Then: for those who are no more

This is a sort of memento mori, written in 2021 during the still-growing wave of Covid. My original intention was to write a sort of memorial piece for those who had been taken by this disease. But I expanded it to take note of all the dead everywhere: all who had once lived but are no more. The only thing stranger than death may be life itself. There is a time in life when we experience the world as ourselves. We think what we think, see what we see, and experience a panoply of emotions.

At death, that all ends. But we still live in a more indirect way in the thoughts and memories of those who knew us. But in time they pass, and perhaps we still appear in family histories with an even dimmer glow. And at some point that’s gone as well. But all of us, present and past, are likely to have some recollection of a time we were most alive. We think of that as Then.

This piece has not yet received a performance, but I hope that changes before long. For now, you’re welcome to listen to a high-quality digital rendering

You can listen here

Brass Quintet #3: A blast from the past (in more ways than one)

Back in 1997, I started another brass quintet. I’d already written two of them as well as another piece for brass and small ensemble (which has been withdrawn). All of them were played multiple times around the Northeast.

This piece turned out a little differently. It’s my only work for brass quintet that has not been performed. When I finished it, my regular quintets had disbanded. I didn’t have time to pursue new opportunities, since my technology career had begun eating into my time. I think this is the best of them. It’s flashy and virtuosic. While based on a 12-tone row, it refers strongly to tonality in many places. The five movements are:

• 1 - Fanfare. Short and simple—maybe deceptively obvious , to be revisited in the last movement

• 2 - Irregularities. Played in mutes, with clashing meters between groups. Occasionally comedic

• 3 - Toccato. A wild movement, with much close counterpoint

• 4 - Canzona. Song-like with alternating theme and chorales.

• 5 - Reprisals. The fanfare again, this time torn to shreds.

I’ve attempted many renderings of this piece, but never had one that captured a sense of the piece. But the tools keep improving, so I have a new one that finally feels right. Perhaps it will find its way to a stage.

Please listen here

Update on a Duet

Just a few months ago, I announced a new duet, Bagatelles for Clarinet and Viola. I had written the piece for two old friends in Park City, Russell and Leslie Harlow. Only a couple of weeks after I delivered the piece, Leslie learned she had an aggressive lung cancer. She fought as well as she could, but only survived a little way into the new year.

Leslie founded the first chamber music series in Park City and made music there for something like 40 years. Early on, she was joined by her husband Russell (who had founded Nova Chamber Music, his own series in Salt Lake City). I never saw her when she wasn’t cheerful and funny—even when she was doing so much of the work needed to keep a chamber music series going. The last few phone conversations the three of us had were full of laughs and musical insight.

In time, Russell and I will sort out what’s to become of the piece in terms of performance. In any case, it will bear a permanent dedication to both of them. In the mean time, I invite you to listen to an audio rendering of the piece.. It’s sunny and playful (and quite tricky), not unlike Russell and Leslie.

20 years on: Updating a symphony

In 2003 the New England Philharmonic, under the baton of Richard Pittman gave the premiere of my symphony Challenger. I only had a fragment of that performance here on the website, since I didn’t have clear permission to post the whole thing.

I’d long felt the piece needed a few revisions and corrections, but it took until my years of retirement that I could take that on. That’s now accomplished and you can hear the entire piece here The performance uses a virtual orchestra, but one that is a considerable step forward. Most of the corrections involve only some small changes in orchestration. A few allow the piece to spread out just a little.

There’s one additional significant change: a dedication. The piece originally bore no dedication, but it now gives thanks to Richard Pittman. Here’s what the score says:

When I began school at Berklee in 1975, I'd already been a working guitarist for several years. But I'd reached a crossroads and knew there was much more to learn--both on the guitar and about music in general. I quickly found a home-away-from-school in Jordan Hall, the principal concert space of New England Conservatory. Quite a few of those concerts were conducted by a young Richard Pittman. While the ensembles were always good to begin with, Pittman brought out that little something extra. I began to get a sense of what 500 years of musical culture really meant. It didn't take me long to know I wouldn't be going out on the road again.

As it turns out, Pittman had a much larger profile in the Boston area, most notably with Boston Musica Viva, the New England Philharmonic and the Concord Orchestra. I began to have pieces played around the area, but never had the chance to really sit down with him. Life was busy. Finally, the New England Philharmonic decided to perform Challenger. I was excited to work with someone who'd been such a part of those formative years. Dick (as he insisted on being called) was convivial, humble, and knew the piece inside-out.

The Philharmonic is comprised of a few full-time professionals and a larger proportion of well- trained musicians who'd decided to pursue other ways of making a living. They were hard-working and fearless (new music was a staple with this group). I remain deeply appreciative of the many weeks they put into this piece. It was a gutsy first performance.

I came back to the piece in 2023, although I'd been thinking about it much longer. It needed some revisions and clarifications. While it did not have a dedication in 2003, it was obvious that Dick Pittman should be recognized. He suffered a major stroke in 2020 and it's likely that he'll not lift a baton again. But his influence on generations of musicians in Boston is significant and will carry on down the years.

Please give yourselves 13 minutes to listen to the piece.

On bringing an old computer piece back to life

I’ve been quite busy going through piles of old scores and deciding what to do with them. I came across a piece I’d written in 1981: Fantasy Music 1 for Flute and Computer. It was a type of piece that was fairly common in those days and involved a tape backing with a live player. The backing was created at the old MIT computer music lab—a predecessor of the Media Lab. Making any sort of computer piece was really quite difficult in those days and required access to a mainframe computer and many hours of computer time. Once finished, the piece would be recorded onto analog tape and played back in the hall with the live performer playing along.

I was very fortunate to have the piece premiered by the excellent flutist Wendy Stern. She played it first at Kresge Hall at MIT, and then at Julliard and around New York. She also recorded the piece for the Composers in Red Sneakers LP. It was picked up by a few other players, but I’m not aware of it having been played in some time.

Some years back, I found a massive printout of the computer data for the piece. It took up a few hundred pages of a dot-matrix printer. This was the way you did backup in those days. You’d get a call from the lab. They needed disk space and were about to delete the piece. So you’d dash over and print the whole thing out. I’d tucked the stack of papers into an fat envelope and thrown it on the bottom of a pile. When I discovered that I still had the printout, I scanned it and ran an OCR (optical character recognition) program to convert the data back into text files. As it turns out, the computer program I’d originally used (then called Music11) still lives as a program called CSound. So I could regenerate the computer part of the piece on my computer here at home. As computer languages go, it’s quite primitive, but there are few languages that can still run programs 40 years old. I thank the group that’s kept it alive.

Back in the 70s and 80s you had to make a number of real sacrifices to generate a piece on computer. Most of those were related to processing time and they had a deleterious effect on the sound. I had to make compromises of that nature to generate this piece. I’d show up in the lab at 8 PM or so, kick off the job and sit there doing something else until the job finished at 6 AM or so. It took all night—with the computer all to myself—to generate just a few minutes of music. It took many of those nights to get a piece just right. Most computer pieces of that era have a hallmark sound. I think that’s the result of it taking too long to really explore and perfect digital instruments. Although the language had potential, it just took too long to experiment.

So what to do with this particular piece? I think there are still plenty of recitals that use music like this. So I decided it was worth it to at least generate a clean backing track. I eliminated those compromises in the code and adjusted the areas that caused distortion on the tape. But I also decided to keep the basic sounds as they are—just with much lower noise. It’s a piece of its time, and I should respect that. Besides, I didn’t want to spend any more time in CSound than I had to! I also realized I could put all the instruments onto separate audio channels for better mixing and to open up the possibility of an Atmos mix at some point. So instead of the basic stereo output, I generated a 40-track output and tossed it over to ProTools for mixing. And just to show that computers have progressed in all those decades, here’s how long it takes now to generate that clean 40-track output: 12 seconds. That’s right. A job that used to require 9 or 10 hours now takes 12 seconds.

If you’re an interested performer, you’ll now find that you can request the music and the backing track (now just a wav file for your laptop) right here at no charge. It’s been quite interesting to revisit a 40-year old mindset and some ancient tools. It’s also fun to freshen up an old piece with some challenges and listener appeal.

Welcome!

I live in two worlds. One is the world of classical music. I’m a small part of a centuries-long tradition of composers who have extended the work of many generations. I’ve been at it for a very long time, with a major interruption or two along the way. The biggest interruption was a career in audio technology, which I will not cover here.

I have a large body of early compositions (most of those have been performed), a much smaller body of more recent work, and am now beginning what I hope will be a larger body of late work (I’d rather not say it that way, but life does come with some realities). I also serve on the board of Nova Chamber Music-the longest-running chamber music series in Salt Lake City. We have an active web page, so I might occasionally nudge you in that direction.

In this occasional news feed, I hope to cover a fairly broad set of topics. I’ll of course let you know about changes to the website. I’ll let you know about new and older scores that are available for performers. Perhaps I’ll do a deeper dive into what makes a piece tick. You’ll surely learn that I feel arts and sciences are inextricably bound together.

I may offer—very gently—a bit of opinion now and then. But I’m not going to pontificate or troll. There are far too many places where you get that already. I do hope to share things with you. Perhaps it’s my own music or that of someone else. Perhaps it’s a tip for a younger musician trying to record a student recital. I’d love to have a comment section for your responses, but that’s going to have to wait. It’s far too easy for bad people to find their way onto message boards and I want to keep this a nice place to visit.

Thanks for dropping by and be sure to come back frequently!