Author: Dale

Composition competitions, redux

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I got the American Composers Forum newsletter yesterday and there on the front page was an article by Eric Whitacre, “Advice for the Emerging Composer: Competitions.”

Eric Whitacre, for those who do not know, is one of the major cool kids of contemporary choral music. His blog is here. Highly readable.

Anyway, he outlines some benefits for emerging composers to enter all these competitions. The first is exposure, which makes sense. Even if you don’t win, the judges will have seen your work. He says several times judges have contacted him to see if they could program his work that didn’t win the competition.

Second, he says, you’ll finish the piece. I’m a Lichtenbergian. ‘Nuff said.

Third, and I will quote him directly here:

In the last 18 years I’ve probably entered a hundred competitions and I have never won anything. Nothing. I lost the ASCAP Young Composers award three times (in three different years I entered “When David Heard,” “Lux Aurumque,” and “Cloudburst,” lost with all three.

And more of the same. Incredible. “Lux Aurumque,” sung here at a midnight mass in London. Didn’t win. His most recent post talks about getting a letter from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, rejecting his application for an award they had invited him to apply for.

He says not winning is a good thing. It helps make you stronger, if you’re smart, because it reinforces your sense of your own worth. Your piece should have won, dammit, because it was good, and you know that. It’s what keeps you writing more.

All in all, a timely and enjoyable article. And now I have yet another blog to keep up with.

AFO sketches, 2/12/10

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Yes, I said “sketches.”

First of all, I took Marc Honea’s “Vibes” piece, which I will let him explain in comments, and which sounds like this [mp3]. He sent me a MIDI version of that, which I sucked up into Finale 2010, creating a score, after much mucking about, that looks this [pdf].

My only goal today was to slam some of those notes into a Finale file that would start playing with the orchestration to see if would even work as a string piece. My suspicion is that it’s always going to sound better and cooler in the computer version. However, here’s where I’m stopping for the day: vibes sketch 2/12/10 [mp3]. Four measures of bass vamping, then the first four measures minus the top notes, then the same four measures with the top notes added back in.

I couldn’t resist the glockenspiel.

About this time, as I took a break for coffee, it started to snow. I went out on the back deck and watched it begin to come down. Why not a piece called “The Labyrinth in Snow”?

Here’s what I’ve plopped down. It’s got some nice bits, but it’s still just noodling. Labyrinth sketch 2/12/10 [mp3]. The violin accompaniment will continue under the cello solo, probably quiet little triplets. In addition to the piano, there will be a solo violin as well. The three soloists will wind in and out over increasing flurries from the rest of the strings. I think.

And just so you can share in it, here’s the labyrinth. In snow.

Update, 5:14 pm:

Here’s the most recent version, a little extended. I’m thinking about changing the opening to be a lighter, more mysterious, trill-y kind of thing. Labyrinth 2/12.b [mp3]

Composition competitions, part 2

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I went through all the forms and rules and regs last night to match up deadlines and what I might have on hand already to submit to each one.

I had to ditch the Utah Arts Festival right off the bat. They expected a recording of the work you’re submitting as an example of your work, no MIDI realizations permitted. In other words, you either have had performances of your work already or you have access to musicians. Oh well.

The Yale Glee Club, deadline March 1, is getting “Sonnet 18.” (They have a prize of $1500 + travel expenses to the premiere.)

The Meistersingers (Huntington Beach, CA) needs an a cappella piece. I’ll have to write one, and since it’s due March 1, I bet this one doesn’t get done. ($1000 prize, plus performances and recording.)

The University of Illinois School of Music has the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award, $1000 first place. They’re going to get the quartet/bassoon piece I did last summer. Since their deadline is not until March 15, I’m going to try to write two more movements for that. Maybe.

The Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center at Wellesley College (Wayland, MA) is also getting the quartet/bassoon piece, also due March 15. This one is an actual conference you get to attend and work with older/wiser composers and hear your work worked on. Or something. The call for scores is pretty fuzzy. It looks as if they’re asking for scores of anything you’ve written for judging purposes, and then they’ll pick ten people to come play at this conference. So they may also get “Milky Way” and the “Epilogue,” because those are pretty.

The 1st International Chorale Composition Competition, from the Monteverdi Choral (Cles, Trento, Italy) wants either a setting of “The 33rd Song” from the Divine Comedy for SSATBB chorus, a cappella, or a children’s choir piece, also a cappella, any text. (Prize is $1000 + publication.) Since the Dante is 39 lines of Italian, I’m not going there. Anyone want to write me a text for the children’s piece? Deadline is not until March 31.

The New York Virtuoso Singers want either a cappella or piano accompaniment. Deadline is April 10. They’ll get whatever I write for Meistersingers, which means they may get nothing. Prizes include nominal sums + performance in NYC + possible publication by Schirmer.

And finally, the National Opera Association’s Chamber Opera thing, deadline May 1. They’re getting William Blake’s Inn, and it’s up to them to decide it’s not an opera. Of course, if they decide it is, then I have to rescore the whole damned thing for 20 players. Somehow I am little concerned about that.

Fanfares? If I get inspired by all the rest of this, I might knock one out.

All righty, off to work on none of the above: I’m going to try fiddling with Marc’s Vibes piece.

Composition competitions

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The American Composers Forum website is broken, apparently, so rather than having all the opportunities just listed on the site, they sent out the entire list via email, which is what they used to do.

Since my flameout with the symphony, I haven’t really bothered looking at all the various competitions and calls for scores that flooded my inbox every month. Since I wasn’t writing anything, what was the point? Now, however, the AFO commission has gotten me moving, albeit slugglishly, so I printed out the list.

First of all, what’s this obsession with younger composers? About a third of the competitions were for composers under the age of 30 or 40. Screw them. I like the Yale Glee Club approach: “Composers should be in the early stages of their musical careers.” That’s me, right? I’ve had nothing published and precious little performed. If I’m not emerging, I don’t know the meaning of the word.

These are all opportunities with deadlines in the next six weeks, so I’m going to be submitting stuff I’ve already written for the most part. Just this morning I arranged my Sonnet 18, originally for men’s chorus, and on YouTube here, for full SATB. That should fit the bill for most competitions: unpublished, and unperformed in this arrangement.

But I’m also looking at several orchestral/chamber opportunities. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do for those. There’s always the orchestral arrangement of “Milky Way” that I did for last summer’s abortive Chinese event, but that wouldn’t be small enough for a chamber competition. I haven’t examined all of those carefully yet, so I may have to chuck some of them.

There’s the National Opera Association’s chamber opera competition, and for that I think I’m going to submit William Blake’s Inn. Why not? What’s the worst they can do to me? Blackball me?

There are two wind ensembles who are both celebrating their anniversaries with a call for fanfares. That could be a lot of fun to work on, although I’m not very comfortable with the band sound.

At any rate, that’s where I am, compositionally-speaking-wise, at the moment.

Getting into GHP

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This past Saturday I had the pleasure of interviewing candidates for GHP’s strings program. If my top candidates play as well as they think, Michael Giel will have a very good summer indeed.

At the end of the lunch break, I slipped over to Pebblebrook’s theatre, where art students were undergoing their interviews on the stage. Each student had spread out the requisite number and types of pieces on the stage floor, and the interviewers were walking around quizzing them about their work.

I realized with a small shock that I underwent that same process forty years ago.

Forty years ago.

Forty years ago, I walked into a room with my portfolio, spread it out over a couple of chairs, and was interviewed by two men. I remember not being able to answer one question about the type of drawing one of my pieces was, the answer was “contour drawing”, and I remember that the men were very entertained by my answers in general.

I remember some of the pieces in that portfolio, and I cannot believe that I made it into the Governor’s Honors Program as a visual arts major. I was not that good. However, at the time, all students had to take the Ohio Psychological, essentially an IQ test, and while academic majors had to score at least in the 90th percentile, fine arts majors could get away with the 70th. I scored something like 98, so I’m sure that tipped the balance in my favor.

On the other hand, perhaps my interviewers understood that giftedness is potential, not achievement, and they saw in my work a student who had the potential to achieve, given the training I’d get at GHP. Certainly I hadn’t had it up till that point. Our schools had no art classes; I took lessons out at the Rec Center from Tom Powers (of Powers’ Crossroads fame).

Clearly, though, I would be unable to get into the art major today. Our kids are phenomenal, as you’ll agree if you’ve followed my blog for any length of time and read my posts about the art exhibits each summer. The level of technical expertise and artistic sophistication would put my 16-year-old self, and indeed my 56-year-old self, to shame.

However, as Diane Mize, my painting teacher from the summer of 1970, has reminded me, art instruction in the schools forty years ago sucked. I might have been better prepared, better trained, if Newnan High School had be better able to teach me.

And as she has also reminded me, whether or not I was a good painter I was at heart an artist, one that deserved to go to GHP and who took all that it had to offer and transformed his life with it.

Forty years ago.

Honey, please

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I clicked on a link from my Google homepage to a news article about the teabagger convention’s deciding it would put together an organizing strategy for national elections.

Generally speaking, I’m a marketing department’s worst nightmare: I ignore context, up to and including ads, banners, and in this case, even the website I was on. But as I read the article, I began to think that perhaps it was a bit clumsy for a news article linked from the front page of Google, the glaring apostrophe in it’s where it didn’t belong was a clue, so I glanced up at the top.

Foxnews.com. Oh. And then I got to the last sentence:

Don’t let anyone tell you this is not a big deal. If this gathering is unimportant and this movement is a mirage, why are it’s detractors so upset and it’s participants so upbeat?

Wow. Let me count the ways: second person direct address, editorializing (based on schoolyard logic, no less), and two incorrect it’s. The only thing missing is the phrase liberal media.

Honey, please.

New music

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And we’re off. This morning I heard from Wallace Galbraith, and here are the answers to my questions:

  • around 70 players – 56 violins, 6 cellos, 2 basses, 1 accordion, 3 guitars, 1 percussionist and 1 pipe
  • 4-5 minutes
  • “it would be interesting and challenging for us to play music with its roots in your part of the world – please feel totally free to let your imagination roam!” [Uh-oh. Do we need to discuss this?]
  • “a deadline – it would be useful to be able to start work before Easter 2011 so let’s say the beginning of March”

Let the agony begin.

New music?

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The Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra, which has visited Newnan from our sister city of Ayr before (2005), will return to these shores in the summer of 2011. I have been asked to write a piece for them.

We’ll see.

Of course I want to, and I’ve agreed to the project, without question, having emailed their founder Wallace Galbraith this afternoon to introduce myself and get the ball rolling.

But we all know what happens when someone makes plans to perform a work of mine. Inexplicable complications ensue, up to and including sudden, unexpected retirement and H1N1 epidemics in China.

However, we shall proceed as if no such omens from the universe were expected.

So, what shall we write? You can hear the orchestra on their downloads page: very competent, sprightly interpretations of mostly Celtic dance pieces. They don’t list violas as part of their instrumentation, and the photos are too small to see. I see an accordion in their large group, and I hear a drumset on the mp3s, but the first question I asked of Wallace was what instrumentation would be coming next summer.

I also asked about length. I’m guessing we’re not in the market for anything as long as “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way.”

Finally, I asked about character: would they prefer something closer to their usual repertoire, or would they like to show off in a different direction?

My goal is to write three to five sketches based on Wallace’s response and let him pick the one he’d like to see finished.

Oh, and I asked for a deadline. Of course.

Labyrinth, 1/31/10

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Today I put up the western bamboo fence:

Here’s half of it. One roll (25 feet) of the fencing neatly ended behind the tree at the westpoint.

So I used my third (of four) roll to get over to the dead tree:

I have enough of the roll still rolled up to cover the piece of fencing past the dead tree, but I need some time to think about how to get around the tree.

In other news, last weekend in Senoia, I found these:

These are cowbells, and yes, they are spraypainted gold, but they actually have a nice tone. The two larger ones are about a half-tone apart, and the smaller one is a pleasant interval higher. Together they will make a nice windchime, if I can figure out how to make the wind make them chime.

Reading: an update

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I was appalled to find that I haven’t updated my reading pages in forever. I’ve done my best, but heaven knows I’ve forgotten something that I’ve read since last summer, and I have this persistent feeling that I’ve forgotten something wonderful.

Oh well. It’s just electrons on a page.

I’m doing a better job keeping my reading progress up to date at school, where I print out a big poster:

I got the idea from some media specialist newsgroup and adapted it for myself. I have to say it works. What is it that our beloved Lichtenberg says? “If you want to make a young person read a certain book you must not so much commend it to him directly as praise it in his presence. He will then go and find it for himself.” As usual, Lichtenberg was right. I’ve created a run on the Dead dog book and a swelling interest in the Ember and Green Knowe series.