I had read that Peabody provided students with the opportunity to have music played by the orchestra in periodic reading sessions. So, I set about starting an orchestra piece during my year off. For me, composing had been a process to better understand the various aspects of music, a way to teach myself. While I had teachers, my eagerness to understand took me into corners of the music world that even they had not seen. The orchestra, to me, was one of the last and most significant places a composer could probe.
I was teaching a few music theory lessons to pre-college students at the University of Georgia. Before and afterwards, I would spend time on the piano with staff paper, sketching out in detail the rhythm skeleton, harmonic framework, and long changes of the first third of my orchestra piece. This was to be my most complicated work, and I put everything I knew into it. Building on the concept of form as one long transition, I wanted to explore superimposed formal units. I wanted to see how musical variables could change at different rates over time and how each parameter could have its own formal shape.
Packed up and shipped out, I arrived in Baltimore, much different from any other place I had lived. The rural farm towns in Pennsylvania and Tennessee and the amoebic suburbs of Atlanta lacked the rows of houses and the thrusting skyline that give a city a memorable shape. Baltimore had a sense of place. The conservatory was also quite different from the liberal arts college I had attended. It was filled with history, and music, but felt empty of scholarship and curiosity.
I brought the orchestra piece with me and completed it under the distracted eyes of Christopher Theofanidis. He had many insightful things to say about orchestration. He continually expressed how courageous he felt I was for sticking with a modernist esthetic. Style aside, we were quite compatible as far as students and teachers go. I feel I learned more from sitting in on his class about living composers, where I lost my fear of minimalist procedures and discovered composers like Saariaho.
The second, longer section of the piece, in retrospect, is missing a lot of the definitive shape of the first section. The piece opens with a city skyline but smears into a less defined cloud of suburbs, a counterpoint to the path my life had taken. The opening is bold, dramatic, and full of one big idea. The last two-thirds meander through an unsettled, unrepeating melody. As Tristan Murail noted, the opening cements something firmly in the mind that one expects to return in some form. At the time, I was purposefully avoiding returning form. For me, this piece was to be one long series of transitions, always moving away from what was before and becoming something else.
This was my life in a way. The earliest time I can remember was being a poor preschooler in a trailer. I remember a warmly lit Christmas scene where I was presented with fuzzy monkey slippers from my father who worked in a boot store. My parents took me to Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles from relatives. The distance was the reason they eventually moved to Georgia. Despite visits to Tennessee and one final visit to that small Pennsylvania town, I would not live there again. I was watching my innocence fade and discovering new interests, science, music, mathematics, computers. Eventually the wooden swords were put in boxes with the stuffed animals. Creating music took their place. Well, music was not the only thing that replaced my childhood, it was the desire to prove my intelligence. I had discovered that I was not athletically inclined. School quiz teams, AP classes, and comparing report cards all demonstrated my need to compete. The baseball went in the box with the wooden sword.
The funny thing about transitions is how they sneak up on unsuspecting people. I did not know that the competitive nature I had developed playing baseball would lead to me fighting to be in the top ten of my class. I certainly did not know that my religious upbringing would shape my early view of music into what were the "right" and "wrong" ways to compose. My high school self would not have predicted that my musical explorative experimentalism would lead me to be treasurer in a non-profit that runs an international improvised music festival devoted to music that cannot easily be deemed "right" or "wrong."
What is sneaking up on me now? Since graduating with two Masters degrees, I have tirelessly tried to stay connected to a musical world that is moving far away from the conservatory. I have organized and staffed concerts of intuitive music, I created a series to encourage other local musicians to compose and perform new chamber music, and I have attempted to continue to teach from this old Western tradition of discipline and fundamentals. I find myself unable to support myself with a career in music. It may be a lack of initiative to get the attention I deserve, or it may the general lack of interest our society has for music that makes them think in abstract terms. Music is a part of me, like family. It will never go away. It may mutate through many forms over the course of my life.
At this moment, there is a more urgent parameter I must shape as I move through time. I need to find the skills within me that can earn me money and establish a lasting career. Two great lessons I have learned from Baltimore's experimental music scene. The first is that one should be versatile and eager enough to play with anyone and learn what one can from them. The second lesson I observed as pervasive throughout the music scene in Baltimore. From the gigging musician to the web developer, everyone works a job to provide them with the resources to do what gives them life. The work, marginally related or not, does not matter. The conservatory tries to crank out a bunch of virtuosi who, when they have reached the end of the academic conveyor, they spill out on the floor because there is nowhere to go. I think Peabody needs to be paired up with a trade school. Come to Peabody and learn the Well-Tempered Clavier and plumbing!
I almost forgot. The orchestra piece was read at Peabody, conducted by the rising star known as Erin Freeman, may she shine brightly in the dark sky of classical music. You can listen to the recording online.
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