Two pre­mieres for the upcom­ing sea­son: I received a com­mis­sion from the New York Youth Sym­phony for an orches­tral work to be pre­miered at Carnegie Hall on May 25, 2014. I also won the Yale Glee Club Emerg­ing Com­posers Com­pe­ti­tion, so the Yale Glee Club will give the pre­mière of my short choir work Love (after Rochefou­cauld) (set to this epi­gram) at Yale on Fri­day, Novem­ber 22, 2013.

Upcom­ing Performance:

• Artist: Yale Glee Club
• Date: Fri­day, Novem­ber 22^nd, 2013
• Time: 8:00pm
• City: Yale Glee Club in New Haven, CT
• Venue: Sprague Memo­r­ial Hall
• Address: Yale Uni­ver­sity
• Coun­try: US
• Age restric­tions: All Ages
• Notes: Pre­mière of LOVE (AFTER ROCHEFOUCAULD)—winner of the Yale Glee Club Emerg­ing Com­poser Com­pe­ti­tion
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• Artist: The New York Youth Sym­phony
• Date: Sun­day, May 25^th, 2014
• Time: 8:00pm
• City: The New York Youth Sym­phony in New York, NY
• Venue: Carnegie Hall
• Address: 881 7^th Ave
• Coun­try: US
• Admis­sion: $10
• Age restric­tions: All Ages
• Notes: Pre­mière of VANISHING IS EASY.
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Until July 10, life is Wild Shore. New cham­ber music in my home­town, Homer, AK, which until now was best known for being the birth­place of Jewel and sub­ject of Tom Bodett’s sto­ries. Very pleased to announce our main­stage pro­gram, set for con­certs at the Bun­nell Street Arts Cen­ter and on a float­ing stage in Hal­ibut Cove in the shadow of glaciers.

Scale 9 by Sean Friar
Indige­nous Instru­ments (III.) by Steven Mackey
Make Prayers to the Raven by John Luther Adams
Lieux Retrou­vés: I. Les Eaux (Places Revis­ited: I. The Waters) by Thomas Adès
lend/lease by David Lang
A Por­trait of the Cos­mic Ham­let by Con­rad Winslow

Upcom­ing Performance:

• Artist: Wild Shore Ensem­ble
• Tour: Wild Shore Fes­ti­val for New Music
• Date: Fri­day, July 5^th, 2013
• Time: 8:00pm
• City: Wild Shore Ensem­ble in Homer, AK
• Venue: Bun­nell Street Arts Cen­ter
• Address: 106 W Bun­nell Ave
• Coun­try: US
• Admis­sion: $20
• Age restric­tions: All Ages
• More infor­ma­tion
• Notes: Our main­stage event, fea­tur­ing the music of music by John Luther Adams, Con­rad Winslow, Sean Friar, Steven Mackey, Thomas Adès, and David Lang. Directly fol­low­ing the First Fri­days gallery open­ing event.
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• Artist: Wild Shore Ensem­ble
• Tour: Wild Shore Fes­ti­val for New Music
• Date: Sun­day, July 7^th, 2013
• Time: 12:00pm
• City: Wild Shore Ensem­ble in Hal­ibut Cove, AK
• Venue: Hal­ibut Cove Live
• Coun­try: US
• Admis­sion: $160
• Age restric­tions: All Ages
• More infor­ma­tion
• Notes: Brunch & con­cert, fea­tur­ing the main­stage pro­gram, with music by John Luther Adams, Con­rad Winslow, Sean Friar, Steven Mackey, Thomas Adès, David Lang, and more, on the float­ing stage in Hal­ibut Cove, directly across the bay from Homer. Tick­ets include brunch, admis­sion to the con­cert and round-trip ferry pass. Pre­sented by Hal­ibut Cove Live.
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This Fri­day, Feb 22, in Williams­burg, Brook­lyn there will be a spe­cial per­for­mance of Try the Spir­its, my flute & gui­tar con­certo grosso thing. It’s on at 8:30 PM open­ing a fun show with David Crowell’s band Empyrean Atlas, as well as Julia East­er­lin, and Tony Cas­tles. 7 Dun­ham Pl Brook­lyn, NY 11211. Clos­est to the J (Marcy). Also the L (Bedford).

Upcom­ing Performance:

• Artist: Winslow Ensem­ble
• Date: Fri­day, Feb­ru­ary 22^nd, 2013
• Time: 8:30pm
• City: Winslow Ensem­ble in Brook­lyn, NY
• Venue: 7 Dun­ham
• Address: 7 Dun­ham Pl Brook­lyn, NY 11211
• Coun­try: US
• Notes: Tony Cas­tles // www.tonycastles.bandcamp.com (10:30) Julia East­er­lin // www.juliaeasterlin.com (9:45) Empyrean Atlas // www.empyreanatlas.bandcamp.com (9) Con­rad Winslow // www.conradwinslow.com (8:30)
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Cadil­lac Moon Ensem­ble does a fan­tas­tic hol­i­day din­ner. Per­cus­sion­ist Sean Statser makes incred­i­ble Apple frit­ters. We have plans for per­for­mances in the spring—and sup­port from MetLife (with Angélica Negrón, Noam Faingold, Eric Lem­mon, and Dylan Glatthorn) Stay tuned! In the mean­time, watch Cadil­lac play Abid­ing Shapes.

Merry Christ­mas, all!

(2012) organ and per­cus­sion (sam­ples), 12 minutes

This work ren­ders the col­li­sion and join­ing of sus­tained organ chords with deep-layered, polyrhyth­mic sound effects. Many of the rhythms in the piece—some resem­bling idling engines—were devel­oped using MIDI-generating soft­ware and Euclid­ean geometry.

Ragged Motors

A proper tour of my liv­ing sit­u­a­tion, on the eve of my 5^th anniver­sary in situ, and my immi­nent move to another bor­ough, is over­due. I came here as a baby baby com­poser, got schooled in this cocoon, and I must pay proper dues to Mar­cia Brody mak­ing it pos­si­ble. She been essen­tially giv­ing three spe­cial rooms in her home for decades to stu­dents, and like many before me I must move on!

Mar­cia had the remark­able fore­sight to buy this place as a young teacher when the UWS wasn’t so much old Jews as pink cadil­lacs and nee­dles. The place was a legit board­ing house in which who knows what went down, and there remains one ancient per­mit on a door:

The whole expe­ri­ence is a lit­tle like inhab­it­ing a model Vic­to­rian apart­ment at the Amer­i­can Wing at the Met; like, exactly where you’d expect a com­poser to reside. But there’s also Marcia’s son, Gothic Hang­man, an influ­en­tial goth/surrealist artist; you get a cou­ple glimpses of the house on his episode of MTV’s True Life. And Marcia’s hus­band, Stephen, who col­lects Every­thing and places lit­tle duck­ies and crys­tals Just So, and lis­tens to Lib­er­tar­ian radio on the stoop unceas­ingly. And Marcia’s Indian rubble/Asian masks/19^th cen­tury Amer­i­can polit­i­cal doc­u­ments, which give you night ter­rors, and fas­ci­nate you, and turn lug­gage mov­ing into a tax­ing cer­e­mony. And no run­ning water in the kitch­enette on my floor. Or A/C.

To give you a bet­ter sense of the whole thing, I made a lit­tle video tour of the house. It begins with the carved faces of the orig­i­nal occu­pants from 1887 on the front stoop and ends in my room. The music is a Scia­r­rino Capric­cio, some­how cap­tur­ing my dreami­est arrivals home.

Great har­mony is great Jenga.

 

Many peo­ple who watched Andrew Stanton’s TED talk (writer, Wall-E, Find­ing Nemo etc.) were made aware of a hith­erto obscure quote by the Victorian-era drama critic William Archer, which suc­cinctly describes drama as “antic­i­pa­tion min­gled with uncer­tainty.”  It feels apt, though it has more to do with the expe­ri­ence of drama than the mak­ing of drama. For a com­poser, it prob­a­bly holds more water than def­i­n­i­tions deal­ing with char­ac­ter goals, con­flicts of inter­est, tri­umph, defeat, dénoue­ment, cre­ative writ­ing sem­i­nars… As it per­tains to music, the quote also reminds me of Robert Jourdain’s pop-science music per­cep­tion book, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, in which Jour­dain defines great lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences as a process of nav­i­gat­ing anticipation—the com­poser sets up antic­i­pa­tions, vio­lates them, rewards them later.

If the Archer quote is true, you can test for the absence of drama. It sort of works: if you’re cer­tain about how the piece will unfold, you don’t feel the need to expe­ri­ence it; if you can­not antic­i­pate any­thing, you get lost. Inci­den­tally, get­ting lost is the some­times goal for par­tic­u­lar artists, but maybe that’s not drama.

Not a rule; use­ful, maybe.

I can­not over­es­ti­mate the impor­tance of breath­ing, grow­ing plants to my healthy psy­che. A fluid cre­ative life depends on the pres­ence of vital plants, for when I am glum I look at them and think, at least some of us are grow­ing; when I am exhil­a­rated, I think, we flower together; and when I seek solu­tions, I think, this spearmint needs to be cut DOWN for it is gan­gly, like­wise the B sec­tion in this piece. Pic­tured: Cof­fee I am grow­ing from the seed of my par­ents’ wed­ding tree, Spearmint clipped from Alaska, a dor­mant Hoya Rope, a vine, Basil, Thyme, and a Venus Fly Trap. He inspired me to steal & assim­i­late. A vine embell­ishes exist­ing struc­tures, which is hugely rep­re­sented in Abid­ing Shapes. The cof­fee is steady, resilient, and makes effi­cient use of lim­ited light with enor­mous glossy leaves. So I aspire.

I saw a paint­ing in a lobby, a black fill whose charm lay entirely in the color-splintered frame-border. So why would the cura­tors see fit to frame it fur­ther? It looked like this:

framed thus:

What might have been a win­some piece of min­i­mal­ism is now a post­mod­ern absur­dity. For the seeker of jux­ta­po­si­tion, there are many daz­zling pos­si­bil­i­ties bet­ter than this gaudy approach. Robert Bringhurst, my favorite typographer-poet, addresses the sub­ject from his camp:

Con­sis­tency is one of the forms of beauty. Con­trast is another. A fine page, even a fine book, can be set from begin­ning to end in one type in one size. It can also teem with vari­ety, like an equa­to­r­ial for­est or a mod­ern city.

Bringhurst, The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style, 102.

Hence an obsessively-focused study works as well as a diverse sam­pler, though each has sep­a­rate require­ments. If the point is to illu­mi­nate vari­ety, pick a com­ple­men­tary frame. If the focus is nar­row, seek the force­ful, dogged border.

Tawdry fram­ing abounds in music, too, in con­cert pro­gram­ming and multi-movement works alike. Imag­ine, as an extreme exam­ple, Orff’s weepy earnest, “O For­tuna” and Bernstein’s satir­i­cal bloody, “Auto da fé” fram­ing John Adams’ sub­lime “Cho­rus of Exiled Pales­tini­ans” from the Death of Kling­hof­fer. I wince as I embed this monstrosity:

Con­trast is engag­ing, but con­sis­tency of tone is for­ever, and it’s mem­o­rable. If you’re going for blood orange, fill it through with crim­son until we all bleed:

Speak­ing of con­sis­tent tone, look at what I got when I searched Google with the above image (you can do this by drag­ging an image onto Google):

  

Queer burg­ers!

Com­mis­sions, as acts grown from respect and gen­eros­ity, are good karma for every­body, and when­ever pos­si­ble we should give them in every form, to set design­ers, vibe-creators, sculptors…pastry chefs. But know that your artist must endure a funny back­wards process to ful­fill a com­mis­sion for spe­cific cir­cum­stances; it’s kind of like get­ting a Jeop­ardy ques­tion, where one must fur­nish a ques­tion for the pro­vided answer. John Corigliano is unbe­liev­able at this process. Given “a flute con­certo,” he pro­duced, “What is the best way to make a piece about the Pied Piper?” Offered a “huge col­lege wind-band con­sor­tium” he answered, “Who could pos­si­bly afford the time and expense to mount an over­whelm­ing piece relat­ing bar­baric Roman enter­tain­ment to our own?” Pied Piper Fan­tasy and Cir­cus Max­imus both turned out pretty well, so the lengthy causal approach was worth it for him.

Other artists avoid it, pre­fer­ring to make a big mess, sort out the trash, and come up with the work, rel­e­vant ques­tions in hand. Call it the tele­o­log­i­cal approach, exem­pli­fied by direc­tors such as Peter Sel­l­ars. David Lynch employs a sim­i­lar, though tidier, process. Here he talks about mak­ing Inland Empire, not a com­mis­sion, but a project like­wise filled with bud­getary and per­son­nel constraints:

DL: I had a script [for Inland Empire], but not a fin­ished script. So I would script a scene and then go shoot that scene, then write another scene and go and shoot that scene, not know­ing if there was going to be any­thing more than just that scene, or those scenes. There was no impro­vi­sa­tion at all. Impro­vi­sa­tion means you don’t know what you’re doing, and you go out and try to get a bunch of peo­ple to do some stuff. Inland Empire was all scripted, scene by scene, but there was no indi­ca­tion of a fea­ture film. Each scene was spe­cific, had to be a cer­tain way. Then, after five or six scenes, another whole bunch of things started com­ing, reveal­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of a feature.

David Lynch, inter­viewed in Reverse Shot

I absolutely can­not do this, but nei­ther can I tor­ture myself for weeks with­out work­ing with mate­ri­als. I like the crossword-y chal­lenge of “find­ing the cause” for a work, but I go back and forth between exper­i­ment­ing, impro­vis­ing, writ­ing; and think­ing about the big shapes. Either way, the dead­line forces one’s hand and one’s muse, so it must always ride shot­gun with the commission.

I am, as I write this, pur­chas­ing Bringhurst’s The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style, because I can­not remem­ber the last time I read prose with such delight. Bringhurst com­ments on the typog­ra­phy of an 18^th cen­tury British anti-witchcraft bill:

The func­tion of typog­ra­phy, as I under­stand it, is nei­ther to fur­ther the power of witches nor to bol­ster the defences of those, like this unfor­tu­nate par­lia­men­tar­ian, who live in ter­ror of being tempted and deceived. The sat­is­fac­tions of the craft come from elu­ci­dat­ing, and per­haps even ennobling, the text, not from delud­ing the unwary reader by apply­ing scents, paints and iron stays to empty prose. But hum­ble texts, such as clas­si­fied ads or the tele­phone direc­tory, may profit as much as any­thing else from a good typo­graph­i­cal bath and a change of clothes. And many a book, like many a war­rior or dancer or priest of either sex, may look well with some paint on its face, or with a bone in its nose.

May we all aspire to such prose, filled with sur­prise, dash­ing with the momen­tum and grace of a skier. And, the kicker:

Typog­ra­phy is to lit­er­a­ture as musi­cal per­for­mance is to com­po­si­tion: an essen­tial act of inter­pre­ta­tion, full of end­less oppor­tu­ni­ties for insight or obtuseness…Typography at its best is a slow per­form­ing art, wor­thy of the same informed appre­ci­a­tion that we some­times give to musi­cal per­for­mances, and capa­ble of giv­ing sim­i­lar nour­ish­ment and plea­sure in return.

Isn’t that what we’ve always wanted to say about great per­for­mances and their power to reveal great compositions?

This, from the 6 AM flight, the air­port in Chicago, and the friendly, mid­west­ern home­land secu­rity voice, likely a for­mer Bears announcer.

The threat level is at orange
today; And I have back pains;
And you are a sin­ner;
And we are going to die soon;
Do not leave your bags.
unre­quited love, dimin­ish­ing prospects, can­tan­ker­ous
mother, phi­lan­der­ing hus­band, expen­sive diesel, culture-deep
iras­ci­ble worry; I am going
to that great big place
in the sky where
the threat level is at green
always; And you can give
your bag to a stranger.

Richard Zarou pro­duced a pod­cast inter­view with me on his grow­ing pod­cast series, No Extra Notes. The pod­cast fea­tures a cou­ple pieces—Ceil­ings in Your Eyes and
Pin­ning Music—and some inter­view ques­tions. Check it out!

This new poem, from me, trans­lated by the iPhone dic­ta­tion app Dragon Speech:

Got Robert­son says don’t see the doc­tor
Brady James five pray to Pat
Robert­son, and all your health
prob­lems be solved. He will be built
Brady James thought
bub­bles good dog blue
tooth peo­ple read the Bible

___________________________

Lee and I cre­ated this while wait­ing to walk through the fan­tas­ti­cal Big Bambú at the Met. I have no idea what we orig­i­nally said. I think these are lyrics to a Rick James song.