hear the bang

Phil Freeman has posted the recording of the first performance of my Percussion Concerto at Burning Ambulance. Thanks, also and again to Omar Carmenates (pictures), Leslie Hicken, and the Furman University Wind Ensemble for their fine performance.

facing a blank

A terrifying sight!

Phil Freeman has graciously posted an article, "Facing a Blank", that originally appeared in Burning Ambulance #3. The article chronicles the composition of my Percussion Concerto, which premiered last week. I'll be revisiting this article in light of the changes made in the piece in the run-up to the performance, and I imagine that I'll be giving myself a thorough fisking in the days ahead.

Thanks again to Phil Freeman for his attention and support. Please give the entire site a good look.

after bang

Omar Carmenates playing the first movement of my Percussion Concerto, 22 Feb 2013.

Some thoughts on the premiere:

• It was freakin' amazing!
• Omar Carmenates is a beast. He took a very difficult solo part and made it look and sound easy. 
• My brother, Furman Director of Bands Leslie Hicken, is a fine conductor and an even better teacher. He took a score that is way outside the Furman Wind Ensemble's normal stylistic milieu, and with a few simple words and by working over just the right passages, he got them to play with expression and power. I'm very proud of him.
• And now the work starts again: making some adjustments in the score and parts and arranging further  performances.

bang 3: on-site

"Grids and Motors", mm 25-37

It's funny how things work out sometimes. (Original observation, I know.)

After arriving in Greenville, I was discussing the progress of rehearsals with my brother Les, who is conducting the premiere of the Percussion Concerto on Friday evening. He said that they had to cut the second movement, "Time's Arrow" for several logistical reasons. This development made me realize something I think I had known but had not articulated, even to myself: that "Time's Arrow", which was originally the last section of the finale ("Grids and Motors") needed to be excised from the Concerto altogether and given a different place, which place I'll be working on later.

So the Concerto is back to a two-movement work, which was the original conception. I'm looking forward to hearing it for the first time this afternoon.

bang 2

"Time's Arrow", mm. 158-163 (upper winds)

My Percussion Concerto started out with three movements in the first draft. (Before the first draft, there were as many as 11 short, episodic sections.) When I finished the first draft, there were two movements. The current version, being premiered next Friday, 22 February in Greenville, South Carolina, by Omar Carmenates with the Furman University Wind Ensemble, Leslie Hicken, conducting, is in three movements:

I. Fields and Waves
II. Time's Arrow
III. Grids and Motors

I'm often struck, when working on a big piece (especially), how the piece changes during the composition process, and just as often, how the original conception remains in the work's DNA. The Percussion Concerto is about time, or rather about some of the various ways time (and its eternal companion, space) has been viewed from Einstein ("Time exists to keep everything from happening at once.") on: fields, waves, arrows  grids, and motors.

When I say a piece is "about" something, the scare quotes are honest. It's hard to say sometimes whether the metaphors or the music come first, or whether they generate each other.

bang

from "Fields and Waves",  m. 124-126

My Percussion Concerto is being premiered next Friday, 22 February by Omar Carmenates, with the Furman University Wind Ensemble, conducted by my brother, Leslie Hicken. The program also includes music by Michael Gandalfi, Roger Nixon, and H. Owen Reed.

I'll be blogging about this between now and then, including posts from Greenville next week. If there are any readers in the area I would love to see you there.

P-P-Pages

Lisa Hirsch kindly points out that Blogger has added a feature that allows the publication of permanent pages (henceforth known as "përmapages") as part of blogs. These përmapages can contain unchanging or infrequently changing material which would, if they were as regular blog posts eventually disappear down the page into the webby mist. Lisa has posted a page recapitulating her recent series on publicity basics--something many of us will be referring to more than once.

Links to any përmapages I post will be listed in tabs across the top of the home page under the header. The first is a sinple list of my compositions. If you are interested in obtaining scores of any of these pieces, please contact me to make arrangements.

I'll post more pages as I think of appropriate material.

Double Bar

I finished the first draft of my Percussion Concerto today. I'll let it stew for a couple of weeks or so, then run through it once or twice to touch things up. I anticipate delivering it to John Parks in early April, in anticipation of a fall premiere.

More regular blogging and reveiewing should resume soon.

Hello, It's Me

I've thought about us for a long, long time.

I've not posted in a while because I've been immersed in my Percussion Concerto. More on that soon.

Regular (or at least more regular) posting will begin again soon.

Workshop (X)

I noticed recently that it's been a pretty good while since I wrote a blog post. I've been composing a lot lately (in addition to taking a couple of trips) and I realized that composing seriously interferes with my word-writing because of the time it takes (of course) but even more because the mental space composing takes up pushes other music out of my ears/head. (That's the main reason I've gotten behind on CD reviews. Sorry, Jerry.)

I'm beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel of my percussion concerto, and I'm reasonably sure that light isn't an oncoming train. As of now I'm looking at a spring 2009 premiere. I'll have more details, including titles, specific instrumentation, and the premiere date later.

I wrote a short piece for solo trombone called American Song during a trip to visit family. It's four minutes long and has lyrical and "technical" sections. I'm having some difficulty with converting it from Finale 2009 to pdf, but a score will be available when that is resolved.

Finally, I want to thank Karl Henning (clarinet) and Peter Cama-Lekx (viola) for their perceptive and expressive performance of The Rings of Saturn (2006), the recording of which I received this past weekend. They are artists and gentlemen, and I deeply appreciate their efforts.

Bang

The Florida State University Percussion Ensemble played a concert last evening to kick off a brief tour that will culminate in a performance at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention this Friday in Columbus, Ohio.

My personal and working relationship with the Ensemble's Director, John Parks, keeps me from writing real reviews of his work, but I can say with all honesty that if you dig percussion (and who doesn't?) you should hear them on this tour:

29 Oct: McEachern High School, Atlanta, GA;
30 Oct: Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond; and
2 Nov: PASIC, Columbus, OH.

The program includes, among other pieces, Edgard Varese's epoch-making Ionisation, which the Ensemble gave a powerful performance here last night. The concert also includes pieces by Clif Walker, Rüdiger Pawassar, Pietro Mascagni (yes, you read that right), Astor Piazzolla, and David Skidmore.

Skidmore's From In Contact (2007) was commissioned by the Ensemble, and is notable because it is a very good piece and because it confirms a trend that Alex Ross noted nearly three years ago--a turning away from the relatively simple surfaces/designs and overt pop references of the music of composers who came of age in the 1960s and 70s (in other words, my generation) and an opening up to include a wider array of materials, especially in terms of harmony and rhythm. I was glad to hear such a piece by a young composer (Skidmore was born in 1982) and to hear that it was very good, and well received by the audience.

Check 'em out if you can.

Bang the Drum Slowly

Inside the mind of a working musician:

I gave John Parks (for whom I am writing a concerto) a copy of the recent Pierre Boulez recording of the Mahler 2 the other evening. Here are some of his comments (from e-mail, published with his permission):

. . . listening to the Mahler right now. It's a shame that the percussion section really didn't think out their sounds. The cymbal playing makes me angry.

After I asked for specifics about the cymbals comment:

European orchestras typically use very old cymbals; usually what we call "Old K" Zildjian cymbals (pre-WWII), and there aren't tons of these instruments left because of the war and the collateral damage of bombing the opera and concert halls. Very dark sounds, which I really like and are totally appropriate for Mahler. In this recording, there's no blossom or body to any of the cymbal sounds, so the cadences don't really have the color, shimmer, and "arrival" that I think appropriate. When I hear cymbals, I want to hear Michael Bookspan with Philly. Anything else is just noise.

Zildjian has, in the past years, rededicated themselves to making new instruments that sound like these old ones-I have several pairs and love them.

Europeans are known for great timpani sounds, but some "schools" over there do not concentrate on the other instruments with the same degree of seriousness. [T]he way the cymbals are being played [in this recording] never allows them to blossom or open up.

"The cymbal playing makes me angry" is my new all-purpose rallying cry.

Additions and Workshop (IX)

A couple of additions to the blogroll:

Jeff Low, who's posting about some obscure operas being staged in Germany.

William Zick, whose AfriClassical blog is a companion site to AfriClassical.com, which treats of the "African heritage in classical music".

Work on my Percussion Concerto proceeds. I'm working on a marimba heavy section of the second (of two) movements, for those keeping score (I kill myself sometimes) at home. Fall 2008 premiere is likely.

FSU Percussion Tour

The Florida State University Chamber Percussion Ensemble, under the direction of John W. Parks IV, is giving a performance at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York City this coming Friday, 4 May 2007, at 8pm.

DISCLAIMER: I am proud to consider John Parks a friend and colleague. I am writing a concerto for him, and consider him an artist of the highest caliber. I want to be upfront about that.

The Ensemble will play music by David Skidmore, Blake Tyson, Andrew Thomas, Bob Becker, and Minoru Miki on the program, which they previewed here in Tallahassee last night. Post-minimalism carried the day in just about all of the pieces, and its influence could be heard throughout the program.

The performances were really good--intense, tight, and expressive. The Ensemble will be stopping along the way to New York to paly the program:

April 29, The University of Georgia (Athens) School of Music , 8pm
April 30, Furman University (Greenville, SC), Daniel Recital Hall, 8pm
May 1, Spring Arts Festival, Kimbrell-Warlick Fine Arts Center (Gastonia, NC), 7:30pm
May 2, The University of Virginia (Charlottesville) School of Music, 8pm

If you have the opportunity to hear them, go. You won't be sorry if you do.

Workshop (VIII)

At the risk of giving A. C. Douglas the vapors, I want to talk a little bit about my working methods on the percussion concerto I'm writing for John Parks.

The piece is cast in three movements, with the second movement constituting an interruption of the first and third. I find myself approaching II very differently from I/III. II is a slow movement in which I'm "building" the percussion part as I write the band part--the solo part is growing as the piece grows. On the other hand, in I/III, which is mostly fast music of one kind or another, I find myself writing the percussion part first, and following 20 measures or so with the band, so the percussion line is like a spinal cord, holding up the whole thing.

The three movements share a common harmonic basis, which I'm not inclined to discuss at this time.

Listening:

Walkin', Miles Davis All Stars
"Someone to Love", Fountains of Wayne

FSU Percussion Ensemble

I attended a very well-played and enjoyable concert by the Florida State university Percussion Ensemble, directed by John Parks. As I have mentioned before, I am working on a concerto for Mr. Parks, who is an energetic conductor as well as a fine player.

Among the pieces on the program was John Mackey's Damn, for clarinet and percussion quartet. The soloist was FSU faculty member Deborah Bish, who gave a good accounting of herself against the brash drumming behind her. I liked this piece much more than Mr. Mackey's Percussion Concerto, for whatever, if anything, that's worth.

The highlight of the concert for me was a performance of Steve Reich's Six Marimbas, which was the freshest, most challenging, and most entertaining piece on the program. The players made a strong case for Mr. Reich's music, which is everywhere (even Tallahassee!) this fall.

Speaking of making strong cases for Steve Reich, here's Alex.