Moon of the Floating World performed by Cantala Women’s Choir on October 27
By admin | October 22, 2007
The Cantala Women’s Choir of the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music will perform my The Moon of the Floating World, an a cappella setting for women’s voices in eight parts of a haiku by Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693). The theme of the concert is Dusk to Dawn and will be conducted by Richard Bjella and Phillip A. Swan in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin on October 27 at 8PM.
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Shifting Coastlines (Medium High Voice and Piano)
By admin | October 10, 2007
Medium High Voice and Piano. (2000/2007) 20’
Texts by Charles Simic; (John Sokol); Ralph Burns; Howard Nemerov; Albert Goldbarth; Ronald Wallace
In 2000, inspired by our mutual love of science, the amazing artist Karen Fitzgerald and I collaborated on a project funded by the Greenwall Foundation and the Queens Community Arts Fund. We chose six poems by living authors that address the human condition through natural and scientific imagery. I composed six songs for the Goliard Ensemble: solo voice, flute, violin, cello, piano and percussion; Karen created six 60” paintings. The work premiered in October, 2000 at the Steinway Reformed Church, Astoria, NYC. These six round paintings were paired back-to-back and suspended above the audience. The project toured six South-East states during the Fall of 2000.
These pieces are very close to my heart, and over the past year, in my spare time, I revisited, revised and re-arranged five of them, paring it all down to a work for voice and piano in the hopes of making them more easily available for wider performance. Stylistically, the songs live in a place where art song, music theater and pop song overlap. Please email me if you are interested in seeing scores. (At some point I may take care of the sixth song, John Sokol’s Thoughts Near the Close of the Millenium, but not right now.)
Drawing the Triangle / Oleander Hawk:
Drawing the Triangle — Charles Simic
I reserve the triangle
For the wee hours,
The chigger-sized hours.I like how it starts out
And never gets there.
I like how it starts out.
In the meantime, the bedroom window
Reflecting the owlish aspect
Of the face and the interior.One hopes for tangents
Surreptitiously in attendance
Despite the rigors of the absolute.
Stars / Pearl:
Stars — Ralph BurnsI sit and rock my son to sleep. It rains
and rains. Such as we are both asleep,
we swim past the stars,
bad stars of disaster, good stars of the backbone of night.We know these stars as they are
and as we’d wish them to be, Milky Way,
Dog and Bear, hydrogen and helium, the 92
elements which make all we know of beauty.We know nothing of angular size or
the inverse square law of the propagation
of light, and swim through a cold, thin
gas, between and among the stars,which swim likewise between two creations
like children who know sleep intimately.
Figures of Thought / Triton:
Figures of Thought — Howard NemerovTo lay the logarithmic spiral on
Sea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,
To watch the same idea work itself out
In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn
Onto his target, setting up the kill,
And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs
Who cannot see to fly straight into death
But have to cast their sidelong glance at it
And come but cranking to the candle’s flame —How secret that is, and how privileged
One feels to find the same necessity
Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise
Without kinship — that is the beautiful
In Nature as in art, not obvious,
Not inaccessible, but just between.It may diminish some of our dry delight
To wonder if everything we are and do
Lies subject to some little law like that;
Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.
The Sciences Sing a Lullabye / Treetops
The Sciences Sing a Lullabye — Albert Goldbarth
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.
Geology says: it will be alright. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness and inch.
You aren’t alone. All the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.
Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down on down.
Love’s Discrete Nonlinearity / Rubythroat:
Love’s Discrete Nonlinearity — Ronald Wallace, from Chaos TheoryNo heart’s desire is repeatable, or,
therefore, predictable. If a few hungry foxes
gorge on a large population of rabbits,
the population of foxes increases
while that of the rabbits declines,
until some point of equilibrium is passed
and the foxes begin to vanish with
the depleted supply of rabbits, and then
the rabbits multiply, like rabbits. And so on.
The ebb and flow of desire and fulfillment
is a story as old as the world. So,
if I loved you, finally, too much, until
you began to disappear, and I followed,
would you theoretically return to love
repeatedly again? There are forces so small
in our story of foxes and rabbits
no Malthus could ever account for them.
Whole species daily disappear, intractable
as weather. Or think of a continent’s
coastlines, their unmeasurable eddies
and whorls: infinite longings inscribed
by finite space and time,
the heart’s intricate branchings.
Thoughts near the Close of the Millennium / Burning Bush (not complete)
Thoughts near the Close of the Millennium — John SokolIn this expanding universe, everything is leaving everything,
yet there is no center
From which any of this leave-taking leaves; the middle
of every departure
Is everywhere. Microcosmically viewed, it all looks a lot like
the pores of Dizzy Gillespie’s cheeks
When he blew his horn. We’re spinning away from the sun
and the stars
While Ceres moves away from Jupiter and Neptune moves
away from Mars.
Everything is leaving its immediate neighborhood, gathering
more and more distance
For itself, like the furthest quasar, that — 18 billion years ago —
said goodbye to Proxima Centauri.
Even Nancy down the street is leaving Charlie and the kids. Like
everything else,
We’re forever blown away by that first Big Bang. We’re stuck
in the atmospheric saddle
Of a slow-motion explosion, like that one at the end of Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point,
Where that floating olive might be the earth, and if we slow down
the slow-motion (slow it,
Geometrically, down), we can witness that olive decomposing
and watch entropy eat it up
While we consider that all those little anatomizing volcanoes and
Olive-quakes of it
Might be comparable to the shifting and colliding of continents
which have slow-danced
To the music of the spheres for billions of summer nights, crashing
their own weddings
And feasting off each other’s tectonic plates until the next big bash:
all of which is just the drop-of-an-olive
In a martini glass compared to what it would take to understand
what I’m talking about
Is the energy that is the black hole of me that sucked this martini
so dry that no light exists,
And now the pimento of that olive is the pit of my stomach
which seems to have multiplied
In density a thousand-fold, like a pellet of buckshot become
shot-put,
Or maybe, like — at the core of a white dwarf — that teaspoon
of matter that weighs five tons.
So maybe all this wonder and worry — and all this speculation —
is futile, because, here it is,
New Year’s Eve again and I don’t think I need to overstate my point.
Topics: Keyboard, Vocal, Chamber, Music | No Comments »
Set fire to have light performed by the Madison String Quartet, October 14 & 15
By admin | October 2, 2007
The New Jersey-based Madison String Quartet will perform my Set fire to have light on a program called New Worlds, along with works by Arcangel Castillo Olivari and Antonín Dvořák on Sunday October 14 at 3PM at St. Bernards Episcopal Church in Bernardsville, New Jersey. They will repeat the program the following afternoon at 1PM at the Bernards Township Library in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, as part of their Leisure Learning Series.
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From the Faraway Nearby in the Autumn Chamber Music Festival, October 12
By admin | October 2, 2007
The piano duo Antra and Normunds Viksne is performing the entire suite of my piano four-hand work From the Faraway Nearby as part of the Fall Chamber Music Festival (a 10-day, annual festival in Riga and its environs of some 20 concerts featuring some of the best musicians from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) on October 12 at 7PM at the Valmiera Music School in Valmiera, Latvia. The other composers on the program are Juris Abols, Arvo Part, and Arthur Benjamin.
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Putni premieres El Paso de la Seguiriya in Riga, October 7
By admin | October 2, 2007
The women’s vocal ensemble Putni will premiere my El Paso de la Seguiriya, a brand new setting of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, on Sunday, October 7 at 2PM at the Latvian History Museum, located at 3 Castle Square (Pils laukums 3) in Riga.
Commissioned with funds from the Latvian Culture Capital Fund and having grown out of some workshops I had created for Putni last year that included an introduction to flamenco, the piece includes a substantial amount of clapping in the flamenco style where the two parts interlock, called the palmas and contrapalmas.
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Job Season (Shoot Me NOW!), CV and Teaching Philosophy
By admin | October 1, 2007
I haven’t written a pure blog entry in a long time… It’s been mostly concert announcements and the like. But it’s Academic Job Season again. Which makes me think of the Abbott and Costello “Who’s on first?” variation from the old Bugs Bunny cartoon where Elmer Fudd (who is hunting rabbits specifically) has both Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cornered with his gun, and Bugs gets Daffy to insist on getting himself shot.
Bugs: It’s true, Doc; I’m a rabbit alright. Would you like to shoot me now or wait ’til you get home?
Daffy: Shoot him now! Shoot him now!
Bugs: You keep outta this! He doesn’t have to shoot you now!
Daffy: He does so have to shoot me now! [to Elmer] I demand that you shoot me now!
[Elmer raises his gun. As Daffy sticks his tongue out at Bugs, he is shot. Daffy walks back over to Bugs, gunsmoke pouring out of his nostrils]
Daffy: [to Bugs] Let’s run through that again.
Bugs: Okay.
Bugs: [deadpan] Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home.
Daffy:[similarly] Shoot him now, shoot him now.
Bugs: [as before] You keep outta this, he doesn’t have to shoot you now.
Daffy Duck: [re-animated] Hah! That’s it! Hold it right there! [to audience] Pronoun trouble. [to Bugs] It’s not “he doesn’t have to shoot you now”, it’s “he doesn’t have to shoot me now”
[Pause]
Daffy: [angrily] Well, I say he does have to shoot me now!! [to Elmer] So shoot me now!
[Elmer shoots Daffy again]
Anyway. That’s close to how I feel about applying for academic positions. But I just retooled my Curriculum Vitae, and created a teaching philosophy statement. I would very much appreciate constructive feedback on either one. I hope the Teaching Philosophy doesn’t come across as the same old, same old pablum.
While I’m at it, I wonder if anyone out there who has been or chaired a search committee might care to illuminate the process by commenting on their experience(s)? I have only taught adjunct, so I’ve never been on one. In the last three years, I have made it to the interview stage three times. The first time, someone with a choral conducting qualification got the job over me, because conducting was entailed. The second time, they broke the position into multiple adjunct posts in the end. The third time I was painfully nervous during the sample lessons I gave, and they gave the position to an internal adjunct candidate.
But I would love to know a few things, the most obvious being what makes one person’s CV float to the top of the candidate pile?
But also random things about the process that sometimes contribute to it feeling like a hassle, like:
• Why do committees ask for things that will make the entire applicant pool spend money on something like official transcripts, videos of teaching, CDs or scores, etc., rather than waiting to reduce the pool to, say, 10 candidates?
• After just reducing the size of my CV from 8 pages to 5 (primarily by winnowing my complete list of works down to commissioned works only), I see a vacancy announcement specifying a desire to see a complete list of works. Why?
• As for letters of recommendation, which is more important, the content of the recommendation or the name-recognition of the referee?
• How important is it to see a cover letter truly tailored to the school to which it’s sent?
Teaching philosophy
As a classroom educator, I model myself on a combination of several professors whom I have been fortunate to know. Teaching effectively requires flexibility, patience, humility, inquisitiveness, humor and creativity. I strive to be clear and methodical in my presentation, to keep the path between the specific and the general visible, and to individualize the learning experience as much as possible. Mistakes should be embraced as instructional opportunities. I strive to bring into the conversation about music ideas from other disciplines such as history, the sciences or psychology, in order to create multiple inroads to understanding for my students, but also to introduce them to the notion that an embracing open-mindedness to disciplines outside of music will help them become better musicians and critical thinkers. As much as possible, I try to treat the classroom as a laboratory environment for my students, where they learn by doing, by being active rather than passive.
When giving composition instruction (in addition to listening, score study, and reading), I follow an excellent model for discussion I learned when participating in a workshop at New Dramatists in New York City, led by Ben Krywosz. He learned it originally from the field of dance, but applied it here to an intensive workshop on collaboration between composers and playwrights/lyricists. There were five composers and five lyricists (and five singers plus an accompanist). We had to produce a lot of collaborative work, and every other day, we would come together and the performers would read through the pieces. When it was time to critique each other’s work, we followed a very specific five-step model for the discussions:
1. Say something positive. This forces us out of our typical reflex reaction, which is to find faults or something we would change had we been one of the authors. A lot of good-faith effort went into the attempt to create something artistic. It shouldn’t be too hard to find something positive to say.
2. You can ask them questions about the work, but not one that couches a negative opinion (like “How dare you?”). An example might be “What inspired you to evoke that image in the text?” or “What was the mood you were hoping to achieve?”
3. The author(s) can ask us questions. They might ask “Did that tempo work for you?” or “Could you understand the text in that vocal register?” etc. Truthfully, we as creators tend to have a sense about what is working well and what isn’t, and this provides an opportunity for the creator(s) to voice their own concerns. This can also preempt some of the content in the next step.
4. Opinion. This is the time we can present the negative aspects of our larger reception of the work. Here, whatever remaining technical or aesthetic issues can be addressed. All creative artists feel a certain emotional vulnerability that accompanies putting one’s work before other people. After steps one through three, that vulnerability has diminished, and leads to an ability to receive these opinions rationally and constructively.
5. Big picture. Here we examine the issues brought up in the discussion and determine if any are relevant to the discipline as a whole.
Perhaps one of the most important reasons I appreciate this model is the respect it accords people in their artistic efforts. I have found it useful when speaking with composition students, performers, or colleagues alike.
Topics: Education, Blog Entry | No Comments »
Andrea Ceccomori plays Fragmentary Rondo with LICA, September 25
By admin | September 24, 2007
The Long Island Composers Alliance hosts a performance by the Italian flutist Andrea Ceccomori and Bulgarian pianist Elitza Harbova on Tuesday, September 25 at 7:00 PM at the Hewlett-Woodmere Library (1125 Broadway in Hewlett - Tel: 516-374-1667).
After Andrea gave the Italian premiere of my Fragmentary Rondo at the Goethe Institute in Rome, I connected him to the Long Island Composers Alliance, and this concert is the result of that collaboration. In addition to performing my solo work on this concert, other works for solo flute or flute with piano accompaniment will be included by LICA composers Jay Anthony Gach, Julie Mandel, Dana Richardson, Herbert Rothgarber and Margaret Collins Stoop.
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Piano Duo Gastesi-Bezerra at the International New Music Festival, September 29
By admin | September 19, 2007
The Piano Duo Gastesi-Bezerra will be performing four of the six movements of my From the Faraway Nearby for piano four-hands at the College of Southern Nevada’s 6th International New Music Festival in Las Vegas. Their recital will take place at the Cheyenne Campus on Saturday, Sep. 29 at 4:00 p.m. The rest of the program will be include The Holy Fool by Symeon Waseen, Amalo Mio by Piotr Lachert, À Rebours by Justin Rubin, Tacomarraco by Carme Fernández-Vidal, and Deceptions by Marlene Woodward-Cooper.
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In Q to perform Kusanganisa at Hofstra, September 16
By admin | September 13, 2007
In Q, the new music trio (flutist Nicole Camacho, with Chris Bonacorsa and Cesare Papetti on percussion) will perform my Kusanganisa for flute and marimba four-hands at Hofstra University on September 16 at 4 PM.
Other works on the program are Idyll for the Misbegotten by George Crumb, Vai by Chris Bonacorsa, Velocities by Joseph Schwantner, Density 21.5 by Edgard Varese, and Composed Improvisation for Snare Drum by John Cage.
Room 010 in the New Academic Building. Admission is free.
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Duo Stephanie Ho and Saar Ahuvia at Cornelia Street, September 10
By admin | September 7, 2007
The piano duo Stephanie Ho and Saar Ahuvia are kicking off the season with a guest performance at Cornelia Street Cafe in New York’s Greenwich Village as part of the Composer’s Collaborative Serial Underground Music Festival. They will perform selected movements from my From the Faraway Nearby for piano four-hands, as well as Conlon Nancarrow’s Sonatina.
Monday, September 10, 8:30 PM
Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street
(bet. 6th and 7th Ave)
New York, New York
Tel: (212) 663 1967
Topics: Concert Announcements | No Comments »
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