composition » David MacDonald, composer

My Baby’s All Growed Up

Mar 162012

Some composers get really nervous leading up to a premiere. I’ve never been that kind of composer. One of the great benefits of being a composer is that I don’t have to stress over performances. At the point that I’m sitting in the hall to hear the piece, there is literally nothing I can do that will affect the outcome of the performance. This realization is, I suppose, the cause of stress in other composers. I find this unproductive at best.

Having said all that, I’m a little nervous about a premiere of mine that’s happening tomorrow. “Why?” you might ask. This is one of the first times I’ve ever had a work premiered that I wasn’t attending and that I’ve never actually heard played in person. I have great faith in my friend Tim Rosenberg who is giving the premiere tomorrow in Tempe, Arizona. But Tim has been living in New York and Florida since we started this project. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even seen Tim in person for over a year. I’ve heard him play over Skype, and we’ve talked about the piece a lot, but it’s not the same.

Writing a piece and handing it off to a performer has often been compared to raising a child and sending it out into the world. I feel like I’ve driven my toddler to the airport, dropped him off at baggage check-in, handed him a $50 bill, and wished him the best of luck. I’m just hoping he makes it to wherever it is he’s going.

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SIDE NOTE: Tim just redesigned his website. It’s both beautifully designed and humorously written. This is the kind of site all professional musicians should have. The virtuoso you can have a beer (or a bourbon) with. Click this link to go there. It will make his analytics go up, and that makes everybody feel good, right?

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.

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, 5 March 2012

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

The Value of Newness

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Sep 252010

There are people who collect stamps. There are people who collect baseball cards. There are people who collect books, spoons, coffee mugs, ties, shoes, rocks, and sand. I bet if I can think of a thing, there’s somebody who gets really excited about collecting it in massive quantities. There are even some people who collect things that are less concrete. Some people like to collect anagrams or recipes. Personally, I like cool words (like agathokakological) and university nicknames/mascots (UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs).

Sometimes I joke that I collect hobbies, and it’s probably my most significant collection of all. I think this comes from my passion for learning about new things. Some of them, like music, have stuck around and remain a large part of my life. Others, like the stop-motion animations I used to make with my Dad’s first digital camera, have been left behind in earlier parts of my life. When I think about picking up a new hobby to add to my collection, one of my concerns is the cost. Picking up golf would cost me hundreds of dollars or more, but picking up disc golf (as I did a few years back) only cost about ten or fifteen bucks. What, then, is the value of collecting these hobbies?

The wide variety of hobbies gets me thinking about things differently, like having your whole music library on shuffle. Listening to Bartok, then Ellington, then Berio, then the Beatles will cause you to think about Bartok, Ellington, Berio, and the Beatles differently.

Double Shadow

One of the most recent hobbies added to my collection was art. A couple of years ago, I picked up a basic acrylic paint set to occupy the hours not taken up by class. Never having taken an art class, I really didn’t know what I was getting into. Everything I was doing was an experiment. I learned what kinds of paper held the paint effectively, how paints behaved differently on canvases, and what interesting things I could mix into the paints to create different textures. It was just as exciting to me as learning about the basics of composition, instrumentation, and chord voicings; or learning about basic concepts in electronics or literature. Buried so mind-numbingly deep in studying music, I had forgotten that feeling of discovery, and painting helped me regain it.

I think my friend Matt Schoendorff might say the same thing about quantum physics. He became so enamored of the subject that he wrote as his doctoral dissertation a set of character pieces about quantum particles for wind band.

All too often, fear keeps us from trying new things. Fear of failure may be reasonable in, say, trying a Wild West-type pistols-at-dawn duel for the first time. But most of the time, trying something new isn’t as risky as that. Create something new, I think you’ll find that it’s worth it.

Most recently, I’ve tried producing a film and this.

What new things have you tried recently? How have they changed the way you think about other parts of your life?

Old Composers are People Too

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Sep 172010

I don’t like a lot of old music. Mozart, Brahms, et al. don’t really whet my whistle, tickle my fancy, float my boat, or light my fire. Having said that, I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Bach. I think counterpoint is just about the coolest dang thing any musician ever thought of, and nobody’s ever done it better than Johann. That’s why I was so excited when I read about Don Freund (composer and professor at Indiana University) putting a series of lectures on YouTube called “Composition Lessons from J. S. Bach.”

They seem to be geared toward an audience that may not have a thorough technical understanding of the music already, but there is a lot of compelling information in them. Freund runs through a significant chunk of the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, pointing out anything that he finds particularly interesting. That’s really a lot of what composers do when they listen to music, though. “Hey that sounds neat. I’ll take some of that.” Here’s a couple of the videos Freund has posted: part of the introduction, and part of the discussion of the C-sharp minor fugue. I encourage you to check out more of them on his YouTube channel.

Steal my music.

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Sep 012010

I’m a member of the Society of Composers, Inc., or SCI. Occasionally (ok, very rarely), there is a conversation on the SCI listserv that I find compelling for one reason or another. Over the last few days, there has been a discussion of photocopying scores. Specifically, choirs performing from photocopied music as opposed to buying enough copies. I would say that anyone who has spent any time singing in choirs has seen this. The composers on the SCI list seem to consider this a personal affront to their cultural value. (The thread is actually called “Choral Crimes”!) Here are a few anonymous quotes from the spicier side of the discourse:

“One of the most serious crimes in our musical community is that of choral directors photocopying the music of living composers in order to illegally perform their music…It is time for singers to report these atrocities!”

“Can we establish some sort of collective to reward whistle blowers?”

“Stealing is stealing. Don’t rationalize it.”

“However, a college or university choral director who photocopies choral parts that are not public domain—and whose choristers know that he does it—he or she is not only breaking the law, but is setting a bad moral and musical example for the singers who respect him or her. Those choral directors ARE evil people!”

First, allow me to say this: piracy, whatever you think of it, is not stealing. Intellectual property law professor Lawrence Lessig ¹ points out an important distinction in his book Free Culture. If I steal a score from the music store, that’s a score the store paid for and that they no longer have to sell. However, if I check a score out of the library and make a photocopy, that isn’t depriving anyone of a sale. If I could afford to buy the score, I probably would have. My copying of the score does not represent a lost sale to a music store, a publisher, a distributor, or (most importantly) a composer.

In the SCI discussion, church and school choir conductors are the chief villains. Churches and schools (particularly public schools) are not exactly known the world over for their bulging arts budgets. The composers taking issue with these performers seem to think that they could put their kids through college if only these horrible, cheapskate conductors would put their money where their batons are and do the “right” thing. WRONG! The options are not photocopying your music on the one hand and purchasing it on the other; the options are photocopying your music and NOT PERFORMING IT AT ALL!

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather hear an “illicit” performance of a contemporary work than a legal performance of a public domain work by Mozart or Scarlatti. I’ve sold my music, and I will hopefully continue to do so. But don’t think for a second that I would tell somebody not to copy my work. Steal my music!

Got any thoughts on intellectual property? I knew you would. Feel free to have your voice heard in the comments.

Notes:

Lessig is also a founder of the Creative Commons project. All of his books are available in print, as well as for free in various digital formats under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. ↩

Me and JC

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Apr 282010

Me and John Corigliano Despite spending a week or so being nervous about Saturday’s John Corigliano masterclass, I think it went pretty well. I presented Falling up the down escalator, a saxophone quartet that H2 has recorded. The format of the masterclass was very different from the one John Adams described on his blog last week. Corigliano was not interested in his or anyone else’s opinions about the music. “That’s meaningless,” he said. He wanted to demonstrate to us what musical material people were able to observe and retain after one hearing. After all, in most situations, that’s all anyone is likely to hear a new piece of music.

He separated the audience into two groups for each piece: a group who had heard the work before and a group who hadn’t. The latter group he liked to call “the innocents,” and the masterclass mostly took the form of a focus group discussion. After each piece, Corigliano asked, “What did you hear?” He wasn’t interested in what anybody liked or didn’t like. He wanted their empirical observations about the materials, their development, and the form. It was a nice little experiment that proved one of the things that Dr. Lorenz has told me before: anytime you feel like you’re really beating the audience over the head with an idea, you’re only beginning to make it clear.”

Toward the end of the observation discussion for each piece, he allowed himself to slip into a few opinions. He told me the disintegrating ending of my quartet was “really quite lovely” and that it was a “great piece.” Not much to snip out and put on a website or anything, but I’ll take it.

Masterclassin’ up the joint

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Apr 212010

Composer John Corigliano (winner of an Oscar, a Pulitzer, and three Grammys) is in residence at Michigan State this week. The band, orchestra, and choir programs are putting together a program this coming Saturday night of his works, including Pied Piper Fantasy (feat. Prof. Richard Sherman, flute), DC Fanfare, and Circus Maximus. I’m looking forward to what I’m sure will be an excellent program, and I’m also planning to catch some of the rehearsals with Corigliano this week. On Saturday morning, Corigliano is giving a masterclass. I, along with my colleagues Kevin Wilt and Victor Marquez-Barrios, have been invited to present a piece in the masterclass for Corigliano and the rest of the assembled hoard to critique.

If you don’t know what a masterclass is, or if you’ve only been to performance masterclasses, composer John Adams just wrote a humorous and thoughtful essay on composition masterclasses that you should read. As a summary, I will tell you that he calls the student composer “the victim” and the process “ritual disembowelment.”

I find masterclasses to be a bit nerve-wracking in the best of situations, but this will be something else altogether. This will be a masterclass given by one of the most prominent American composers of his generation, and I imagine it will be attended by several members of the faculty from outside the composition area. Thankfully, I will be presenting a rather short (6½ min.) piece, Falling up the down escalator. Also, I happen to have a stellar, recently-released recording by the H2 Quartet.

I’m hoping to come out of the experience smarter but not in too much pain.

the next big thing

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Feb 252010

I had a student today ask this question: “What do you do when you’re in the middle of working on a piece, and you get an idea about another cool piece?”

It’s a tough question, and it’s one that I know a lot of composers deal with, though not one we often talk about. I’m a one-thing-at-a-time kind of person. That’s bad, because it means if I get side-tracked by one of these “next projects,” I put off my main project and it loses momentum. There are some people that can successfully work on two pieces at once, but I’m not among them, and I think most of the composers I know would say the same thing. This can cause some problems. One of the most frustrating is that working on large-scale projects means that you can’t take on any new projects for a long time. Right now, I’m working on my dissertation. By the time I finish it, I’ll have been working on it for at least a year and a half. The worst part is when somebody says, “Hey, we should work on a piece. I want you to write something for me.” This doesn’t happen very often, and when it does and I can’t act, it’s pretty maddening. I have to tell them to come back in a year and ask me again.

The good thing about the one-piece-at-a-time policy is the moment I get the new idea. Nothing gets me more excited about finishing the piece I’m working on than the allure of diving into a new one. (Admittedly, the diving in can be painful, but in a hurts-so-good kind of way.) I know some composers that keep a written queue of pieces they want to write. I keep a mental list. Sometimes I bump things up and down the queue. I’ve been meaning to work on a one-act chamber opera for the better part of 5 years. But when things start to stagnate, it always helps me to start thinking of that next big thing.