Getting Heard

21 February 2013

Early in my career, I would write fan letters to composers and arrangers whose work I admired, and ask them to look at my work, critique it, and offer advice. The overwhelming majority of those I contacted responded most graciously in the affirmative. They were incredibly generous with their time and attention, and gave me valuable insights into their methods, as well as some terrific war stories. Some of them even gave my name out to others, or called me to assist them on projects.

I seem to have reached a state in my career where younger, or less established composers are now asking me to look at their work and give them advice on how to get it heard. It is, of course, flattering to be thought of as successful, and I take the responsibility of their trust very seriously. I owe a great deal to the writers who helped me, and since I can never really repay them for their kindness, I “pay it forward” by showing these other writers the same courtesy I was once shown.

Someone recently asked me what he could do to get his music performed more often. The music he showed me was very well crafted, intelligent, interesting and musical; there was nothing “wrong” with it that would put it in the reject pile. But still it languished, gathering dust. Why?

I had to think about this one, and that’s the beauty of being put in the role of a teacher; you’re often forced to examine and analyze things you may do purely by instinct, in order to explain them to someone else. “By your pupils, you’ll be taught.” as Mrs. Anna would sing to us.

What I came up with, and what I’ll share with you now, is this: Pieces I wrote to satisfy my own desires almost never get heard. Pieces I wrote to satisfy someone else’s desires almost always get heard, and usually more than just once. So, instead of writing a piece and then find an opportunity for it to be heard, why not find the opportunity first, and then write the piece to go with it?

If you want your music performed, it’s essential to get the performers in on your process, as early as possible.

Approach performers you admire, find out their interests and preferences, find out if they feel there are any holes in their repertoire that need filling, and then write the piece that will address all of the above. Check with them about ranges, techniques, as if you’re a tailor custom-fitting them for a suit of clothes. Make them part of the process, and of course they’ll perform your piece when it’s finished, because they collaborated on it with you, and, because of that, they have a vested interest in its success.

Countdown to HaZamir

30 January 2013

I see I have not blogged here in almost a year. Shame on me! My only excuse is a lame one; I got busy and couldn’t/wouldn’t make the time to blog. Busy times are when you have news to report, so my New Year’s Resolution for 2013 is to be a much more faithful journalist. I’ll keep the entries coming, and I won’t censor myself. I’ll let you, Dear Reader, be the one to decide if what I have to report is worth your time and attention.

I’ll also add that I was shamed into blogging more by the example of my friend, Cantor Jack Mendelson, who has just launched a new website. Jack has already blogged more in one month than I did all of last year. Well, Chazz’n, anything you can do, I can do… almost as much and almost as well.

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Last week, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I had the great pleasure of attending an open rehearsal for HaZamir: The International Jewish High School Choir. HaZamir is preparing for their 20th annual Festival, which will culminate in two concert performances in the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex in New York City. (Last year, they had one concert, which sold out instantly, hence the two back-to-back performances this year) The program includes a world premiere of a new piece by yours truly, “Netzach Yisrael” (The Eternity of Israel), commissioned by the Zamir Choral Foundation in honor of HaZamir’s 20th anniversary, through the Jeanne R. Mandell Fund for New Music. This is the second such commission for me; the first was “L’ma-an Tziyon” (For the Sake of Zion) for HaZamir’s 2011-2012 season.

The open rehearsal was part of a Winter Intervisitation, a rigorous rehearsal retreat, attended by some but not all of HaZamir’s 22 chapters, roughly 175 teen singers. I was very impressed with how much progress the kids had made with my piece, which they had only had for maybe two weeks prior. That speaks well of the tremendous skill and dedication, not only of the kids, but also of the conductors and pianists who lead and coach each HaZamir chapter.

I have every confidence that the concerts, with all 300+ voices, will be thrilling, inspiring, not-to-be-missed events. Details are below:

HaZamir: The International Jewish High School Choir
Sunday, March 17, 2013, at 3:00 PM and 6:30 PM
Frederick P. Rose Hall (Jazz at Lincoln Center)
Broadway at West 60th Street - New York, NY

TICKET INFO

March Madness

1 March 2012

I’m in the enviable position of having eight performances of my music this month, including three world premieres, two of which are commissions. I’m immensely grateful for such an embarassment of riches.

Here’s the schedule, along with some comments on the pieces:

Fri Mar 2 5:30pm – 6:30pm
Kiddush (WORLD PREMIERE) - Temple Emanu-El, Fifth Avenue & East 65th Street, New York, NY
— I wrote this in 2011, upon hearing of the death of composer, musicologist and raconteur Jack Gottlieb. The piece is dedicated to Jack’s memory. Jack was adept at finding novel approaches to setting traditional texts, and I set out to emulate his example. So, rather than a slow, stately setting of the Shabbat Evening Kiddush text, such as Louis Lewandowski and Kurt Weill had written, I wrote a merry, sprightly setting. The cantor intones a blessing over the wine, but the choir sounds as if they’ve already had some.

Sun Mar 4 3:00pm – 5:00pm
L’chu N’ran’nah (Psalm 95) (WORLD PREMIERE) Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple - New Brunswick, NJ
— A 2011 commission from Makhelat HaMercaz (The Jewish Choir of Central NJ), a community choir co-led by Hazzan Sheldon Levin and Cantor Anna West Ott. The piece is scored for SATB Choir, Piano, and Clarinet obbligato.

Sat Mar 10 8:00pm – 10:00pm
Y’did Nefesh - Temple Beth Elohim - Wellesley, MA
— I wrote this setting, for soprano, tenor, and piano, in 2007. This performance will be with the “original cast,” Natasha Hirschhorn, Ramón Tasat, and myself, under the auspices of the Shalshelet Foundation for New Jewish Liturgical Music as part of the Boston Jewish Music Festival.

Sun Mar 18 6:00pm – 8:00pm
L’ma-an Tziyon (WORLD PREMIERE) - Frederick P. Rose Hall (Jazz at Lincoln Center)
— Commissioned in 2011 by the Zamir Choral Foundation, this piece will be premiered by HaZamir: The International Jewish High School Choir. The texts are from Isaiah and Zechariah, and are a strong and energetic statement of Zionism. NB: This event is now SOLD OUT, but the piece will be repeated on 20 May 2012 in honor of Yom Y’rushalayim.

Sun Mar 25 3:00pm – 7:00pm
Sha-alu Sh’lom Y’rushalayim - Beth El Synagogue - 50 Maple Stream Road, East Windsor, NJ
— Performed by Sharim v’Sharot as part of the Mercer County Jewish Choral Festival.

Tue Mar 27 7:30pm – 9:30pm
Soprano Sax Sonata - DiMenna Center For Classical Music 450 W. 37th St., New York, NY, 10018
— Performed by Javier Oviedo (saxophone) and Helene Jeanney (piano).
[CORRECTION: I was misinformed; my Soprano Sax Sonata is NOT on this program. 3/4/12]

Wed Mar 28 7:30pm
“Jewish Voices” Concert - Anshe Chesed Synagogue, 251 West 100th Street New York, NY 10025
— A concert by Bachanalia in memory of Omus Hirschbein. Works by J.S. Bach, Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Bloch, Natasha Hirschhorn and Dmitri Shostakovich (From Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79, transcribed for string orchestra by Steve Cohen)

Fri Mar 30 7:30pm – 9:30pm
Saxophone Quartet No. 1 - Church of the Redeemer, 36 South Street, Morristown, NJ 07960
— Performed by the Metropolitan Saxophone Quartet.

I’ll close here by expressing my deep admiration to all the musicians mentioned above who breathe life into all the dots and squiggles I put down on paper and transform it into music. Please support and encourage them.

Saved from Oblivion!

5 February 2012

Last night, Saturday, February 4, 2012, a Quintet for Alto Saxophone and Strings I wrote in 1978 received its world premiere performance at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. You might be curious to know why this piece had to wait 34 years to be heard.

In 1978, I had been out of college for 2 years. I had a Bachelors degree from Manhattan School of Music (MSM), but I wasn’t keen on going for a Masters degree. I wanted to work and learn in the “real world.” Still, I felt it would be useful to continue taking composition lessons, not only for the knowledge I’d gain, but also for the spur of weekly deadlines the lesson appointments would afford. I studied privately with Giampaolo Bracali (z”l), who had joined the MSM composition faculty in 1972, the same year I started as a freshman. I studied with Giampaolo from 1977 to 1980, and I think that it was during this time when I truly found my voice as a composer. The pieces I wrote during this time include the Sextet for Piano and Winds, the Suite for Flute and Harp, the Symphony in One Movement, which I dedicated to Giampaolo Bracali, and the Quintet for Alto Saxophone and Strings.

A friendship with saxophonist Paul Cohen (no relation), whom I met at MSM during my undergrad years, alerted me to the largely untapped possibilities of his instrument, and I was eager to write something for the saxophone. Sax plus string quartet seemed like a good idea. I devised a three-movement structure wherein each movement would explore one particular facet of the saxophone’s personality. Movement 1 would feature tense, angular lines, Movement 2 would be soulful and ariose, and Movement 3 would be playful and sardonic.

[I’ll mention in passing that a young composer’s work is often a catalog of his influences, and this piece was no exception. One could hear lots of Bartok and Shostakovich in Movement 1. Movement 2 was modeled after a Bach aria with a walking pizzicato bass line, and this owes a particular debt to the lovely “Cranes Duet” from Kurt Weill’s MAHAGONNY. Movement 3 owes much to the scherzo from Schubert’s Cello Quintet in C, and in the trio section I do a cheeky, but affectionate parody of a Mahler ländler.]

When the piece was finished, I learned a very tough lesson: it was going to be really difficult to get string players to commit to performing, or even reading my piece. Apart from new-music specialists, for whom my style would be too conservative to consider, I found that established string quartets had such busy schedules playing their standard repertoire, they had little time or interest in new music. After a few months of frustration I gave up on trying to get the Sax+Strings Quintet heard, and went on to other projects.

Ironically, my next chamber piece would be my first Saxophone Quartet (1980), and that was premiered instantly, almost before the ink was dry. While the string quartet has a huge, rich repertoire, going back to Haydn, sax quartets only went back maybe a scant century or less. You write a piece for saxophone, and sax players go berserk with excitement as soon as they hear of it. You write a piece for strings, and your piece gets put at the bottom of a pile of pieces to be read maybe sometime. (Except in some very rare instances…) Is it any wonder that I’ve written so much music for saxophones?

Last night’s premiere came about when Andrew Steinberg, an undergrad sax student at Rutgers University, asked his teacher, Paul Cohen, for advice on repertoire for his junior recital. Paul remembered the Quintet, got Andrew in touch with me, and I was able to locate the score and parts, all done in beautiful, archaic pen-and-ink.

It was very strange to hear this music I’d written so long ago. My style has changed a lot over the years, and my music has gotten simpler and more direct. Back then I felt compelled to make a compromise between the music I heard in my head and the more rigorously intellectual music all my classmates were writing. If I had a beautiful simple tune, I needed to add some “wrong notes,” complicate the rhythm, or add some fussy details to make it sound “modern.” I no longer feel the need to do that, but people still tell me how difficult and challenging my music is, both for the performer and the listener.

I cringed at some of the excesses of my younger self, especially in the string writing, but I was gratified to see that the piece really worked in performance. Here was a piece that was shunned for 34 years, and now college students in their late teens and early twenties were telling me what a cool piece it was. I doubt that whatever satisfaction I might have gotten from having the piece performed when it was new could compare to the sense of vindication I felt last night, when the piece was finally heard.

Writer's Block

14 January 2012

How does one cure Writer’s Block? For me, one sure cure is to stop writing. Step away from your desk, computer, piano, whatever you use to compose, and go outside. Take a walk in the countryside, as if you were Beethoven. Run, jog, bike, skate, go to the gym and take a class or lift weights or something, anything. I find I get my best ideas when I’m not thinking. How’s that for a paradox? I spent most of yesterday trying to get a new piece to take shape, and nothing came that was at all compelling. I packed up to go home, and during the 1-mile walk from my office to Grand Central Station a phrase came to me, and I found that very compelling. I jotted it down and I’ve been working with it ever since. The piece hasn’t taken flight yet, but at least it’s now taxiing along the runway and picking up speed.

It’s important to bear in mind that, as writers, we don’t necessarily create ideas. Ideas come to us, and we work with them, but I think the ideas come only when we’re receptive. It could be that when we’re distracted or otherwise engaged, that is when we are most receptive. Who knows?

Inspiration 101

11 January 2012

People have these romantic notions about composers, and how they get inspired. In some way, it’s probably in my best interest to foster such notions, but in reality pieces of music rarely come in a blinding flash of inspiration. The real process, usually, is slow and painstaking. Watching paint dry is more exciting to watch.

I’ve had a few instances where whole pieces, or movements, were written in a matter of hours rather than days or months or years. My setting of “Esa Einei” (Psalm 121) was written in one sitting a few days after my mother died in 2002. The middle movement of my Soprano Sax Sonata, Blues, came quickly after news of the death of composer/arranger Ralph Burns, whom I did not know personally but nevertheless admired a great deal.

It’s no good waiting for friends and loved ones to kick the bucket so I can get inspired, so it’s important to have other resources to get the creativity flowing.

Nothing motivates me more than knowing - or at least believing - that what I’m about to write will fill a need of some sort. When I’m lucky enough to garner a commission, I’m told the personnel, the duration, the technical limits, sometimes what text to use, what mood to set, what statement to make, and then all I have to do is fill the order like any bespoke tailor. Sometimes the clients want a piece just like something I’ve already written, in which case I try to balance giving them what they want with some new twist to keep myself engaged.

A commission for money is a fine thing, but I’m also amenable to a “you write it, we’ll perform it” commission. As long as the interest and the desire is there, that’s (mostly) all that matters. If there’s a piece I thought of that I want to write, I’ll sometimes commission myself.

An important thing to keep in mind is how long and how hard one must craft and revise music to make it sound natural and spontaneous. I find it’s a good method to write first and edit later. Let those ideas flow, and don’t worry if they’re any good. They can be mediocre, they can even be terrible; just get them down on paper - or computer - and know that it’s raw material which you’ll process and refine later on. The important thing is to be as un-self-conscious as possible in the early stages of composition, and generate ideas freely and happily.

Music and the Movies

6 January 2012

December is the time when movies for grownups are released, and I attend more movies that month than any other time of the year. In the last two weeks I’ve seen four movies, “Young Adult,” “The Descendants,” “The Artist,” and “A Dangerous Method.” I enjoyed them all to varying degrees.

I can’t even remember anything about the music scores for “Young Adult” or “The Descendants,” but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; sometimes all a film score needs to do is add a mood and a pulse to the film footage and mask the silences where appropriate. Nothing impressed me, but nothing bothered me either.

“A Dangerous Method” is about Carl Jung and his stormy relationship with Sigmund Freud. Many discussions in the dialog center around Richard Wagner and his operas, and I guess composer Howard Shore took this as his cue to utilize a lot of Wagner in the score. Most of the time I felt the choices were apt. It was weird to hear this music played on solo piano, or in small chamber ensembles. Wagner’s music sounds so strange when stripped of it’s orchestral colors and textures, but it could be that this was just the effect Howard Shore and director David Cronenberg were going for.

Music is practically the star of “The Artist,” a black-and-white silent film about a silent film star in the late 1920s and his trouble adapting to the introduction to talking pictures. I was blown away by the score by Ludovic Bource from the opening notes. And then, halfway through the film, I recognized the unmistakeable sound of Bernard Herrmann. They used “Scene d’Amour” from VERTIGO, and all I could think was “Why?” This music took me out of “The Artist” and made me start thinking about James Stewart, Kim Novak, bell towers and strong currents under the Golden Gate Bridge. By me, it was not a good choice, much as I adore Herrmann’s music.

This might be a case of the director getting so used to his temp track that he feels it must stay in the picture. Sometimes this works well. Stanley Kubrick discarded a commissioned score by Alex North for 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in favor of excerpts from Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss, Aram Khachaturian, Gyorgi Ligeti and others, and I can’t say those choices were not effective.

Going live!

5 January 2012

If you’re reading this, my website has gone live! Thanks to James Donegan of James Did It!