My Baby’s All Growed Up

 thoughts  No Responses »
Mar 162012
 

I call him "alone together."

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.

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.

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.

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