, I got a reimbursement check for my incidentals, such as parking at the airport, etc.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And there is the call for scores that <i>Composer In Residence</i> guy (moi) does once a year. All those layers of administrative help? Not to be found. Free meals? Nope. A high altitude hike? Nope, stuck at 330 feet above sea level here.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And here's how it really went.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7qrD8rFz5ZYk6GaiaFb6W1JECw6AdZ33iSnVUzdcQYJMTIHBCYT5QTda_nzodMu2b_IJB7IJlxlssbPmGUFEzUqMjDMtj9zgqP-uy6WcAoasSk5aeXP_MtB_5dWoHS4ahHxTe6LPdmPQB/s1600/IMG_2778.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7qrD8rFz5ZYk6GaiaFb6W1JECw6AdZ33iSnVUzdcQYJMTIHBCYT5QTda_nzodMu2b_IJB7IJlxlssbPmGUFEzUqMjDMtj9zgqP-uy6WcAoasSk5aeXP_MtB_5dWoHS4ahHxTe6LPdmPQB/s400/IMG_2778.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Oh wait. First an interruption. There's been a lot of unremitting text here. So here's a cat in a laundry hamper.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">First, soon after it was announced that the orchestra had me as the CIR (I'm abbreviating now, rather a long word for such a thing), I got an e-mail from a former student asking if he/she should apply for the opportunity. I said, using nothing but truth, <i>I don't play favorites for these things, and you wouldn't get any special preference. You'd be on a level playing field with the entire applicant pool. That said, if yours really was the best submission and was declared the winner, how much of those first two sentences would anyone else in the world believe?</i> I did not see an entry from this composer. Relief.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And then there is the actual doing of stuff. Yes, that's what composition is about. Doing stuff. And so is a call for scores. Stuff that must be done by me when there's no administrative layers or interns.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The submissions went to a PO Box and were collected by the orchestra's manager. He has a full-time job at BU in addition to this managing gig, so he brought them all to his office. He logged in maybe half the submissions and removed the entry fee checks, but given that he has a full-time gig ...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And how did I get the submissions? Did they magically appear on my doorstep? Yes! Except that they were never on my doorstep, and I had to drive to BU (and back, duh) to pick them up — that's 55 minutes each way, much of it spent sandwiched around and between Boston drivers, who are notoriously <i>the worst</i>. The applications filled the trunk of my car. It was three trips to bring them from my car into my living room. And this may be a coincidence, but it was while I was doing this whole task that I aggravated an existing hernia, culminating in surgery just about ten days ago.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I'll go with the coincidence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I spent two full days with the submissions. Two full days. During my April vacation. When I could have been writing music. When I <i>should</i> have been writing music. Also, I had to pull out the entry fee checks from a little more than half the applications and file them, to make sure that eventually someone would get them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Did all the entry fees add up to a figure that would pay my CIR stipend? Nope. It turns out that this isn't an opportunity funded by the entry fee.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And while I'm at it, I always advise against entering anything with an entry fee. Especially this one. Because next year that would be less work for me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And also. This year's application pool was 1.7 times as large as last year's. Just sayin'.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So I did my usual oohing and aahing over two days about how few kinds of beginnings that composers writing for orchestra think of, at the professionality of so many of them, at the quality of many of the recordings, and all. At the end of my part of the process, I had <i>four</i> that I liked the best.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In a perfect world, a world with unlimited interns, all the scores and packets would have magically disappeared right around then. Somehow, they didn't. Instead, the nonwinners were all packed up and stuck ... in our side porch. The only place we have with space for them where they wouldn't get moldy. <a href="http://bethwiemann.com/" target="_blank">My wife</a> has commented many, many times on how nice it would be to have them out of there.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Then the glamour increased some more. I took just the scores and recordings of the four finalists out of the packages, being sure to keep the documentation with contact information. And what did I do with them? I packaged them in a mailing bag that I myself had bought, walked it to the post office, and mailed it to the conductor using money that just happened to be resident in my wallet at that moment. Several days later he and I had a long phone conversation about those four pieces, and it was clear he knew them all encyclopedically. And we decided on a winner.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Still, the packets did not magically disappear.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzvt6vGznlTrbvxjwohuN3-uP2rAoyW7LSF4ntEsBoGHV_EhyphenhyphenSMhDdUfNmA3iFLFjQ4aCyVAv3-nkJBdUP-nEUvoxj7-9DHbTdqN-ULFQTLoqhm9kDGiERonwieTR7DLktWr1KauFFEvxo/s1600/IMG_2757.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzvt6vGznlTrbvxjwohuN3-uP2rAoyW7LSF4ntEsBoGHV_EhyphenhyphenSMhDdUfNmA3iFLFjQ4aCyVAv3-nkJBdUP-nEUvoxj7-9DHbTdqN-ULFQTLoqhm9kDGiERonwieTR7DLktWr1KauFFEvxo/s400/IMG_2757.jpg" height="400" width="300" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I know, dear reader, that you'd like something else to break up the text. So here's some <i>rosemary chicken</i> just as I started to grill it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The rosemary came from my own garden. I rule.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Finally, after school finished, I had that operation, etc., and it came time for the time of notification to <i>those who did not win</i> (I could have said <i>those who lost</i>, but there are no losers here. You can't win if you don't play. Then again, you don't lose if you don't play. Etc.).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Davy the Intern</i> is what I became. And notification involved three kinds of things: applicants who sent mailing bags and postage for return of materials (the dreaded SASE); applicants who sent e-mail addresses; and applicants who sent only postal addresses. So already, three kinds of ways of responding.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">First, I asked the orchestra manager to set up an e-mail account for my official capacity as CIR. Which he did. So I have yet another gmail account. And this one is notification only. Or at least I say it is. Because, you know, not one hundred percent of nonwinners are gracious nonwinners. Some will dislike me intensely but generically, and some will want to know <i>specifically</i> why they didn't win, what they did wrong. The correct and truthful answer <i>I don't remember your application</i> usually would not suffice.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And I spent an entire morning generating gracious but terse letters — using the name of the applicant and of the applicant's piece — and packaging materials into the SASEs. But that was only part of it. Because then there was <i>the trip to the post office</i>. It's not straightforward, you see.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The first time I was ever involved in a call for scores was the early 90s when I taught at Columbia and was living in rural Massachusetts, and the Griffin Music Ensemble had such a thing. When it was over, I did that packaging of stuff into the SASEs and brought it to the local rural post office to be sent out. Which prompted the postmaster of said post office to invite me into his office to give me a gentle but stern talking to about how these things <i>should have been packaged</i>, how this <i>stuff is supposed to go in a perfect postal world</i>, just so I would know that <i>next time</i>. <i>There's not going to be a next time</i> didn't seem to faze said postmaster. The lecture continued while I waited for the iPod to be invented.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So I was going to the post office with a pile of what a bunch of different composers thought the standards were for SASEs, and, true to form, of all the counter help at the local post office, I got <i>Attitude Guy</i>. <i>Attitude Guy</i> don't take no guff, because he doesn't know what guff is. He's been waiting for guff, man.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ2fvvIwBjpa1pQOMVHVXbM2DEtY4_B4QzlIEBjWPNSceYGoRxHOcRXTcf8V-5CwaV9mTovrrIYRK4q4h7Azs6m67r_cdrQBHLrnIiqkthknjIfLRx42YjWNaGAEyQKqqQkug4Zfb9jdBU/s1600/IMG_0321.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ2fvvIwBjpa1pQOMVHVXbM2DEtY4_B4QzlIEBjWPNSceYGoRxHOcRXTcf8V-5CwaV9mTovrrIYRK4q4h7Azs6m67r_cdrQBHLrnIiqkthknjIfLRx42YjWNaGAEyQKqqQkug4Zfb9jdBU/s400/IMG_0321.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Here are my cats enjoying the blanket under which I recovered for the first week after the operation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My opening gambit, given my experience with such things, was to identify these as <i>packages done by others</i>, but in more words than that. His response: <i>Excuse me?</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So ... package by package, he went through, guffless. When he said <i>This should be stamped MEDIA MAIL</i> I said <i>I don't care</i>. To which he said <i>I can just give these all back to you right now and I won't send any of them out. </i>Apparently <i>I don't care</i> qualifies as <i>guff</i>. Man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So I stood there silently as he went through package by package, stamping MEDIA MAIL on some of them. The last one was 25 cents short on postage. I paid that 25 cents out of the goodness of my own heart.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Oh, by the way, composers. When you send an SASE, it'd be nice if you'd include at least as much postage on the package as is required. You don't want to see me wasting my time on silly comebackers like <i>Show them no quarter</i>, do you?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So then there were the rest of the applications. Of which there were a lot. Using a mixture of <i>e-mails</i> and <i>letters stuffed into envelopes</i> -- did I mention I copied the orchestra's logo off the webpage and used it, cleverly so, to create an official envelope? I rule. -- I spent another entire morning printing letters, printing envelopes, and sending e-mails. Then, another trip to the post office, a book of stamps bought on my own dime (it was more than that), and four international postage stamps.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Glamour</i>, I tell you. Remind me not to pursue a career as an intern.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But then again, I am writing ballet music.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Meanwhile, all those applications. Still on the porch.</span>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8338681421222406348.post-79011652657335330942013-02-16T20:28:00.002-05:002013-02-16T20:28:58.993-05:00Matthew 22:14<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Canons are cold, but fugues are frozen.</span>zio davinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15242909705354229947noreply@blogger.com