CD review!

I've been on a "pick random CDs from my local library's collection and give them a listen" kick, and with that I bring you a review of John Adams: Century Rolls / Lollapalooza / Slonimsky's Earbox.

Weirdly, we talk about John Adams in this blog fairly regularly (well, what counts as "regular" for us, anyway). In case you haven't caught on, he's a prolific modern American composer who usually writes in a minimalist style. His stuff isn't the epitome of classical music, but rather often a fun excursion into the many things that music can simply do. That, and he writes operas about such personalities as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Nixon, which makes him way cool in my book.

This particular CD is most notable for the piano concerto Century Rolls, performed by none other than Emanuel Ax and the Cleveland Orchestra. Listening to this work is truly a musical experience; the first movement, aptly named "First Movement", is inspired by a mechanical piano, featuring the orchestra acting like percussion instruments beating a solid, robotic backdrop to the piano solo. The second movement, "Manny's Gym", could not be more different. It is a romantic song in 3/4 (I think!), with a free tempo and beautiful expression by both Ax and the orchestra. My favorite movement, however, was the third -- "Hail Bop", named after a mishearing of the name of the "Hale-Bopp" comet. It has a jazzy feel to it at times, combined with frenetic tempos and disconcerting brass punctuation. Sometimes, it feels like an eight-minute-long musical chase scene.

Lollapalooza, for orchestra and a kickass low brass section (I just made that up, although writing that in the score would probably be helpful), was the highlight of the CD for me. As a linguist, I love it when composers try to play with language in their musical themes. In this piece, the main theme is a five-note loud brassy thing that mimics the stress pattern in the title word. It comes out at expected times, and some unexpectedly as well. It's almost a cacophony of themes interwoven, but make no mistake -- the brasses are in charge of this piece, even though the timpani has the last word with a single stoke in silence at the end. I would dearly love to see this piece played live.

The last piece, Slonimsky's Earbox, didn't really catch my interest. It is a tribute to Nicholas Slonimsky, who wrote a book of scales and modes called The Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, which Adams says influenced his work. It has a number of scalar themes and modal games, which might interest those of you with an ear for theory. I did enjoy the wild ending, but the rest of the piece pales in comparison to the other offerings on the disc.

I would highly recommend giving this CD a listen if you're in the mood for some musical fun. This isn't a relax-around-the-house CD, nor is it something I'd want to do spring cleaning to, but if you've got an hour to experience some work by a modern composer, definitely check this one out.

on recordings... again

I'm sitting here waiting for my car to be repaired, managed to steal a WiFi signal, and so I thought -- what better time to update the blog?

Uh-huh. 

I mentioned last time that the AWCB was doing a recording session. The first round of it was this past Monday, we will take a week off for the Memorial Day holiday, and then we'll come back and do another recording in the first week of June. I expressed that I was worried that we were under-rehearsed, and my fears were definitely confirmed. We did several takes of each piece, especially Suite of Old American Dances. I was personally disappointed in my own performance in our recording of this piece, and I think most of the band wishes we could have a collective mulligan.

There were, however, really good parts of each take we took of that piece. I am hopeful that by the miraculous tactics of recording engineers, they will be able to crib together a version that somehow incorporates the good parts of each take and eliminates the bad parts. Now, I can't wait to hear the final version of the recording, and I will make absolutely sure to post my reaction when we get the final product.

I do enjoy that piece very much, especially since someone had the bright idea that the first trombones should have a chance to play really loudly in the meaty range. I think Jon and I nailed that particular lick very nicely on one of the takes, and I hope with a musician's sometimes-futile hope that they keep THAT version for the final copy. 

On being harrassed into making a blog post

I must admit to two things to start out. One is that I'm having a hard time getting motivated to do... well, anything. The second is that I asked to be harassed to get things done. Gotta get back on the horse.

The AWCB is getting ready for the seventh annual Three Rivers Community Band Festival. I don't get to play due to work obligations, which is pretty much killing my trombonastical motivation. The program, as far as I know at this point, consists of the theme from the western Silverado, Equus by Eric Whitacre, and the March and Procession of Bacchus, which for reasons I can't quite understand is called Cortege in our edition. (Note: that was sarcasm.)

Silverado is a pretty standard Hollywood type score for the brass: we've got our block chord moments, and a couple of big broad melodies. There are some nice challenging parts for the trombones, and a fun horn lick at the beginning that lays really nicely on an Eb alto.

Equus is entirely my fault. Most of the people in the band at this point know that I'm a big fan of Eric Whitacre, which started with singing a couple of his pieces in a choir a while ago. Equus is a neat little minimalist lite thing- we're having some trouble with some meter changes, but it's coming along. It makes me pretty sad not to be able to perform this one, though.

The March and Procession isn't my favorite piece of music ever, and I won't miss playing it for a fun trivial reason: it's one of a very few pieces of music that I've played on violin, string bass, and all three trombone parts. I've got that one covered already.

But that's what I'll be missing. If there's anybody reading this from the Pittsburgh area that's not already going to this, have a look at the website, and let me know how it goes!

on composition methods

I found this interesting video from composer Steven Bryant on YouTube. It's the first of a series about his compositional methods in creating his latest work, Concerto for Wind Ensemble.

I found this interesting to watch, not only to hear the composer's thoughts on how he conceives the piece, but also to see the methods he uses for actually writing the music. I've been wondering about this for quite some time -- with all of the unusual time signatures that we see in the most contemporary band music (alternating 5/8 and 7/8, 3/2 and 2/2 alternating with bars of 3/4, just to name two that we've seen this year in the AWCB), I've often pondered how composers come up with these things. Do they sit down and say "hey, I want to write a piece in 5/8 and 7/8"? Do they have a melody in mind and try to build it in to these time signatures? It looks like Steven Bryant, at least, approaches it much differently.

I'm extremely interested to watch future installments to see the continuing process. I hope he'll do something about the transcription of the music and the translation into a written format. (I am such a linguist, even in my musical interests!)

There's so much in this video -- what did you find interesting?

on clarity

Allow me to rant for just a moment about clarity.

I am the instructor of an introductory linguistics course at my university, and I have been recently grading my latest round of homework papers on semantics and pragmatics. This is the unit on context and meaning. My delightful students (they really are delightful) had a problem set on their homework asking them to propose hyponyms and hypernyms of certain words. For example, if I give them the word dog, a hyponym would be poodle and a hypernym would be animal. It's all about sets of words and meaning relations -- all poodles are dogs, and all dogs are animals, but it doesn't work the other way (all animals are not dogs, and all dogs are not poodles).

So I gave them the word soda (pop, for you locals). I expected them to suggest a hyponym like Pepsi, and a hypernym like beverage. (All Pepsis are sodas and all sodas are beverages, but not all beverages are sodas and not all sodas are Pepsis, as the makers of Coca-Cola would attest.)

Three of my students gave me the hyponym grape. I'm assuming they mean grape soda, but sorry kiddos, grape is a kind of fruit. All grapes are not sodas. If you had written grape soda, that would have been fine, but no, you couldn't have been bothered to write out the extra four letters to convey your meaning, and thus, you lose your points.

How does this relate to trombonery, you ask? Well, let's ask Eric Whitacre and his publisher, who thought it would be a great idea to combine the first and second trombone parts into one 1st/2nd Trombone part in his piece Equus.

WHERE DO WE PLAY?!

Oh, yes, and check out what we had to do in order to compensate for unclear printing failures in perhaps the coolest part of the piece.

Yeah. Spend the extra ink, and for the love of whatever you hold dear, make sure your parts are written clearly.

And better musical directions would be great, too, like this one:

on a goal for the future

So while in Lake Placid, the GACB played Italian Rhapsody, written by Julie Giroux and commissioned by our conductor Colonel Gabriel. While some bits of the piece seemed to be regurgitated from another Giroux piece we had played before (Husaria Cavalry Overture), it was overall a very challenging but fun piece to play.

The second trombones sure got a workout. The entire last page and a half of the piece (starting at about 4:22 in the recording below) was full of quick runs that, if I had a couple of weeks to practice or the chop strength to practice outside of rehearsals while we were there, I might have had more success with than I actually did. The gentleman sitting next to me shook my hand when it was all over and said "We made it!" That was about the best we could do.

This piece inspired a goal for the future for me, though. If you listen below, at 1:54, you can hear a trumpet duet (just barely, but it's there). The players stood up and you could see their fingers flying across the valves as they played their duet.

The secret? That duet is written in the first and second trombone parts. I wanted to give it a shot, but the other members of the section wussed out; we had no chance to even try it. It's fast, but I firmly believe that it could be done by a pair of hardworking and competent trombonists. Whether "hardworking and competent trombonists" includes a certain pair of bloggers, I'm not sure, but it is my goal to at least give it a shot sometime... which means getting this piece on the AWCB's list. Let the games begin!

On woodshedding

I've been working up the Rimsky-Korsakov Concerto for Trombone lately -- for what purpose, exactly, I'm not sure, but this is one of those pieces that I have always wanted to play somewhere.

I've been woodshedding the third movement. Today I was working on the passage leading into N, which is deceptively tricky for me. Here's the passage I was working with (6:03 in the video):

It doesn't look like much.The first thing that gave me fits was getting those Gs in the fanfare-like second line to speak. I had to reorganize the last four bars of this excerpt in my brain so that each G was connected into the following Cs like a pickup note rather than being just another sixteenth note in the line. That worked nicely, giving definition to the lower pitches (it's amazing what a little psychology can do!).

Then there's that happy little sixteenth note string at the end of the first line. The attempt to transition from the C at the end of the first line into the Gs in the next was messy, and attempts to psychologically reorganize the line only made that E-natural disappear into the ether. Then I remembered the age-old advice: "Relax and blow." I turned off the metronome. I closed my eyes, I relaxed, I blew, and it came out. The only problem is that relaxing makes me drag -- but yet, when I turn on the metronom, I find it impossible to relax enough to get the sixteenth string out with any clarity.

One trick that has helped me with this is changing the metronome to beat in half notes instead of quarter notes. I was running this passage at about 100 bpm -- turning the metronome down to 50 like it was being conducted in 1 really helped my ability to relax first to get the troublesome sixteenth note strings out, but to also attend to playing in time. Try it -- maybe it'll help you too!

In praise of musicians who inspire me

A few posts ago, Lauren said something about every great romance needing a bad breakup. I kind of hope that's not true, but I can vouch for the idea that my own great romance with the trombone has gone through a number of periods of distance and mistrust. Usually it starts with me setting a goal that's too ambitious, goes through a stretch where conscientious practice doesn't achieve the goal, moves on to a period where I don't practice and get worse for it, and eventually get so frustrated I put the horn down for a time.

The usual path back for me is a reminder of why I do this. Usually this comes from hearing some other musician do something I really want to be able to do, usually through a recording, and oddly enough, almost never from another trombonist. Most often when I hear a really good trombonist, the Joe Alessis and Alain Trudels of the world, I think, "I could never do that!" and come away discouraged. Most often it's not a trombonist at all.

One of the most vivid instances of a non-trombonist pulling me back into trombonery happened a few years ago when I re-discovered the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Every male who sings lieder- which is probably every male who's taken more than two or three voice lessons- knows Fischer-Dieskau as one of the best lieder singers of the past century. (I can't vouch for the women, I'm sure they've got their own lieder virtuouso! Although Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson comes to mind as my personal pick.) He has his detractors- people say his voice is too small for opera, and that's probably true, and they say that his low range is not as good as it should be for a serious baritone, and that's probably true too.

But for my money, among baritones, there is simply no one better at providing the range of emotions and characters necessary to flesh out the gamut of German art song, whether it's the delirious joy of parts of Schubert's Schöne Müllerin or the horrible melancholy of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, his impeccable phrasing, near perfect technique, and loving attention to detail and character bring out the stories behind the songs, without any compromises to the soul of the music. And once, when I had laid the trombone down with the full intention of never picking it back up, I listened to a cd I had of Fischer-Dieskau, with Leonard Bernstein playing piano, of Mahler's Rückertlieder, and I remembered why I do this: there are some events, some emotions, that are simply inadequately expressed through any other medium, and some places you can only get to through playing music.

So I got the horn back out. I think it still took me a couple of days, but it was inevitable as soon as I had heard that cd again. And temporarily chastened, I set back to the diligent study of the Rochut etudes to try to find the places that people like Fischer-Dieskau take me when I hear them perform, and some small fraction of his ability to take people with him.

Speaking of John Adams

I was in a very good mood yesterday. Along with the usual trappings of a good mood, like an inspired reading of the Wicked Witch of the West in the latest nightly bedtime chapter of the Wizard of Oz, I found an immediate karmic balance in an unaccountable compulsion to listen to Rutter's Gloria. To excise this piece of musical pablum from my mental ipod, I decided today to listen to a cd I bought a little while ago: John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony, as recorded by David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony.

The piece is based on the opera of roughly the same name, most of which I heard when it was simulcast from the Met in October 2008. Due to circumstances out of my control, I missed the middle, but heard the beginning and end. What I remember of it are some of Adams's distinctive musical constructions: obviously the signature minimalist perpetual motion, but the falling interval that described Joseph's angst at finding his wife pregnant in El Nino and a terrorist's attempt at explaining his motive in Death of Klinghoffer found its way into Robert Oppenheimer's existential discourse on the atomic bomb, sung by the amazing baritone Gerald Finley in the original production. There was a lot of play on "Trinity"- the name of the test, appearing in the libretto (through texts by John Donne, I found out later) and in a number of allusions throughout the other chosen texts. (I should point out that having read some of the libretto later, I was kind of glad that I got more of the music than the words on a first listen, but that's another post!) The ending was especially memorable: the warning siren signaling the first detonation of an atomic bomb is overlaid with a recording of Japanese woman asking for water, shifting from the pre-bomb world to the post. It was a very effective moment, I thought.

So I went into the recording of the Symphony with a number of expectations and preconceived notions, and came away a bit disappointed on the first listen. The piece is divided into three sections, The Laboratory, Panic, and Trinity. The first section has the normal moto perpetuo that defines a lot of Adams's work, punctuated by irregular percussive bursts from the brass section. This is what I missed on a first listen, while trying to hard to make sense of the piece in terms of the opera. While these certainly happen in the opera, and the opening of the symphony is essentially the same as the opening of the opera, the opera opening is necessarily setting up for dialogue that doesn't occur in the symphonic version.

The second movement passes vocal lines through the brass, creating an orchestrational dichotomy between the ragged, harsh spikes of the first movement and the melodic, if perhaps delirious, lines in this movement. Solos in the trombone, trumpet and tuba are clearly adaptations of sung parts, following the patterns set out in other Adams operas and choral works. The liner notes list Michael Sanders as the tubist, and Timothy Myers as principal trombone. Myers (presumably, since soloists aren't listed and it wouldn't be the first time I've mistaken instruments) does some wonderful playing on some very difficult passages, but Sanders (again, presumably) does yeoman work on what sounds like an incredibly difficult solo, coming across as in complete control at all times.

The ending movement mirrors the first- the powerful ending of the opera is changed, but the new ending brings closure to the themes developed as a necessity of the new medium. The very end invokes the same percussive brass, although more insistent and more often this time, with the strings clawing away through the moto underneath, until the entire affair is cut off abruptly with a final crash. This is definitely a reimagined symphony, and not a suite from the opera.

I don't know that I would recommend this as a starting point for folks who don't know Adams- I still think Naive and Sentimental Music is his most accessible large-scale work, and Short Ride in a Fast Machine the easiest to get in touch with overall. And it will probably confuse people who are expecting a Paganini-esque suite from the opera. But for those already familiar with his body of work and compositional tendencies, it's another solid entry to his catalog, and absolutely worth a few times through to get in touch with.

Jon likes to make lists #1

Since there was no rehearsal this week for the AWCB, and therefore no back row shenanigans to comment on, I present a list that I keep in my head and update pretty regularly. The criteria should be fairly self apparent. The order changes probably daily, and the pieces on the list change most often when I actually get to play them, although there are a couple that have been on there forever and might require me to actually haunt somebody, which would kind of be a drag.

Five pieces of music I need to perform at least once before I die, or I’m coming back to haunt somebody:

1. Mahler, Songs of a Wayfarer. I have not invited any of my friends snobbish enough to correct me on the title. I’d love to be able to sing well enough to do this and have somebody care about it. Then again, maybe I just want to be Thomas Hampson when I grow up.

2. Shostakovich, The Tale of the Priest and his worker Balda. This covers a lot of ground: it’s Shostakovich at his sardonic best, and it’s incidental music for an experimental satiric cartoon (this whole post is worth it just for that link) by Tsekhanovsky based on a story by Pushkin- does it get better than that? I admit it, I had never heard of Tsekhanovsky before this. But it starts off with a cracking trombone solo with straight mute, and just has a lot of fun after that.

3. Bach, B minor mass. I did the St. Matthew Passion a couple of years ago, and it remains a highlight of my musical career. (Well, except for that idiot with the cell phone stepping on that glorious suspension in the oboe at the end. Jerk.) There’s some great stuff in the Mass, though, and part of the reason I want to perform it is to get into the nuts and bolts of the piece the way I only can when I’m preparing something for performance.

4. Morten Lauridsen, Lux Aeterna. This would be hard for me- the tenor part is too high, the bass part is too low, there isn’t a string bass part, and the trombone part wanders around in that annoying mid/high trigger range that I’m so bad at. When I muck around with range extension, pieces like this are why. (Side note: I’m agitating to perform Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium in the AWCB, so we’ll see how that goes!) At some point I’ll need to do a post about how my obsession with settings of the Requiem does not indicate an unhealthy obsession with death.

5. Brahms Ein Deutches Requiem. When paring the list down to five, it’s a tough call between this and the Mozart- what self respecting trombonist wouldn’t want a crack at the Tuba Mirum solo? But today at least, the idea of sitting in a group of 50 or so musicians singing the pianissimo opening of Denn alles Fleisch is the difference. Trombone parts are pretty awesome, too.