A New Duet for Clarinet and Viola

I’ve just completed a new piece - Bagatelles for Clarinet and Viola - for my good friends Russell and Leslie Harlow. They’ve both been important to the classical music scene in Utah for decades. Russell was assistant principal with the Utah Symphony for over 40 years and Leslie (while often playing with the Symphony) founded the longest-serving chamber music group in Park City.

Bagatelles weighs in at just under 10 minutes and provides plenty of technical challenges for both players. I hope we’ll have a chance to hear it in the coming season.

A New Piece for Solo Piano

It’s been a busy summer for all sorts of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that I was hard at work finishing a new piano piece for Jason Hardink. Jason is fine musician and loves a challenge. Without doubt this is the most difficult piece I’ve ever written for piano and I’m sure Jason will make it shine. We don’t yet know the date of first performance yet. It may need to wait until next season. Since this is Thierry Fischer’s last year with the Utah Symphony, Jason is quite busy. I’m afraid you won’t be seeing or hearing it before that point, but I’ll be sure to post it when the time comes.

The name of the piece is and so on and it runs about 11’30”” or so.

A Morsel to Share

Whew! It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted here. Life’s been busy in so many ways. I’ll post more about some of those things soon, but for now here’s a little something for your ears.

In 2003, my symphony Challenger was performed by the New England Philharmonic in Boston. Only a few months later, I found myself in a new home here in Utah. After the boxes were unpacked I began work on a companion piece of sorts. It used the same tone row, but I intentionally used the row in such a way as to hint (sometimes strongly) at tonality. Whereas Challenger is often dark, this piece is playful. I got it sketched out pretty well, but then had to set it aside as my technology career began to intrude even more deeply.

After I retired, I found the piece and decided to finish it. The result was a short and highly kinetic orchestral scherzo. I named it Not Quite Yet, which was something my then 3-year-old granddaughter loved to say. The piece is, of course, dedicated to her. I created a mock-up, using some quite excellent sound libraries. Perhaps it will find its way on stage at some time, but for now you can listen to it here.

I hope you enjoy it and I promise to be back soon.

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.

Why no social media?

I first ran this post more than 3 years ago. In light of recent developments, I thought it was worth refreshing. Here’s the original text:

Most artists of any stripe maintain an active presence on social media. This is the way they announce events, provide updates, and show images or videos of their work. But you won’t find me there. Why not?

When I ran a company (Exponential Audio), I was very much present on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on. I also participated in a number of product-oriented forums. It was an absolute necessity to be there. But I grew very uncomfortable with what I saw and what I learned. Frequent incivility should come as no surprise to anyone. Monitoring conversations to keep them on-topic was a big job for my company and removing bots and trolls was an unfortunate part of that.

I also didn’t like my interests and conversations to be shared with advertisers, political groups and malevolent state actors. Running a social media site is certainly costly and users must realize that they’ll pay for the service in some way. But I simply don’t like the way it’s done now. Catching up with friends and family is great, but the price is simply too high.

I hope that—whether through some regulation or the arrival of new media outlets—I’ll again be able to participate in the better parts of social media. I would pay for a service that didn’t sell me as the product. But that’s not what we have right now. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

I’m glad you’ve found my little website and I do hope you’ll share it with others. Reach out to me on my contact page if you like. Word of mouth is always the best way to do anything. Thank you.

All of what I said then is still true. But at the start of 2025, there’s no longer even a fig leaf of concern in two of the major social media providers. One provider has an owner who has explicitly allied himself with right-wing and Nazi sympathizers around the world. His grip on the American government has tightened. The other has dropped all content restrictions in favor of the revenue he gains by allowing hate and untruth to flow though his servers. It is apparent that no amount of wealth can slake their thirst for more.

I believe that both of these social media providers have worked against honest dialogue and have done deep damage to democracy around the world. I would be delighted if they went out of business today. That won’t happen: it will take the world a generation to understand how it has been damaged by the venality of these organizations. In the meantime, I can’t associate with them in any way. I hope you will understand.

I am hoping to find social media with outreach for the arts and civil dialogue. I do have a tiny presence on Blue Sky, but the company has a lot of organizing to do.

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!