Organ Writing and Electronic Improvisation. Why Improvise?

University of Miami has kept me extremely busy, but I recently was able to finish my piece for organ titled Wend Your Way.  It takes the popular Latter-day Saint hymn tune, "Come, Come Ye Saints" and depicts its historical background and message in four sections, moving from despair to confidence and hope in the Lord.  Writing for organ was an exciting experience; there are many peculiarities to the instrument, and it takes time to understand the registration (how the colors work and how to send the different keyboards to different pipes).  I look forward to writing more for the organ.

During this time, I also started to write an electronic piece.  This will be my first new electronic piece in a year, and I have enjoyed working on it.  In fact, it is a sequel to my last electronic piece Improvisations IV: An Appeal to the [SOUND] Masses.  The concept of these improvisations is to create a sound situation that the performer must learn and take advantage of in the performance.  Most of the sound comes from the performer and is electronically manipulated to create a background for the performer.  In Improvisations IV, the performer plays music that was looped sixteen times.  As the piece progresses, the loops shift to high and low registers and sometimes drop out to leave solo sections against a drone.  Improvisations V: Two-Track Mind uses two tracks to store the performer's live material.  The first track records twenty seconds of free improvisation from which a series of random complex rhythms are derived and juxtaposed by the program.  The second track takes the performer's music and spits it back out at different speeds.  For both pieces, the composer's blueprint is in its resultant style and its fixed overall form.  The challenge for the performer is to navigate through these situations and develop an instantaneous vision and direction for the piece.  Improvisations V will be premiered on April 9th   

I was surprised this past week to hear the question of "why" concerning this piece.  It is rooted in deep tradition.  Improvisation has always been integral to music, especially free improvisation in certain restricted environments.  For example, both jazz and Indian raga use extensive improvisation.  In fact, Western music highly incorporated improvised elements until the 19th century (and it is a real shame that composers cut it out from their compositions).  In the 20th century, Western music brought back improvisation through experimentalism.  American composers such as John Cage, Earle Brown, and La Monte Young challenged performers to engage in improvised and unconventional situations.  It could be said that the return of improvisation to the Western world is the hallmark American achievement of the 20th century, both through jazz and through the experimentalists.  But more importantly, improvisation allows performers to freely express themselves, unhinged by the dictates of the composer.  Not all performers will desire this opportunity, but I know countless performers who love to dabble in improvisation.  And it also requires submissiveness from the composer, who only provides the framework for the music itself.  Why not give a performer music that is flexible in form and free in nature?  Why not unleash the performer from the shackles of notation and give them guidelines, real notes to read, to lead them to successful express themselves?  My goal is to complete at least six of these improvisation with electronics works, each with a unique feel.  Thanks for reading; if you want to try out these improvisations, let me know!

A Warm Miami Winter

An update is well overdue here.  Much has happened in the past two months.  First and perhaps most exciting was my recital January 15th.  I was able to pull together a group of excellent performers who gave an amazing concert to a decent-sized crowd of friends and musicians in the Miami area.  On that concert, Stone in Hand was premiered by Julia Lougheed, Andy Eshbach, and Cynthia Burgess.  It was a great run-through for the premiere, and I look forward to its Virginia premiere with Julia Lougheed and also its Texas premiere by my good friend from BYU, Catelyn Gentry.  Premiered by Daniel Velasco, Andy Eshbach, Lee Seidner, Jordan Bidwell, and Brandon Guillen was Oh, That Light!, written for the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival (and it was performed by amazing players who nailed it).  RF ISOLATION: Faraday Cage also had its public premiere despite being my oldest piece in the concert, which was masterfully done by Paige Towsey, Sara Arevalo, Lauren Miller, and Laura Jacyna. And my most performed piece, Thoughtsketches, received its Florida premiere from a new set of performers--Dana Kaufman, John Harris, Monte Taylor, and I.  Finally, four of Six Sax Pieces was performed by Matt Taylor, who gave a compelling Florida premiere of the work.  I am grateful for everyone who supported me and made the night possible.  Catalina von Wrangell provided the audio recording and video, which is indispensable to me as I share my musical ideas with others.

Since the concert, I have been writing my American Guild of Organist commission Wend Your Way, a theme and variations on "Come, Come Ye Saints."  It has provided a unique challenge to me because it deals with such a familiar theme--I have sang this hymn in church meetings since I was a young child.  But it has been a great experience to analyze both the text and music and gain new meaning from it.  I hope that my variations reflect the concepts that I have learned from the music and words.  This will likely be premiered by organist Seth Carlson at a joint-composer concert on April 9th with Morgan Denney and Monte Taylor.  More details on this concert are forthcoming!

In other news, I am a finalist for the New American Voices competition with my setting of Rubén Darío's Tarde del Trópico.  Mario Almonte will premiere this work at the New American Voices concert in Gusman Concert Hall at the University of Miami on March 26th.  It is an exciting opportunity to work with him and his pianist, and I'm looking forward to it.

And last, in preparation of my website's 2.0 version, I am revising all my scores, including a digital version of my handwritten Romance Sonámbulo, which is an interesting challenge.  I will have sample scores online and then my site will be finished.  But it is a huge project to deal with; as much as I enjoy it, I fear there is no end to the work I need to do!

I have been applying to summer festivals and such, and I look forward to the future.  Hopefully I'll have some news of those opportunities in my next post.  It's great to be in Miami, and I'm looking forward to continual sunshine and heat all year round.  Until next time.

The End of Another Year (and the beginning of another)

It's amazing to think back on all the adventures from this year.  Graduating from Brigham Young Unversity, touring with the BYU Wind Symphony to Mongolia, South Korea, and Japan, attending the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival as an emerging composer in New York City, returning to Illinois and Tennessee for the summer, and beginning my Masters program at the University of Miami shows how busy the year has been.  

But my composing life featured my first concert of solely my music, my first four completed commissions  (including one to be performed in just two weeks and a fifth commission from the American Guild of Organists to be written next year), my longest continuous work at 14 minutes (Stone in Hand), my first two orchestral pieces (listen to the BYU Philharmonic Orchestra read my work And it fell), my first repeat performances (Improvisations IV was performed the most at three times this year on three different instruments), and the completion of 14 pieces total--many of which were recorded in audio and/or video or premiered.  I also created this website and began the revision of my earlier scores to make my music accessible to everyone on the internet.  I consider this year a success, but I hope to keep up with this pace!

As the new year approaches, I look forward to making resolutions to work even harder to write music that inspires and enlightens.  I believe that music is a powerful force to help people feel important feelings and have a vision of the human experience (and that experience to me reflects eternal truth).  I hope that I can learn how to better express these sentiments and point others to notice the beauty in all the sounds we hear.  I'll commit my goals to writing in my January post!

Finally, to start the new year, I will be having my own concert January 15th at the Bede Chapel on the University of Miami campus.  It features wonderful performers from the University of Miami and Julia Lougheed, who will perform in the piece she commissioned, Stone in Hand.  The concert will premiere Stone in Hand and a piece I wrote over the summer for the Imani Winds to read, Oh, That Light!.  If you are in the area, I'd love to see you there.  If not, I am looking into video streaming possibilities, so keep posted on Facebook.

Best of success to everyone on your resolutions this upcoming year!

Stone in Hand

I just finished my work Stone in Hand: A Dramatized Parable for Oboe, Clarinet, and Chimes, a commission for Julia Lougheed, an amazing clarinetist currently attending Virginia Commonwealth University.  Julia asked me to focus on the topic of forgiveness, and since then, my mind has been constantly thinking about how forgiveness works.  Though the piece contains many layers of symbolism--from the number of movements in total (seven) and the number of pitch centers in the first clarinet section (six), and the characterization of the instruments and interplay--most important in the piece is the transformation in texture and mood.  I believe this is the most complex work I have written yet, both in terms of utilizing the full capacities of the instruments (nobody writes for chimes when doing chamber music!)  and in its architecture.  Also, being 13 minutes, this will be my longest continuous piece (even though there are seven movements, there are no breaks).  I am very excited to hear this work performed and hope it is an uplifting experience for both musicians and non-musicians, performers and audience.

The exact date of the premiere of the piece is still TBD, but we are planning on it being premiered in either December or January, and because she is originally from Florida, we hope to have it premiered in Miami.  I look forward to working with the performers as we take this next step in the music-making process.  

P.S.- This piece is a consortium commission, so if you would like to join the group of premieres of this piece, you can!  We have had several generous donors already, but by joining the commission, you will be able to fund my efforts to bring inspiring music to life!  All commissioners will be considered the commissioners of the work and be able to premiere it in their city or state, being mentioned in the music.  Email me if you would like to join this commission, or if you would like to commission a new work!

Hello from Miami!

I have the special opportunity to study under Lansing McLoskey while receiving my Masters in Music Composition at the University of Miami.  UM has been a unique experience so far, and I feel like musicians can learn a lot from how the musicianship/aural skills coursework is set up here.  I'd like to share what I find intriguing about this system and then share a little bit about what has happened with me musically since my last post.

Aural skills traditionally consists of a sight singing course and a dictation course.  They are typically separated in teaching, even if they are found under the same class name and run back to back in a day.  Students usually will not bring their instruments to class, and because of the nature of the course, many students find these courses to be irrelevant and have little motivation to do well.  When will a classical performer ever want to dictate a melody?  And when will an instrumentalist ever need to sing solfege (other than in Michael Hicks's The Idea of Domes found on his album Felt Hammers, except the solfege syllables are on the same pitch as an allusion of sorts).  

Now, the UM way is exciting to me.  I help teach students this same coursework, but it is organized with an element of improvisation that I believe makes the experience much more musical.  But some may ask, "Why improvisation?  Is the school wanting everyone to learn jazz?"  Yet to ignore improvisation as a part of any music history is to cater to a less than 200 year tradition from Europe.  Every time period in Western music up to the Romantic period allowed for improvisation, so why did we let that part of music slip?  And this is not to mention other traditions around the world like Indian raga, where improvisation is so important it takes a lifetime to become an expert in the style.  So jazz, rock, pop, raga, Beethoven, Mozart, Leonin, etc., we should definitely include at least a little improvisation in our abilities.  

But pedagogically, I don't believe there is a better way to develop the ear than by exercises in imitation.  Instead of telling the students the "rules" of voice leading, they are allowed to experiment with these principles in small groups.  The students at UM mix sight singing with their instruments; they learn how to apply the abilities of audiating (sounding out the music in one's head before playing) that are inherent in sight singing to their performance, a confidence booster to wind players especially who need to hit into different registers with a nice sound and on pitch.  Plus, it's fun.  We do not need to restrict ourselves to strictly classical music or jazz; there is room in the curriculum for experiments and grooves.  

By the end of the two years, students will be able to improvise through all the types of music covered in the first three semesters of the theory curriculum with some extra knowledge about jazz harmonies.  I am grateful to be learning with the students this year; this will first and foremost open our ears to be more sensitive and precise, and secondly, open a lot of doors for future gigs/inspiration and so forth all of us.  I recommend this method to anywhere that has a faculty dedicated to trying something radical and new.  

Since my last post, I wrote a small jazz chart for the wedding anniversary of two good friends in my hometown.  I have improvised with Table Nine, a local jazz group in Provo, but I had never had the opportunity to write a number like this before.  I wish I were there to hear it, but they shared the video with me, and I'm glad it worked out.  Happy 30th anniversary to the Nelsons!  

I am currently writing a piece for chimes, oboe, and clarinet for my friend Julia Lougheed.  It's great to be able to write this piece for her and take advantage of the sound capabilities of these instruments, especially the chimes.  Today I was able to meet with a percussionist and try out different techniques on the instrument.  Different mallets, bowing, harmonics, and hitting different parts of the chime gave interesting sounds that will help the piece.  Of course, the techniques are to add to the piece, not to become the piece.  So I hope to use these techniques as part of the symbolic nature of the work.  But I'll put more details about the work when I'm finished (by my next blog post).  Enjoy this wonderful month of September!

Summer Time

With some help from my brother Michael at Blue Stripe Studios, I was finally able to design this personal website!  For those who don't know me, my biography tells all.  But I wanted to share the neat opportunities that I have had since graduation from Brigham Young University. 

The week following graduation, I left with the Brigham Young University Wind Symphony to a tour in Mongolia, South Korea, and Japan.  The tour impacted me.  It helped me understand the power of music, feel important in both what I have chosen to do as a career and as part of a group of good-hearted people who love to serve others, and gave me life-long friends.  The opportunity to have gone to Asia now for the second time leaves me in awe; how could I be this fortunate?  I hope to live up to these opportunities.

When I returned, I needed to write three pieces within two weeks.  I immediately began Horas serenas del ocaso breve, a setting of a poem by Miguel de Unamuno.  This poem in particular struck me because of its focus on the liminality found at the moment before death.  For me, I constantly find my inspiration in the moments in the expression of moments that transcend tangibility.  And this piece fits into this recurring theme.  My friends Zane Harker (tenor and fellow composer) and Chris Morrison (piano), with the tech help from Daniel Nash (composer) and Robert Willes (cellist), helped me with a rough recording of the piece.

The next two pieces I needed to write were for the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival.  I first wrote Oh, That Light! for the Imani Winds.  It was going to have, again, the theme of transcendence, but my ear took me a different and more scientific route.  I was overlaying rhythmic patterns and realized that I could control the pacing of the piece by only changing the density of my materials.  I had planned to do this, but not to the extremes that I felt like using in the end.  It also lent itself to a humorous ending, another aspect of music that I think studying Mozart and Beethoven has inspired me to do.

The final piece I wrote was Terelj, a work based on aspects of Mongolian culture, an homage of sorts to the Wind Symphony tour to Asia.  I wanted to create music that reflected the feelings I felt there without being too Mongolian.  Yet I still wanted to pay tribute to the musical styles I heard while there.  I first gave tribute to the morin khuur or horsehead fiddle with Camel's Tear.  The piece used a drone centered around the fifth of the original tonal center like I heard in some horsehead fiddle music. The next movement, Shagai, gave tribute to the ankle bone shooting game enjoyed by Mongolians.  The middle contains a theme largely inspired by the Mongolian National Hymn.  The last movement, Ger, evokes the feeling of home.  I wanted to see how the phrasing of long lines of grace notes in regards to fluidity, and I provided these lines to every instrument.  I also tried to make a smooth yet brief transition to double-time and back as another experiment.

Finishing these pieces just in time for the festival (well, Ger was actually finished at the festival), I left for NYC.  I was lucky enough to find a private room in a so-called hotel in a Chinese neighborhood in Brooklyn for $48 a night.  Just down the block was a wonderful fruit market and grocery store.  And across the street from the fruit market, I had my first NYC food--a big and delicious sub sandwich.  The Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival was an excellent experience; I recommend it to all my woodwind player friends and fellow emerging composers.  The Imani Winds performed Oh, That Light! with their awesome enthusiasm and precision, and I am excited for them to premiere the work.  Woodwind Quintet Emoji Winds, comprised of Julia Barnett, Zack Borowiec, Ruth Aguirre, Amanda Ray, and Martin Van Klompenberg, spent hours of diligent practice refining my piece Terelj.  They rocked the piece and the Visionaries concert, and I am grateful for all their hard work on the piece.  I'm excited to hopefully continue working with each of these excellent musicians on future projects.

Additionally at the festival, I was able to learn a lot from composers and music business experts.  Eric Ewazen served as our main mentor, and I was able to have two masterclasses with him.  We first looked at some of my earlier works and discussed them, and then we talked about my future plans and works.  I also had a lot of interaction with Mohammed Fairouz, who writes excellent music.  Mohammed's vocal writing is inspirational, and I was lucky enough to get feedback on Horas serenas del ocaso breve from him.  Other notable guests included Jason Moran, who told us that we need to "dig up the soil" and liven up the music scene, and Cliff Colnot, who taught excellent intonation rules and music notation guidelines for efficient readings (it saves a lot of time to have clear notation).  I should also mention my fellow composers at the program, Sequoia Sellinger, Devon Yasamune Toyotomi, Jake Walsh, and Ray Fields.  In the end, the festival gave me energy and excitement to write music for great performers, and I have a lot of great people who would be happy to play my music.

Once I returned from NYC, I began writing my first post-festival commission for Marcus Moore.  He needed a closer for a recital in Atlanta, Georgia, and he wanted it to be fast and flashy.  Being a clarinetist, it is a sin that I haven't written too much clarinet music (no solo music for over two years).  I readily took the opportunity to write for the instrument I know best.  The story for the emotional content of the piece is slightly goofy.  Right before the composers Visionary concert at the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival, I felt nervous to introduce my piece.  I happened to be by Marcus and told him that the piece would be about that nervous feeling.  And then I told him about this creepy millipede-like creature I saw in my hotel.  So combining those two, I created a light-hearted piece that thrives off of what I thought of as "nervous energy."  I made use of chromatic lines and unusual arpeggios while making sure that everything felt nice to the fingers.  Marcus performed the piece last week, and he said it went well.  In July he plans to record it!  This was a lengthy post, but I'll be on top of updates!  Feel free to leave comments and/or questions!