Alone Together With Kickstarter

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Mar 052012
 

Remember last year when I was all hot and bothered about the arts patronage opportunities afforded by the Kickstarter platform? Well, it happened. With help from my friend Tim Rosenberg, I put together a consortium to commission a work for solo alto saxophone. It’s totally done now, YAY!!!!!1!!!!1!!!! The piece is called alone together and will be premiered by Tim at the NASA biennial in a couple weeks.

alone together

first system of alone together

I just sent an email to my Kickstarter backers with a PDF of the score, and hard copies are going in the mail today. Right after I finished sending the PDF out, I checked my usual web comics and found this gem on Married to the Sea:

Married to the Sea

Married to the Sea, 5 March 2012

This was today’s comic! I swear I didn’t plan that.

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The Golijov Problem

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Feb 242012
 

About a week ago, I first read a story about a new Golijov piece that a couple of audience members believed had been plagiarized. My first thought was “No way. Golijov is a serious composer. He works with other people’s material in a kind of collage, but he wouldn’t be so silly as to blatantly rip off another composer.”

I’m beginning to sing a different tune. Especially now that I’ve heard the two pieces (which incidentally, do not sing different tunes). To demonstrate the similarities between these two compositions, I made a video with recordings I could find on the web. 1

Can this be a “-gate” now? Lots of smart people have weighed in on this already, notably Alex Ross, Anne Midgette, and Rob Deemer.

My thoughts:

The piece is most definitely a rip-off. Golijov claims he cleared it with the original composer, but the original composer didn’t get any credit in the program, and he ain’t gettin’ paid by ASCAP/BMI when the work gets performed. Also, this was a large commission. According to one report, 35 orchestras each paid between $1,500 and $4,500 to join the consortium. Even if they all paid the lower amount, Golijov would have received more to write that piece than I made teaching college courses last year. They paid for something original, not an arrangement. They got an arrangement.

I would be remiss if I did not add this one last thing: Sidereus is a piece of junk! My first reaction when I listened to the piece (before hearing the Ward-Bergeman) was to wonder if the music I was hearing was really distinctive enough to be considered a copy. It’s boring. It goes nowhere in the sub-4-minute original work, and it doesn’t go any further when Golijov spins it out (mostly through repetition) to 9 minutes.

Notes:

  1. Osvaldo Golijov: Sidereus, performed by the New England Conservatory Philharmonia, conducted by Mei-Ann Chen.

    Michael Ward-Bergeman: Berbeich, performed by the composer. (Yeah, that’s right. MySpace.)  ↩

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On the Radio

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May 022011
 

When I published the Kickstarter page for the saxophone piece I’ll be working on with Tim Rosenberg, I was only doing it for the massive media coverage it would bring me. Finally, it’s paying off.

About a month ago, I got a phone call from a voice that I hear all the time on Michigan Radio. It was Jennifer Guerra, an arts/culture reporter for a local public radio station. She asked me a few questions about my Kickstarter project. Apparently my answers satisfied her, because a few days later, she met me in the Music Practice Building here at Michigan State. (That’s right, she drove from Ann Arbor to East Lansing to do a story about a composer-student.) I had the reaction that I think a lot of people have when they meet a radio voice in person. As Ira Glass once said, “That’s his voice…and it’s coming out of his head!”

Anyway, you can listen to/read the story here. It just aired today.

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Jennifer, if you happen to read this, thanks!

Now, you may be wondering, “How did Jennifer Guerra find this schmuck?” I wondered the same thing. So I asked her. She said that she just found me on Google looking for Michigan arts stories. She navigated to my website, saw that it was active, and got in contact. Moral of the story: your web presence is important. It’s getting more important every day. If you’re a musician/artist reading this and you don’t have a website, I hope you’ll consider starting one soon. It’s easier than you probably think.

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Concerto for Steelpan and Wind Ensemble

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Apr 132011
 

 

Dave’s Spring 2011 “to do” list:

  • start awesome podcast about new music
  • build a sweet digital instrument/controller
  • write a concerto for steelpan and wind ensemble
  • solve world hunger
  • cure cancer
  • secure well-paying, intellectually/artistically rewarding, emotionally satisfying tenure-track position in academia

Not this kind of steel pan.

As of this morning, I’m half-way through those goals. Today, I turned in my dissertation piece, Concerto for Steelpan and Wind Ensemble. I struggled for a long time with what to call it, but I decided that the instrumentation itself is one of the most striking features. So I thought the rather prosaic form-title would suffice. Details? You want details. I got your details right here:

Score PDF

Here are some computer realizations. They range from bad to downright misleading, but I’m ok with that for now. I’ve still got my fingers crossed for a good performance in the next year or so. The pan part is played on piano sounds. Trust me. You do NOT want to hear MIDI steelpan.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Speaking of performances, I’m quite hopeful on that front. I’ve spoken with MSU Director of Bands Kevin Sedatole about the piece. He seems interested. I’ve also corresponded with Liam Teague, arguably the best steelpan soloist in the world. My teacher, Ricardo Lorenz also knows Liam. And that’s probably the reason I’m most confident about getting the work performed. Apart from being an excellent composer and teacher, Dr. Lorenz is probably the strongest advocate I’ve ever had. I’m sure that he’ll be in the ears of both Sedatole and Teague. (On the off-chance that you’re reading this, Dr. Lorenz, thanks for going to bat for me all those times over the last five years.) Additionally, the wind ensemble director at the University of Missouri, Tom O’Neal has expressed an interest in performing the piece. My good friend Skip Thompson, another excellent steelpan soloist and former student of Teague, is in residence there working on a M.M. in percussion.

If you’re curious, here are my program notes:

Steelpan, the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago, is not an obvious choice for a concerto instrument. However, there are many composers and players working to build a classical repertoire for pan. There are many chamber works that include pan, and even a small handful of concerti, notably, by Jan Bach (1994) and more recently, Libby Larsen (2004). My research leads me to believe that this is the first concerto for steelpan with wind ensemble.

Pan has a sound profile unlike any other instrument I know. For that reason, I open the concerto with a timbre sampling of the ensemble, punctuated with the pan for comparison. The melody presented by the pan beginning in m. 15 of the first movement is only the first statement of a theme that informs nearly all of the melody, harmony, and counterpoint of the concerto. Of the three movements, the first pits the pan most strongly against the ensemble, emphasizing the uniqueness of its sound. This movement also focuses most strongly on the relationship between the pan and the percussion section.

The second movement is more texturally dense. The pan floats over a bed of loosely imitative counterpoint, which thickens throughout the movement. The soloist has the opportunity to “stretch out” over cadenzas, including an optional improvisation. Because the range and layout of steelpans are not completely standardized, the improvisation allows the soloist to exploit the peculiarities of the instrument being used.

The final cadenza of the second movement, which includes the optional improvisation, connects directly to the final movement of the concerto. In m. 5, the pan presents the clearest statement of the theme on which the whole work is based. This movement is the shortest of the three, a succinct and groove-based wrap-up to the complete concerto. The rhythms and textures refer to jazz, a familiar genre to many steelpan players. The pan concludes with a virtuosic flourish (mm. 88-94) before a cool and casual exit.

 

 

 

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It’s ALIVE!

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Mar 132011
 

I saw a presentation by composer and performance artist Laurie Anderson at the University of Missouri while I was an undergraduate student. In preparation for her residency, I learned about some of her past work, including an instrument she created, the tape-bow violin. I thought that it sounded like a really amazing thing, and I decided then that I would one day make one.

When I came to Michigan State University, one of the first student composer concerts I saw included Nate Bliton performing a work on an electronic instrument of his own creation, the Bovalve. I had never before considered that regular people like me, with no specialized electronics or computer training, could design and build a computer peripheral (or that this could be done for cheap).

A little over a year ago, I cooked up the idea for a digital version of Anderson’s tape-bow violin. I wanted to be able to switch sounds on the fly using buttons, switches, and knobs on the instrument itself (unlike the tape-bow violin). I called it the Sampolin. With lots of help from Nate, who taught me about Arduino microcontrollers (open source electronics hardware/firmware) and Puredata (open source media creation platform), and Sam Merciers, who shared his fabrication expertise, the Sampolin became a real thing!

Last Friday, in celebration of the birth of the Sampolin, Nate and I created a piece for our respective original creations. We made a video recording of Sampolin Jam, for Sampolin and Bovalve.

If you’re curious about how Sampolin works or what it is I’m actually doing in that video, here’s a video of me demonstrating how it works.

 

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Commissioning Project Update

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Jan 312011
 

WE DID IT!

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to each person that’s pledged. Thanks to each person that read about this project and thought about pledging. Thanks to each person who passed this project along to friends and colleagues. Who knew all you had to do to get a commission was to ask for one?

Earlier this morning, with a pledge from Alex Sellers, the commissioning consortium on Kickstarter reached its goal. It has since surpassed that goal (thanks to a generous pledge from Tim Rosenberg). If you read my blog, you should definitely read Tim’s as well. He doesn’t post as much as he used to, but there’s a lot of both thoughtful insights and humor. Well, I think it’s humorous anyway.

Talking about money like this is awkward for me. I’m asking people to pay me for something that, in all honesty, I’d probably do for free. I think most performers have this experience much younger than composers. I know I did as a performer. (Thankfully, one outgrows this feeling through playing showtunes and wedding music.)

Having said all that, I picked a goal of $500 because I thought it was achievable. I wanted to pick $1000, but I would have been in a crappy mood for a while if we’d only gotten to $800 and gotten nothing. Here’s the thing: yes, I’m a greedy jerk and I want your money, but that’s not the point (mostly). Now that we’ve reached the goal, the thing I’m more concerned about in this project is building a large network of people to play the piece. I know projects have been done in the past with new music to have lots of simultaneous “premieres” of works, but I want to have a big group of performers that are invested in this piece and feel some ownership of it. ”Investment” and “ownership” are, literally speaking, words about money. However, I think it’s telling that we also use those words to describe intellectual, emotional, cultural, and (in this case) artistic connections as well. That’s what I want.

So my point is this: we’ve reached our goal on Kickstarter, but this project ain’t over until the fat lady’s digital watch alarm goes off on Friday, April 22, 2011 at 11:36pm EDT. Please, continue to pass the word along.

Also, I don’t know if I’ve fully convinced Tim that we need to do this, but I really want to write a paper that uses our Kickstarter experience as the basis for discussing Web 2.0 things and the future of music patronage. My working title is “Patronage 2.0.” I know, it doesn’t have a colon in it, so it’s not a real academic document title yet. Like I said, it’s the working title. I’d also really like to title the section on social networking “Tweet the Composer.” Whaddaya think?

Thankyou
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Technology Creates a Performance Tailored to Each Viewer

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Sep 062010
 

My parents are both scientists. They taught me to value science, curiosity, and learning. To their chagrin, I went into music. However, I never lost my love for science, and in particular, technology. Many people assume that art and artists don’t really go with technology, but there are some people who do brilliant work bringing the two together.

One new web technology I’m particularly excited about is HTML5. It’s going to change the web fundamentally, and it will do away with proprietary plugins (like Adobe’s Flash) and codecs. HTML5 is an open standard currently supported by Google’s Chrome browser and Apple’s Safari, with Firefox and Internet Explorer soon to follow. With tech development becoming an increasingly litigious affair, the only way to move forward together (with everyone in the world) is open standards and open source.

…which brings me to Arcade Fire. They recently released a new video for their song “We Used to Wait.” The video, which is called “The Wilderness Downtown,” did not debut on MTV or VH1, or even YouTube. It’s on it’s own HTML5 site. There, you enter the address of your childhood home, and the music video experience is tailored to you. As the song plays, you’ll see a music video experience that includes images from your own neighborhood pulled from Google’s vast geographical image database. This is all the brainchild of director Chris Milk, and it would not be possible without the open standard of HTML5, Google’s open API’s, and people who can think creatively about both technology and art!

Go there now, but make sure you’re using Chrome (or Safari, but seriously, use Chrome).

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Be Creative…NOW!

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Aug 032010
 

A couple of weekends ago, I tried something new. I made a film. Well, I didn’t do it by myself, but I was part of a team of around 13 people that made a seven-minute film in only 48 hours. It was part of the 48 Hour Film Project in Detroit.

We met at 7pm on a Friday in Detroit and were assigned a genre (Sci Fi), a character (Jason/Janice Strawberry, realtor), a prop (an award), and a line of dialogue (“Take your time.”). All of these things had to be included in a final film that we turned in at 7pm the following Sunday.

It was a pretty crazy 48 hours. I was the producer, and my great friend and frequent creative collaborator Sam Merciers was the director. I would guess that we each got about 7 hours of sleep over the whole weekend, but it was completely worth it. I had more fun than just about anything else I’ve done all summer long. I experienced some of the same satisfaction I experience as a performer when a lot of hard work and preparation comes to fruition. There was also the exhilaration of improvisation from being asked spontaneously create something that is at once artistic and appropriate and technically sound.

In the end, I am extremely proud of what we created, especially considering we had never made a film before on any schedule. We got to see it on the big screen (or at least a big screen) at the Main Art Theater in Royal Oak, MI along with an audience of around 500 people. The experience reminded me forcibly of the feeling I get at the premiere of a new piece I’ve written. I hope it goes well, but it might completely bomb, and worst of all, it’s completely out of my control at that point.

For your consideration: Download.

Tonight, we’re going back down to Detroit for the awards presentation. I’ll be sure to post back here with the results.

Here are a few pictures of us during the production:

If we deploy enough gear, we almost look like we know what we're doing. We didn't really have a compelling plot reason for shooting at SCENE, but Tim Lane was kind enough to give us permission and the place and the art just looks so dang cool, we couldn't pass it up.

Emiliano and Matt (left) are composing and recording the score. Ben (top right) is editing the audio recorded on set. Corrina (bottom right) is working on a logo graphic for the credits.

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Das ist gut, ja?

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Aug 022010
 

I’m pretty sure that’s German.

Sometimes, I like to Google the titles of my pieces in the hopes that I will find that they have been programmed by performers that I don’t know. It’s a bit silly, and I’ve not really found that many, but hope springs eternal (or something like that). I was doing just such a search yesterday when I came upon this. It’s a Wikipedia article about me.

The article is in what I can only surmise is perfect German. I have no idea who wrote it, and I don’t think I know of any Germans who have played or been involved in my music. Most vexingly, there is no corresponding article in the English Wikipedia.

Apparently, I’m huge in Germany. Add that to the list of things I have in common with David Hasselhoff.

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“The new phonebook’s here! My name in print!”

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May 032010
 

My mother’s favorite movie of all time is Steve Martin’s The Jerk. If you haven’t seen it, put it in your Netflix queue right now. You won’t regret it.

In the film, there’s a very funny scene in which Navin Johnson, played by Martin, ecstatically proclaims “I’m somebody! Look! My name in print!” even though the “print” in question is the local phone directory.

I had that experience the other day when I discovered my name in the iTunes store, where the H2 Quartet‘s new album Times and Spaces is now available. Yes, I know. Just about anybody can put music in the iTunes store if they’re willing to jump through the right hoops. But I’m really proud of this piece and the recording, even though I had very little to do with the recording. In fact, maybe that’s what makes me so happy about it. It’s one of the few times in my brief career that I haven’t had to beg for performers or herd metaphorical cats in rehearsal. Yet there it is, my name in print.

Incidentally, the CD is also available as a digital download from Amazon, but they don’t list composers over there. Check it out from your preferred download dealer.

iTunes – Amazon

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