A Few Words On Generosity

Sometimes I think composers — or perhaps people in general — don’t see the big picture, particularly when it comes to generosity.

I can count on one hand the number of times composers have recommended other composers for my ensemble, the American Modern Ensemble. This even includes teachers recommending students and colleagues recommending other colleagues. It does happen occasionally, of course, but mostly by older, more established composers who probably (and rightly) think they have nothing to lose.

Why is this?

Perhaps young composers feel like it’s wasted energy promoting anyone else. Of course, I am not referring to composers running ensembles who promote others by default.

Being generous actually makes you appear confident, and people are more inclined to want to be nice to those who are generous.

So, as a composer, how can you be more generous?

Recommend a friend whose music you like to the director of an ensemble. Of course, you should do this carefully, and only when you truly believe in a piece or composer,and particularly if you know the director. It is very frustrating when someone recommends someone else’s music and the recommender doesn’t believe in his or her music, or shockingly, hasn’t even listened to it. I can usually tell right away, and will then probably avoid that composer’s music like the plague. Personally, I want recommendations from people that not only know my group and what it’s about (and who have hopefully attended a few concerts), but also know the composer and his/her music they are recommending.

Invite composers—especially younger ones—to speak at your college’s Composer’s Forums. What I mean by younger is not composers who are currently students, but the ones who have been out in the real world for less than ten years. I think that students would want to know how a composer fresh out of college views the world. Even if you cannot pay a speaking fee, younger composers will be grateful to have an opportunity to connect with college age musicians, particularly at institutions they are not affiliated with. If you can persuade one of your school’s ensembles to program a piece by the young composer in question, all the better.

Take a minute to go online and write a nice comment or give a nice review on Amazon or iTunes or any other site for a composer’s album. This may not directly help a composer financially, but even if one customer purchases a CD of a composer’s music because of your recommendation, that’s one more fan.

If you have any money to spare—I know most of us don’t, after all, we’re composers—consider making a donation to a favorite group whose concerts you attend. Often, even a small amount is appreciated, but even if you can spare $100 once a year for one group, that will make a small but significant difference to any ensemble’s operating budget.

When you attend a new music concert, bring a friend, and hopefully one who is not a musician. All ensembles appreciate having their audiences expanded, and if everyone in the audience brought even one friend, the audience would be twice as large.

Of course, I am just scratching the surface; there are many other ways to be generous. The key is to remember that we’re all in this together, and that it’s never to late to lend a helping hand and say something nice about someone else.

The Book of Goddesses: Behind The Scenes

Book of Goddesses CD Cover: © American Modern Recordings 2012. Image and Design © Kris Waldherr 2008. All Rights Reserved.

Above Image: The Book of Goddesses CD, available for sale on Amazon, iTunes and CDBaby on December 6, 2012.

People often ask me what I am inspired by. Sometimes it is something as simple as the sound of wind, waves or thunder, or even a work of art, but often it is something a little more unexpected. In the case of The Book of Goddesses, it all started with a phone conversation.

One day, a woman from California called, wanting to sell some of Victoria’s Lumiere Records CD’s in her shop. Her store specialized in New Age music and music for meditation and massage. Out of curiosity, I asked her what her top selling CD’s were. She said, “Oh, by far, our goddess CD’s. Those sell more than everything else combined.” I was immediately fascinated by the idea of music inspired by goddesses, and the idea stuck with me.

I know a few composers that write (or have written) music based on gods, but not too many composers that have focused on goddesses. The idea of writing a work based on goddesses has always interested me. There are so many classical music works that focus on gods, so why not goddesses? The main challenge would be to write a piece that sounded goddess-like, without slipping into sounding too New-Agey (nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but that’s just not my style). My goal was to write a piece that infused different styles of music from around the world with my own sensibilities as a composer, while at the same time creating a work that would work well choreographed by a dance company.

Most importantly, this piece would also need to work in a concert hall setting. Fortunately, at around this time, the New York City based trio MAYA received a New York State Council on the Arts grant to commission me to write a piece. I struggled to come up with a compelling idea, until one day it occurred to me that a piece based on goddesses would work very well for their instrumentation, flute, harp and percussion (and mostly hand drums). Many images of goddesses from around the world depict them playing flutes and harps, and all three of these instruments (or in the case of percussion, many instruments), have deep roots in many ancient cultures around the world. Also, since MAYA was very open to the idea of working with a dance company, and since MAYA is such a visually striking trio, the two seemed to go hand in hand. I have never written music designed for dance, at least as a professional composer, and this is something I’ve always wanted to explore. This work seemed like it could be the perfect introduction to working with dancers.

Book of Goddesses Cover: © Kris Waldherr 2008. All Rights Reserved.

When composing programmatic pieces, I research whatever subject I write about quite a bit, so I collected as many books on goddesses as possible. The best one I could find was The Book of Goddesses by Kris Waldherr, and her book ended up inspiring the title of this piece. Once I found out that she lived in Brooklyn, I just had to meet her.

Two of my favorite aspects of composing are when I have an opportunity to collaborate with other artists who I admire, and when I am inspired by work by living artists, so I was hoping that Kris and I would hit it off and find some common ground. We met at her studio and got along very well, and I was thrilled to see her beautiful work up close. Kris also plays cello, so I thought she would be interested in what I was working on. I asked her if she’d be willing to design a booklet that featured her work to accompany the music, based on The Book of Goddesses. Luckily, she agreed.

The Book of Goddesses trio is only about thirty-six minutes, and it is designed to be performed either in its entirety, or groups of movements or even single movements can be performed. AfterI wrote the piece, I decided to create two other separate pieces from selected movements: Three Goddesses, consisting of the movements for flute and harp, and Estsanatlehi for solo bass flute (or C flute). Performers are free to mix up movements any way they want on a program.

Since my ultimate goal was to record The Book of Goddesses, I chose to round out the album by composing a sister piece for The Book of Goddesses entitled Freya’s Tears for the Clockwise Duo (Jacqueline Kerrod, harp and Marc Uys, violin). An interesting aside: this piece calls for an innovative, specialized harp mute called the Kerrod Mute, designed by Jacqui and Marc. This mute is placed on the harp ahead oft time, and allows the harpist to quickly mute or un-mute sections of strings, creating a sort of xylophonic sound. This allows the harpist to play with both hands while the mute is in place. I am hoping that other composers write pieces using this mute so it becomes a standard device in the harp world.

I then decided to include another work I wrote entitled Embracing the Wind that was recorded by my ensemble, the American Modern Ensemble. (Embracing the Wind has a similar instrumentation, flute, viola and harp.) The performers for this piece are Danielle Farina, viola, Jacqueline Kerrod, harp, and Sato Moughalian, flute and alto flute. This piece was previously released on Star Crossing, a CD of my chamber works AMR released in 2011.

MAYA and Clockwise spent a few days over two different sessions recording with Adam Abeshouse, a world-reknowned, multi-Grammy® winning producer. A few months later, he edited, mixed and mastered the entire project. Not surprisingly, it sounded incredible.

Book of Goddesses CD package: © American Modern Recordings 2012. Image and Design © Kris Waldherr 2012. All Rights Reserved.

As we were finishing the master, we began working on the booklet. This process took months. What attracted me to Kris’s work in the first place, other than her subject matter and compelling writing, is that her books are very distinctive, beautifully designed, and often very elaborate. Some of her books have gold foil in the titles in the book itself, others have fold-out sections, and so on. We decided that the book should be hard-bound and completely wrapped in gold foil, which, as far as we could tell, had never been done before for a CD. In Kris’s words, this would give it a sort of Gustav Klimt quality. This turned out to be a very difficult process, and the entire template for the CD packaging had to be designed from scratch. Luckly, I found Megalodon, a company that specializes in elaborate packaging. They are perfectionists to the max, and did an incredible job. The project turned out beautifully.

MAYA Trio (John Hadfield, percussion, Bridget Kibbey, harp, Sato Moughalian, flute)

After the entire project was completed, Adam Abeshouse submitted it to the Classical Recording Foundation for consideration for an award. Luckily, through this recording, I was one of two composers who won the 2012 CRF Composer of the Year Award, and this helped cover some of the production costs. I was also presented with the award at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall by Christopher Rouse, a good friend, former teacher and mentor. MAYA performed a few movements from The Book of Goddesses, and I was thrilled. It was an amazing evening and I was incredibly honored. There were some amazing people there who also received awards, including the legendary Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, the amazing soprano Susanna Phillips, and the talented composer Arlene Sierra, who also won a Composer of The Year Award. All in all, it was an amazing evening that I will never forget.

It is often surprising to me where creative ideas come from, and even more surprising that this, wonderful creative journey all started with a random phone call.

Pimpin’ CD: Behind The Scenes

It’s common knowledge that classical record companies basically stink at marketing and CD design. Sure, there are a few good album covers out there, and a few CDs break out and create a buzz (which in classical parlance, means selling more than a hundred CDs), but basically, albums are usually marketed on the merit of the performers, composers or perhaps the actual music. Classical covers almost never help market the CD, and are usually boring—often an abstract painting or not-so-great photo of the performers or composers. Just something to fill up space. With this CD, we wanted to provoke people, so we modeled it after a hip-hop album.

What we ended up with is Pimpin’, the latest release on the American Modern Ensemble‘s house label, American Modern Recordings (AMR). It consists of seven pieces either commissioned or chosen by AME’s saxophonist Jeremy Justeson, including Tongue and Groove for alto sax and marimba by yours truly. The CD also contains Pimpin’, the title track by the well-known European composer JacobTV (Jacob Ter Veldhuis)

As with many good ideas, this one started out as a joke. One day Jeremy was in town to rehearse. After having lunch, we were walking down the street in Hell’s Kitchen, and he told me that he wanted to title the CD Pimpin’. As we laughed, we walked right past a porn shop, and I said, “You know what? For the cover, we should dress you up like a pimp, but holding your instrument, and flanked by a couple of girls that look like hookers.” He seemed cool with the idea.

The whole concept is obviously silly and full of innuendos. I mean, a white guy holding a sax, surrounded by hot chicks, looking like a 70s pimp? That’s pretty funny. Everyone knows classical sax players are a little geeky (no offense to Jeremy, but I think he would agree), and also that classical sax music is about as far away from hip hop as you can possibly get, except for the JacobTV track. Plus, why would a pimp be holding a sax, while he’s pimpin’? Are we saying that Jeremy’s a classical sax pimp? Or that we’re all just classical ho’s? The whole idea is just plain hilarious.

To really put a shine on the whole thing, we knew we had to shoot the cover photo in front of a porn shop.

A few days later, my photographer friend Daniel Dottavio and I scoped out potential girls from a modeling site called Model Mayhem. We received tons of inquiries from a lot of different women. After much debate, we settled on two, but one of them never showed up. We actually ended up using Leslie the make-up artist instead, which, lucky for us, worked out well. She did a great job.

The next week, my wife Victoria, Daniel and I scoped out potential sites. The problem was finding a porn shop that isn’t extremely crowded. In NYC, there are all kinds of rules about when and where you can do photo shoots without permits, and we had to make sure that we didn’t block the sidewalk. We chose a shop on a side street near Port Authority.

Pimpin CD Photoshoot: Here's makeup artist Leslie working on Olga's hair. Daniel Dottavio and Jeremy Justeson are watching intently from the couch.

That evening, the models came over with appropriate clothes from their closet and tons of makeup. Jeremy showed up with the Pimp costume he purchased online. After everyone was done up, we all walked down 9th Avenue toward the selected site. Guys were hooting and hollering, saying thinks like, “Hey, pretty mamma! Damn… you lookin’ fine!” They must have really looked the part, because every guy walking by really thought they were the real deal. I half expected Jeremy to start trying to pimp out the girls.

We arrive at the site and set up lights and reflectors. Unfortunately, the only way Daniel can get the right shot is by kneeling in the street, with constant oncoming traffic. I stand in the street, watching for cars to make sure he doesn’t get hit. Daniel kneels and gets off a few shots, and then I yell at him to move to the sidewalk, screaming, “OK, stop! Get off the street! Cars coming!” It was like a version of that old Frogger video game. It’s amazing we didn’t have an accident.

Meanwhile, there are people walking by, but it’s not as bad as it would have been on 8th Ave. Seedy guys slither out of the porn shop and gather around, wondering what we are up to. Every so often the owner of the porn shop comes out to see what we are doing, but doesn’t seem to mind. I think that he thinks we are shooting a cover for a porn video.

Pimpin' CD Outtake: notice the owner of the porn shop standing in the doorway?

Finally, we finish the shoot, and go back to our apartment. We still have months to go, with editing, making the CD liner and so on, but at least the cover shot is done.

What’s the moral of this story? I’m not sure there is one, except that if you see a cool-looking or outrageous CD cover, just know that a whole lot of effort probably went into making it happen.

There Are Two Types of Composers

There are two types of composers: those that revise, and those that do not. I am not referring to making minor corrections—a wrong note here or there or whatever—but major changes. like ripping apart and re-constructing sections, adding new notes and changing lots of dynamics and articulations.

There are many well-known composers who edited older works: Sibelius, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Boulez and Ives, to name a few, but others simply do not like to go back or feel they do not need to, or only make changes when there are very minor details that need fixing, like Christopher Rouse and Poul Ruders.

This is not a black and white issue, of course, but one with infinite shades. One composer’s revision is another composer’s minor tweak. Some revisions are musical, while others are technical.

I have been thinking about this lately, because I recently revised a work I wrote fifteen years ago, a forty-minute piece for piano trio called Sun Trio that was premiered in Los Angeles by an enterprising new trio. It a surreal experience, revising something I wrote so long ago. As I became intimately reacquainted with the piece, it felt good—like reconnecting with an old friend, or a son who has moved away (or in this case, a sun).

I also recently made minor tweaks to my eleven year old Duo for Flute and Marimba. Like Sun Trio, I didn’t make any major changes, just small tweaks that make it more playable: slowing down a few of the tempos by a couple of notches, or tweaking a note here and there. I wrote this piece for percussionist Ingrid Gordon and never played it myself, so I never had a chance to really internalize the tempos in a physical way. I spent this past summer practicing the part, and now realize that my tempos are a little too fast—playable, but right on the edge. Too on the edge, in fact, so I bumped the tempos down a bit.

This brings up another interesting issue: that of altering works written long ago. Is it worth it? In this case, I made a few errors that could be fixed without harming my original intention. For example, I  wrote a few notes as harmonics that work much better now as regular pitches. Back then, I was even more obsessed with dynamic shading than I am now, but in a few spots, I  think I went way over the top, so I simplified some of the dynamics. I also increased a few of the tempos, easily shaving off a good minute or two from the entire work. By changing these details, the piece will still sound the same, but will also be much more playable. None of my revisions were huge, but everything just feels better now.

A final issue I have been obsessed with lately is the concept of having an editor. By default, composers are their own editors. I think this, more than anything, is the most difficult role to teach composition students: the importance of being self-critical, without pandering to the trends and preferences of others.

In some disciplines such as film, collaboration is normal. Classical composers almost never have an outsider edit their music, or even suggest edits, unless they work in the film industry, write operas or musicals or are still students. Can you imagine? Long, boring swaths of music by certain long-winded composers (I won’t mention names) could be cut. What a thrill that would be, and imagine the millions of hours saved!

As Ruders once said in an interview, perhaps experience is what makes the difference, but if there is a good reason, revisions are OK. In the end, it depends on the composer and the work, but composers should always feel free to make changes if they will make a piece better.

Our Harmonic, Spectral Lives

Whether or not we are aware of it, we all follow different developmental models over long spans of time. Many people gravitate toward certain organizational systems without realizing it—in effect, creating large-scale waves. Some people’s lives are more like sine waves, others more saw tooth, and so on. Some people’s lives begin one way and end in another, or are a combination of different waves piled on top of each other. An alarm clock going off at the same time every morning is a definite pulse, but the emails piling up in your inbox are probably not very pulsed at all.

Many parts of our lives seem to mimic waves; when heard or viewed or heard together, they could create a harmonic or spectral profile of who we are. We are all different chords, melodies or even a series of rhythmic patterns that could potentially come together to create a musical composition that represents each one of us.

If every major parameter of our lives was recorded, I think we could figure our which instrument we are, or chord, or at least whether we lead a life of dissonance, relative sine wave purity or more like the sonic spectrogram of a crash cymbal. I can think of a few people who, if I analyzed their lives, would definitely fit a crash cymbal’s profile, like Sid Vicious from the Sex Pistols.

Here are illustrations of different types of sound waves:

The amount of research it would take to decode major waves for any individual with a long lifespan would seem daunting, but if we can send people to the moon or decode the human genome, it is certainly possible. It would mean tracking certain major, interrelated details about someone for a long enough period to see if there are patterns, or more darkly, controlling someone’s environment, Truman Show style, so we could analyze as many patterns as possible.

What could be tracked? How often someone becomes sick (perhaps a micro version of Google’s Flu Tracker), sleep patterns, financial profiles, what you eat, your weight, disintegration (this could be represented either as a diminuendo or crescendo, or an accelerando or ritardando, depending on your point of view and whether you favor youth or antiquity), which routes you take to work, or even how often I update this blog. Various waves for different parts of our lives are influenced by our surroundings and seemingly random events, circadian rhythms, and perhaps, in a subtle way, the moon’s gravitational pull. Interestingly, this experiment would probably work best with those that are not aware they are being tracked, or for those who have been tracked for so long that they become indifferent. (Note to self: tracking when someone becomes indifferent is part of the pattern, and the tracker tracking is a pattern as well.)

As an aside, I believe that the main reason so much research is flawed is because we don’t compile enough details and co-mingle seemingly unrelated patterns with enough people, such as what has been demonstrated with the so-called butterfly effect (i.e., sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory—thanks Wikipedia). If someone is suffering from a disease, often times the root cause is something that is at first, seemingly unrelated, but when a huge sample of people are analyzed, with as much relative, recorded data as possible, the pattern becomes clear. With enough human patterns translated into waves, rhythmic patterns, articulations, melodies or harmonies, someone’s musical “iComposition” becomes evident.

In an Elliot Carter String Quartet No. 2 sort of way, you could represent certain patterns in each instrument in an ensemble, and the evolving composition would literally be a musical representation of those patterns. For example, using rhythmic diminution, a whole movement could be based on the four members of a string quartet dining out in a particular month, or an entire year. Each dining excursion is an eighth note, every other day is an eighth rest. Each type of cuisine could be a different pitch (Thai could be B, Chinese, could be C, and so on). This could be coupled with representations of whether anyone became sick with food poisoning (perhaps octave shifts or arco playing rather than pizzicatos, or scratch tone—best done with an adventurous string quartet that eats exotic foods!). The level of dedication to tracking these details is definitely beyond what most people would be willing to undertake, but with social networking devices like Twitter, this becomes possible.

Of course, just as Messiaen’s bird songs only approximate real birdsong, this is merely an abstract approximation of certain events. Truncated and normalized, it might be interesting, or even humorous. A lot of rough edges would be shaved off, and you can’t really represent every detail, but that’s where the art comes in: selective choosing—finding and combining interesting patterns.

“Don’t tase me, bro!”

I am currently composer-in-residence with the Vermont Youth Orchestra Association, from 2009-12, through a Meet the Composer/League of American Orchestra Music Alive residency grant. One of the main components of the grant is that I work with the Vermont Youth Orchestra and associated ensembles and they perform my music and commission me for a new work—in this case, a twenty-minute work for orchestra and chorus—but I also travel around the state as a virtual ambassador for VYOA, and visit schools and other organizations in the process.

One of the more interesting schools in Vermont is the Wheeler Integrated Arts Academy—a new, innovative grade school that uses the arts to teach traditional topics such as math and science. At least twice a  year, I visit a third and fifth grade class at this school and help teach them a little about how to compose music, and I also answer questions at the end of each class.

Sometimes the questions are a little odd, like the one student who asked me, if, as a composer, I have ever been tased. On the surface, this is somewhat funny (why would I be tased as a composer? For writing a truly bad piece? Did he think I was a conductor?), but when you dig deeper, why is a fifth grader even talking about tasing? Why does he even know what tasing is? Maybe I am more sensitive to these things now that I have a four-year-old child, but there definitely seems to be a loss of innocence with some of today’s children. Certainly, in the age of the internet, it will be more difficult to shield children from topics they really should not be exposed to or thinking about, but I really do think it also falls on parents to keep an eye on their children—and their ears open—so if something like this comes up, they can explain what that is, and how bad it is, and that tasing is very serious—like guns—and is something you really should not joke about.

Perhaps what was a little more disconcerting was that I was asked, multiple times, how much money I make. Not just by these students at this school, but from a few high school students who interviewed me from a different school. Not that I am afraid to answer the question—I basically did, more or less, and gave them a range, from hundreds of dollars to many thousands, depending on the project—but why are they concerned with that, at such a young age? At the Wheeler Arts Academy, these are third and fifth graders. The high school students, I can understand, but even so—would this question have been asked fifty years ago?

I think it is sad that we live in a world where young children are thinking about money—or more accurately, concerned with making a lot of money—when what they should really be doing is having fun, learning, exploring and imaging what they can grow up to be, without serious regard to financial matters. Of course, I would expect this from high school students who are about to enter college or the real world, but not from  such young kids. Yes, even young children should learn how to value what they have, and learn the basics, that we use money to buy things and so on, that everything has value, but is making money really what is most important? Of course, when children hear their parents talk about money, they absorb that, and we are in a recession, so maybe that has something to do with it.

This issue really trickles up to adults.  Many people are too concerned with materials objects and making money—keeping up with the Joneses—and not concerned enough with happiness, giving, and being good citizens. I just think it is important, and our responsibility, to make sure kids grow up being kids, and are loved, as much as possible. Otherwise, many of these soon-to-be adults will just feel the urge to re-live their childhoods as adults, because they did not have true childhoods.

The job of raising children, not just our own, but all children, falls on all of us—parents, teachers and the community alike. It really does take a village.

Scarcity Versus Abundance

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, wrote an interesting article entitled Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It’s Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity. (He also came up with a provocative retailing concept called the Long Tail that I mentioned a while back.) This got me thinking about how this applies to the music industry, and also to being a composer and performing musician.

The following quote from his article pretty much sums it up:

“This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world.”

In the music world, there are many examples of how something that used to be scarce is now abundant. Quite often we are still living by the old model (scarcity) when the new one (abundance) makes more sense. Two examples where everything has changed dramatically in the music world are with recordings and sheet music.

Recordings

When someone wants to hear a  piece  that is not available commercially (and that I don’t have the right to post in full on my website), I either need to email an audio file, give them access to a private page or burn a CD. Ten years ago, I paid ca. $1.00 for a high-quality blank CD-R, but now I pay ca. 20¢. This means the cost of physical media is now negligible. Hard drive space has also become cheaper per gigabyte, and burn speeds, upload and download times are now much faster than they were even five years ago. Burning music to blank CDs is now not only cheap, but faster than ever. Emailing files is even more efficient—and virtually free.

So which is better? CDs or emailing files? As each year passes, the value of my time goes up. Sometimes even the five minutes it takes to burn a CD, email a file, write a note (which is often repeating what I wrote in an email message or on FaceBook) and send a package seems a little time-consuming, or at least shrouded in redundancy.

Bandwidth speeds have increased way beyond even what was available in the 1990s, and since almost everyone in the Western music world has access to a computer and high speed internet, it is more cost effective and time efficient to post audio files online. After all, many people are purchasing digital files rather than CDs, especially younger crowds. The main problem is that with live recordings, I often don’t have the right to post these files online openly, so I have to post them on a private page and give permission to each person individually. Of course, this process slows everything own, and flies in the face of what computers are capable of.

One of the reasons people still like to send CDs is that they believe—perhaps rightly—that files on the burned CD will generally not end up being spread all over the internet. In reality, at least with classical music, this almost never happens. I attribute this to both the good nature of most classical listeners, but also to the relative scarcity of classical music and listeners in general, versus the massive listenership of pop music. It’s really just statistics: there are simply more pop listeners, therefore more chances for someone to post something on a file sharing site.

Also, receiving a physical CD seems much warmer than just linking to audio files. Most people like holding physical objects, and knowing that someone took the time to make a CD for you seems like they went out of their way for you even more. I am so used to downloading files that I don’t think this way anymore, but I know that there are those out there who do. Also, you don’t have to wait to play a CD, unlike downloading or streaming an audio file: you just pop it in and play it, and can take it anywhere, including a car or laptop on a plane.

The main point is that whether you use CDs or audio files, both cost virtually nothing, so we should be exploiting this resource even more, rather than treating each CD or download as a precious gem. We often fail to see the big picture: exposure via recordings will often lead to even more opportunities that eclipse the recordings in value.

Sheet music

Are publishers a dying breed? Reproducing sheet music at a copy store or at home is now fairly cheap. It is really just an issue of supply versus demand, the value of a composer’s time, their ability to tolerate duplicating their own materials, and so on. But it is also an issue of scarcity versus abundance. Fifty years ago, reproducing sheet music was not only very expensive–especially for large scores, think 11X17—but more time-consuming as well. Also, you couldn’t easily reproduce materials at home.

Now, it is almost silly to not sell PDFs online instead of sheet music. Think about it: selling the PDFs is obviously easier, there are no shipping costs, and the purchaser now has you file to print over and over again. So, why don’t we do this?

Composers and publishers are sometimes afraid that performers will just send their files around willy nilly, and won’t pay for future performances of their piece. I counter with this: I think that at this point in time, it is less about the physical sheet music and more about the license. Each piece of music should be licensed. When you purchase a  piece of music for, say $30, that could give you the rights to print as many copies as you need for yourself (for page turns, in case  our music was lost or ruined in a rainstorm), but for each subsequent performance, you would have to pay an additional fee. Or, you could purchase a number of performances outright, say five, if you knew you were going to play the piece five times. This process seems to make more sense, but there are catches.

Print size is currently limited to standard sizes (8.5X11. 11X17 and 8X5X14) and 9X12 and 11×14 cut down from 11X17. 10X13 parts and scores larger than 11X17 are still relatively difficult to reproduce, and only major publishers or people patient enough to do the printing themselves are able to accomplish this. Copy stores are still not able to do this well.

Good publishers also often have better paper and binding machines. But do musicians really care? What is more important: receiving the music quickly and having a backup copy, or a beautifully-bound copy on nice paper? It is not that paper and beauty do not matter, but it is an issue of what is more valuable. Most musicians I work with are so used to awful paper and bad binding that they don’t seem to care. But they really care if the music arrives too close to a performance, or if they lose it and need another copy, and will receive it too late.

Conventional wisdom dictates that really good publishers publish really good composers—they mostly weed out the riff-raff. Do I really believe this? Not really, but some performers will gravitate toward composers who are published by publishers such as Boosey & Hawkes and Schirmer, simply because you assume that in order for publishers to spend time promoting their roster of composers, they must have determined ahead of time that those composers are marketable, or at least good, whether now or in the future, and therefore, publishers save you time when looking for an engaging, performable piece of music. In practice, this seems to only be true some of the time. All musicians have played awful pieces published by well-respected publishers, and excellent pieces by un-published composers. Either way, many performers place trust in publishers, and publishers have staff to promote their composers, or at least that’s what they are supposed to be doing.

Purchasing from publishers also saves time. When you purchase something online or from a brick and mortar music store (a dying breed, I am afraid), you don’t have to worry about paper, binding, going to the copy store, etc. However, since most performers own printers at home, if the parts are on letter-size paper, printing parts is extremely easy. Of course, letter-size is definitely not an optimal size for sheet music, but many composers now use this as their default paper size anyway.

The problem is that technology has moved faster than our old business model. In most cases, the internet negates the need for hard copies of sheet music. This has, of course, led to performing from a computer monitor. As flat screen monitors catch on, printed music will be even less necessary. Monitors make a lot of sense: your markings are easily altered and saved for future performances, you won’t lose your music, no need for physical storage, licensing becomes a lot easier, music will not degrade, etc. However, my prediction is that monitors will merely be an additional alternative and not a replacement, well into the future, at least for a long time to come. There is just too much old music that is still performed that will not be transferred anytime soon, and it will take a few generations before performers are comfortable reading music off a screen with any regularity.

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Ultimately, if the music world learns how to embrace technology even more, it will lead to greater freedom and more opportunities. Those that jump on fastest will benefit the most. The key to all this, as with the newspaper industry, is to figure out how to maneuver this new business model and still be able to make a living. Ironically, this may center around old ways of thinking that predate recordings and published music, such as focusing energy on live performances, or on ideas we have yet to imagine.

What I Will Remember

Sometimes I think about what I will remember most—or care about—when I am old.

I am pretty certain I won’t remember much about FaceBook. I know I won’t think about email or text messages, or as much as I love gadgets, my mobile phone.

I won’t care what operating system my computer is running, if we even use computers at that point, but I might care if I backed it up, although it probably will not matter unless I print everything. I know I certainly won’t want to be holding a Kindle, or a laptop or have a Bluetooth headset on my ear.

I am also certain that I won’t think about all the frozen dinners I have eaten, organic or not,  that Sienfeld re-run where they cut up candy bars with a knife and fork—although that was pretty funny—or that great deal I wrangled on a flat screen TV.

Here is what I am pretty sure I will think about.

I will think about my family, both immediate and extended, first and foremost, and wondering how they are, wherever they are, and I will want to be with them as much as possible.

I will think about Victoria and Dylan, and how much I love them, and how much of a gift it is to have them in my life. To see another human being that is genetically half you and half your wife look into your eyes and say I love you is truly euphoric.

I will remember that time my father threw me in the air when I was three to the music of Shostakovich, and I will think about my mother painting on the third floor of the house I grew up in, while I stood by her side finger painting. I will remember molding clay side my side with my father in his studio while he was making his sculptures. I will think about the rice crispy treats with little cinnamon candies my grandmother made me and my brother and sent in care packages while we were growing up.

I will also think about my work and how much I accomplished, the experiences I have had as a composer and performer—both good and bad—and what I am leaving behind. I will certainly hope that my music doesn’t die with me. I want to think that by the end of my life, I will have contributed to the world in a positive way.

I will think about the walks I took in Central Park, the mountains I climbed in the Adarondacks and Colorado, homemade chocolate chip cookies and those times I stayed up all night with Dan, one of my best friends while growing up. I will think about friends, present and past. I will think about a few exquisite meals I had in a few fancy vegan restaurants, and my favorite pieces of music and visual art.

I will think about everything in my life that was intensely personal and full of love. I will also regret all that I wanted to do, but didn’t.

It is interesting how some of what we do now will not matter that much when we look back, and how important it is to live each day as fully as possible, take chances, and be with the people we care about, in the flesh.

Vermont In August

This August, I will begin a three-year Music Alive Residency with the Vermont Youth Orchestra Association, made possible by a grant from Meet The Composer and the League of American Orchestras. I am really looking forward to working with everyone and exploring some of my old haunts in Burlington.

The Vermont Youth Orchestra Association consists of one of the most accomplished youth orchestras in the North America, along with a few other excellent orchestras, chamber groups, choirs and an annual music festival in Burlington called the Reveille! Music Festival. They even just completed a tour of Quebec and France with their out-going Music Director Troy Peters. After a highly successful fourteen years with VYOA, Troy accepted a new position as Music Director of the Youth Orchestras of San Antonio. Although he is much-loved by everyone in VT, and brought the association to new and higher levels, this will be an exciting year as VYOA embarks on a search for a new director. I lived in Vermont long enough to know that although great people sometimes leave, they often come back, and fresh, new faces will also arrive.

Back in the mid-90s, Victoria and I lived in Burlington on the corner of Church and Main, right next to Nectar’s, the bar and  restaurant where thousands of bands have played and Phish played some of its first gigs. We moved there right after we left undergraduate school at Eastman and the University of Rochester. I can still remember the smell of gravy fries wafting over from Nectar’s, roasting coffee beans at Muddy Waters, and the freshly made pizza and bagels from across the street and down the block.

While we lived in Burlington, Victoria had a violin studio of ca. 20 students, and we gigged in just about every classical group in the state, including the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, UVM Symphony Orchestra and with the Lyric Theater Company. We even played West Side Story at the Flynn in 1995, which is an amazing coincidence, since Victoria is now playing in West Side Story on Broadway. I played in Vermont Composers Consortium concerts and worked with interesting musicians like Michael Arnowitt and Gordon Stone. These are all great memories.

Before gigs and commissions started trickling in, I worked at Kinko’s in Burlington, which I think still has the distinction of being the only Kinko’s in Vermont. For a young musician trying to meet people, it was a great place to work: it seems like just about everyone in town made copies there. I would strike up conversations and try to get to know everyone in the music scene. Burlington is a major city, but cozy enough that you will probably eventually run into every classical musician in town—and even in the state—if you stick around for a while.

Anyway, I am very excited, both to work with the Vermont Youth Orchestra Association and interim conductor Andrew Massey, and to be in Vermont in August. As time goes on, I may either blog about my experiences with the orchestra here, contribute to the VYOA Blog or even create a new one, but either way, I hope you will continue to read about my experiences with this wonderful organization.

Reflections on Yaddo

Yaddo - Woodland Cabin

I recently spent three weeks at Yaddo, an artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, NY. Located down the road from the Saratoga Racetrack, Yaddo is one of the most famous artist colonies in the world, and is the largest in the U.S. Tons of great people have worked there, including Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, David Del Tredici, Truman Capote, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Philip Roth—the list goes on, seemingly forever. It was an honor to be there among so many talented people.

While there, I wrote over sixty-five pages of score for Invisible Child, the opera I have been working on with writer and librettist David Cote. I wrote more in three weeks than I have ever written in that period of time in my life. It was amazing to be able to work in solitude, and to think big thoughts, for long spans of time. In this crazy email-centric, cell phone-tethered world we live in, large, uninterrupted moments are becoming a rare commodity, and I think this is what makes the difference between the kind of work—and the amount of work—that is being created these days, compared to, say, a hundred years ago. Not necessarily better or worse, just different.

In some ways we have less to worry about—we have cleaner water, less disease, and more (but not necessarily higher-quality) food, at least in the U.S.—but we are also very distracted and seem to have shorter attention spans. Sitting through a Chopin Nocturne seems like eternity for some folks, and you can almost seem their fingers itching for the remote during a live performance. It does not help that we are over-saturated with content and media, and not all of it great, but it is really all about distraction. We are pulled in a many different directions at once, and we kid ourselves into thinking we can really multi-task to great effect. Mozart had almost none of the gadgets we have now, and look how much he created. That tells you something.

What is so great about artist colonies such as Yaddo is that you have time to really concentrate. It is amazing how much you can get done when you are left alone. Ironically, I had better cell phone reception at my little cabin in the woods than I get in Manhattan (it is near the highway, however distant and in the background), so it was a mental thing. The physical distance from NYC and separation from other people created a sense of calm that is really hard to find, and with birds—and not people—twittering in the background, it is much easier to turn off gadgets or conveniently leave them behind.

Don’t get me wrong: artists love to party. Almost every evening consisted of sharing bottles of wine and great conversation, but during the day, at least during my stay, people were either working very hard, thinking very hard, or even just thinking about working very hard. Artist’s minds are usually churning in the background, even when they look like they are paying attention to what you are saying. It’s faint, a distant look in their eyes, but you will notice it if you look closely. You learn to not take it personally: they are just existing on multiple planets at once.

Some people do not work well at colonies, but others thrive. I loved my time away, although I missed Victoria and Dylan immensely. I work well at home, surrounded by my things, but there is nothing like working in a space so quiet that you can hear the blood rushing in the back of your neck, away from honking trucks and WiFi connections. It was truly a gift to be there.