Puhutko Suomea?

'Twas a good day for Finnish music.

Einojuhani Rautavaara - Cantus Arcticus, Symphony no. 5, Anadyomene (Adoration of Aphrodite), On the Last Frontier
Kaija Saariaho - Cinq reflets, Nymphea Reflection, Oltra Mar
Magnus Lindberg - Clarinet Concerto
Joonas Kokkonen - Symphony no. 4, Requiem

And because you simply can't have a Finnish music day without Sibelius...

Kullervo, Op. 7.

Stockhausen est mort

Karlheinz Stockhausen died last week. It's interesting that I didn't find out about it until Sunday. Anyway, there's a good obit from the LA Times here. You can also check out Alex Ross' blog entry here.

Stockhausen the man came with a lot of personal baggage. But if one can separate the man (and the cult of the man) Stockhausen from the composer one can recognise that he was an incredible force of creation. Admittedly I don't know as much of his music as perhaps I should. And I'm not sure I would begin to think about appropriating (for fear of misunderstanding) many of his ideas about music for quite some time. If ever.

I've been planning for awhile now to know more of his music. I suppose there's no time like the present. I also need to return to the music I have heard and listen to it again for the first time.

Good Things Come in Threes

Elaborating on one of the Bard's recent posts (and because I've been listening to The Return of the King a lot lately) today's Film Score Friday will be drawn from third installments. This doesn't necessarily mean trilogies, just third installments.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith - John Williams

Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi - John Williams

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - John Williams

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - Hans Zimmer

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - John Williams

The Omen: The Final Conflict - Jerry Goldsmith

The Matrix: Revolutions - Don Davis

X-Men: The Last Stand - John Powell

Batman Forever - Elliot Goldenthal

Jurassic Park III - Don Davis (that's right, I went there)

The Rundown

The birthday was great.

Wonderful dinner with great friends at McCormick & Schmick's

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (The Complete Recordings)

Alex Ross's terrific new book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Stephen Pinker)

And cake. Delicious, succulent, homemade red velvet cake. Mmmmmm...

One Score to Rule Them All...

The Precious is mine!!!

My wife is awesome.

Laramie Sketches

The theatre department of William Jewell College is presenting The Laramie Project this weekend. It's a powerful, moving testament of how Laramie, Wyoming (which could be any town, really) deals with the aftermath of a young gay man being kidnapped, brutally beaten and left for dead in its community.

A few months back I approached the director about writing some music for the production. He allowed me to do so with the understanding that there was a possibility that it wouldn't be used. I understood this. It was a test.

I knew immediately that I wanted to write a piano-based atmospheric score with subtle electronics underneath. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. Normally my music is busy with lots of notes. I kicked all that out. I wrote simply and without sentimentality...I hope.

It didn't really hit me until we were in Colorado last month. We were driving through Loveland on our way to Longmont to visit Michael Harris. I gazed at the stunning beauty of this land, nature's music realised in landscape. Instantly I understood the irony. The juxtaposition of the brutality of the crime in a place as beautiful as this is tragedy that seemingly only human beings can create. I knew my job then. I needed to provide commentary without sentiment. Something that, like this beautiful place both real and imagined, would just be.

I hope I've done that.

Festival, Part II: Music Appreciation

Four concerts in a single day. If you've never done this it can be a bit overwhelming (or underwhelming, depending on the circumstances). After while one begins to experience sensory overload, but that doesn't stop me from pushing on.

The first two concerts were chamber music. The first concert was mostly interesting. There was a really great piece for percussion scored for three small drums and three pieces of metal. Very cool. There was a flute solo by my teacher that went mostly well. There was a great piano solo that was very bluesy and I expected it to break into the third movement of the Gershwin piano concerto at any minute. After the concert I thanked the composer for writing something that had a pulse (take that as you will).

Then came the Wind Quintet.

Very rarely do I feel that I don't give a piece of music the full benefit of the doubt or can't appreciate something for what it is. I even feel that I can separate appreciation of great craft from my own aesthetic and not dislike a work just because it's not my aesthetic. I also think I'm a good enough composer/musician that I can hear "through" a weak performance and get the composer's intention. But this piece was atrocious. It wasn't Serial, or serial or whatever, just dense and intellectually over-rigorous to the point of non-interest.

Concert 2 was also chamber music. There was a terrific set of piano miniatures by a composer who is a member of the education department at Truman State. One of the things I have always admired about Robert's music is that, while his music is enormously difficult, it always has a sense of being whimsical, humorous and slightly mischievous. This is especially true when the piece is entitled Vogons on the Beach after Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide. There was a terrific piece for trombone and percussion that really had to be seen to be believed, especially when some of the "percussion" are squeaky toys that are glued to a wooden board and controled by the player's feet. Awesome..and hilarious. This was the concert on which Carol played Angels and Demons. We've covered that already. The concert ended with a saxophone quartet which largely left me with a feeling of...um...okay.

Concert 3 was the already discussed performance of May Music and a series of choral works. The first two choral works were really interesting. A little too brief for the possibilities they contained but really great. The rest, unfortunately, didn't quite hold up. The remaining three pieces on the concert were nice but ultimately sounded like sketches that Eric Whitacre had been smart enough to throw away.

The last concert of the evening was of the Saint Ambrose University Community Orchestra. As these things go (community orchestras) they were actually decent. They were still better than my undergraduate orchestra. Then again there are some middle school orchestras out there that are better than my college orchestra. Anyway there were two pieces on the program. The first was a piece that was a result of the Continental Harmony Project in 2000. Continental Harmony began as a massive commissioning project that created commissions for composers in all 50 states to ring in the new millenium. It's ongoing and you can read more about it here if you want. I was lucky enough to be involved in the performance of the Missouri commission that year. Anyway, this particular piece was kind of a celebration of rural Iowa. Well you can imagine what that was like. Well maybe not. It was kind of like reheated Copland and Ives whirled together and then uninterestingly orchestrated.

The second piece on the program was a saxophone concerto. It was a really nice piece. Very cinematic. This particular composer has written a lot of film/theatre/dance music for larger ensembles and it certainly shows. Interestingly the orchestra sounded completely different on this piece than they did on the symphony. I'm positive that this is because the composer of the concerto knows how to orchestrate to make players sound not just good, but maybe even better than they are. The only distracting element of the piece was that the first movement sounded an awful lot like much of James Horner's Sneakers score which is also scored for alto saxophone soloist and orchestra. Other than that I liked the piece quite a lot.

So that's it. We didn't stay for the Sunday concerts because Davenport is a six-hour drive and we didn't really feel like getting home late in the evening. It was a good weekend though. It's always good to see this motley gang of composers who appreciate each other's work.

Festival, Part I

So. Last weekend die Frau and I were in Davenport, Iowa for the 20th anniversary new music festival of the Iowa Composers Forum. As I mentioned before I had two pieces performed, one of which was a premiere. There's a link to my myspace page on this posting where you can listen to the retooled premiere of May Music (which is still its best performance).

The performance of May Music was good enough but left much to be desired. They got the big picture but some of the really important nuances got completely lost. Here's a hint: when your piece involves a lot of microcanons it's not good to play together. It finally occurs to me that while the piece is written for winds it is actually an orchestral piece that happens to be written for winds. Nonetheless I was appreciative of their efforts.

But the performance of Angels and Demons, an unaccompanied violin solo, went smashingly. Carol played the snot out of it and, I think, really impressed the other composers in the room. Then again, most of them had only gotten 'pretty good' performances. What can I say? It's good to know people. I also happen to know that she surprised several of the professional performers in the room. That's awesome

That's it for now. More about the rest of the festival later, including the possibility creating diversionary tactics like gnawing off one's arm or starting a fire in order to escape the serial composers!

On the Road Again...

Die Frau and I are headed up to Davenport for the weekend.

The 20th anniversary festival of the Iowa Composers Forum will be taking place on the campus of Saint Ambrose University. A good friend of mine will be giving the world premiere of an unaccompanied work for violin called Angels and Demons. Additionally the university wind ensemble will be performing May Music, a sometime noisy, somewhat postminimalist piece I wrote in a flurry several years back. Of all the music I've written so far, it's definitely one of my favourites. You can read about the works in a previous post here.

Keep your fingers crossed for good performances!

What's that smell?

We're off to northern Colorado for the weekend. Die Frau is going to check out the doctoral program at UNC-Greeley. I don't own a laptop so I probably won't be blogging any of it until we get back.

At least I get a break from work.

Gateway

Die Frau and I went to St. Louis this past weekend to hear the symphony perform. Here's the program:

Berlioz - King Lear Overture
Berlioz - Le mort de Cléopâtre
Bernd Alois Zimmermann - Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu
Ravel - La Valse

Berlioz is Berlioz. But the real reason we went was to hear Susan Graham perform Le mort de Cléopâtre. As always she was terrific. The only distracting thing was that she was performing with music. I'm not opposed to this but I think it does take away from the atmosphere surrounding the piece. There were also many parts of the piece where I can certainly understand why Berlioz' teachers at Conservatoire were a little confused.

I had never heard the Zimmermann before and I think I can honestly say I don't think I've ever heard anything like it before. Zimmermann wrote the piece when he was hired to teach at the Berlin Academy. It's scored for large wind orchestra, jazz combo, percussion and 2 guitars (one doubling electric and the other doubling mandolin) and draws on tons of disparate influences. It's chock full of quotations from dozens of other pieces woven into Zimmermann's own framework. It was a pretty nifty piece though not something I would listen to on a regular basis.

The evening ended with Ravel's La Valse which is just a wonderful, bizarre piece of music.

Between the Zimmermann and the Ravel there was a large span of time to reset the stage for to bring the strings back on stage. What blew my mind was that, rather than go back to his dressing room, David Robertson came out and started chatting up the audience. He asked who liked it....applause. He asked who didn't like it. One older gal raised her hand and he immediately went over to her. He wanted to know why she didn't like it and not so he could tell her why she was wrong but, rather, because he genuinely seemed to want to know.

The performance itself was absolutely impeccable. There was clearly a lot of artistic give-and-take between David Robertson and his orchestra. None of it seemed forced or heavy-handed. All-in-all it was a good day. While I don't think we'll be driving over and back in the same day again it was definitely worth the trip.

Day Trippers

Die Frau and I are headed to St. Louis for the day. We're going to hear Susan Graham perform some Berlioz with the St. Louis Symphony. That should be nice. Back tomorrow. Very, very a.m. tomorrow.

Happy Equinox

I love autumn. Now it's here.

It's great living in a part of the country where you have no idea what kind of weather will be bestowed upon you for the Autumnal Equinox. It could be 68° (1997), 77° (1998), 87° (2000), 78° (2004) or 90° as is forecasted today.

I love the Midwest.

First Contact

My film music odyssey began in January 1994. It started with a John Williams obsession but within a few years it was Jerry Goldsmith's music that caught my fancy more than any other. I don't remember the first Goldsmith score I bought but it was a beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.

Today's Film Score Friday is an all Goldsmith affair.

Rio Conchos (1964) - Jerry Goldsmith had the good sense to reclaim the Western from Copland imitators in this terrific little score.

Planet of the Apes (1968, Oscar nominee) - Mmmmm...12-tone + Stravinsky + Bartok. Yummy.

Patton (1970, Oscar nominee) - This might be one of the most intellectual scores ever written.

The Wind and the Lion (1975, Oscar nominee) - Jerry goes swashbuckling.

The Omen (1976, Oscar Winner) - Jerry dances with the devil in the pale moonlight. This movie is nearly unwatchable without his score.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979, Oscar nominee) - The subtitle of ST:TMP should have been: Jerry Goldsmith Saves Our Crappy Boring Film.

Legend (1985) - Damn you, Sid Sheinberg for taking Jerry's score off the American release of the film.

Total Recall (1990) - A great score, one Jerry was really proud of. He swore off action movies after this because there was almost no critical response to his score.

First Knight (1995) - According to an interview done in the mid-90s, one of Jerry's personal favourites among his scores. Kind of strange since the movie stinks. Good music from top to bottom though.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996) - The Pikey's list made me realise I hadn't listened to this in a while so I pulled it out. I almost forgot how good it is.

Air Force One (1997) - Lean. Muscular. Hyperpatriotic. I'm glad Jerry only swore off action films for the time he did.

The 13th Warrior (1999) - I have nothing to add to the gagillion times I've written about this before. It's just awesome and great composition to boot!

This gives me an idea for another post...

10/10

So I got to thinking last week during Film Score Friday. I know each of us has delivered our all-time favourite scores, our all-time favourite cues, etc. but what about narrowing it down? What about making it harder?

We haven't talked film music in a while so here are my nominees for 10 best/most interesting cues of the last 10 years in no particular order.

• "Toccata and Dreamscapes" - Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Elliot Goldenthal, 2001). Combine Penderecki, Ligeti, late-Romanticism and a former blues pianist and mix vigorously.


• "Main Title" - Signs (James Newton Howard, 2002). Three pitches. Three rhythmic durations. Build your entire score on that. Go!


• "Lighting of the Beacons" - The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Howard Shore, 2003). Few music/cinema moments are as satisfying as this. Ever.


• "Glamdring" - The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Howard Shore, 2002). It seems unfair to use two examples from LOTR, but I don't really care because it's my list. What captures it for me is the part where Gandalf falls until the end of the cue. Genius. Especially the long shot of Gandalf and the Balrog falling together into the lake. Cinematic beauty.


• "Trinity Infinity" - The Matrix (Don Davis, 1999). I know. I could've picked "Mona Lisa Overdrive" or "Neodämmerung" or even "Ontological Shock". But "Trinity Infinity" set the tone beautifully for all three scores and their films. It was one of those beautiful rare occasions of something unheard of in film that is used not as a gimmick but as an honest-to-dog structural tool.


• "Dead Already" - American Beauty (Thomas Newman, 1999). This is too different and quirky not to include. While it's a great score it has inspired a host of imitators which, I guess, is the sign of success.


• "The Battle" - Gladiator (Hans Zimmer, 2000). This is where Pirates of the Caribbean really began. This might be the first Zimmer blood-and-thunder cue in which you don't get bored or wonder where the hell he's going with it. Nope. It actually sustains interest from beginning to end.


• "Buckbeak's Flight" - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (John Williams, 2004). Don't ask me. I don't know why. I just love this cue. I fell in love with it the very first time I heard it. I guess it has something to do with the way it almost too perfectly captures both the wonder, excitement, melancholy and sadness of Harry's existence.


• "The Fire Dragon" - The 13th Warrior (Jerry Goldsmith, 1999). A cue built from a single idea that gradually increases in intensity, is completely relentless, and never loses interest. Awesome.
  
• "Journey to the Line" - The Thin Red Line (Hans Zimmer, 1999). This is the single greatest piece of music Hans Zimmer has ever written. Comparisons to Barber's Adagio aside it just seems so audaciously simple. And as we have learned in recent months, audacious and simple aren't necessarily bad things.

Now it's your turn. Go!

Windfall, Part I

I got the call last week that two works of mine are going to be performed at a new music festival the first weekend of November. The festival is the 20th anniversary of the Iowa Composers Forum, to which I have belonged for about a year-and-a-half now. So the first weekend of November we'll be heading to the tropical paradise of Davenport, Iowa.

So what are they performing? I'm glad you asked.

The first is Angels and Demons for violin alone. This will be its first performance. I hope it's as interesting as I think it is. It originally began life as a work for violin and chamber ensemble. Ultimately I was forced to revise the concept heavily and I took about 5 bars from the original piece and used that as the starting point for the solo. The piece is probably best described as a tripartite (slow-fast-slow in this case) fantasia. It is inspired quite a lot by Polish postmodernists like Henryk Gorecki and, to a lesser extent, Krzyzstof Penderecki. The whole piece stems from a single four-note chord that, so I've been told, is really difficult to play. Other than that I prefer to riff on a quote by Sir Harrison Birtwistle: "I went to the piano and found a chord that I liked. Then I learned to make more of it". Aren't crotchety British composers are great?

The second piece is a wind ensemble piece that I wrote in graduate school. I was writing a paper comparing and contrasting the postminimalist techniques Don Davis used in his score for The Matrix with the early orchestral works of John Adams - Grand Pianola Music, Harmonium, Harmonielehre (I'll save you the suspense, there are a lot of similarities, but Davis uses it to imbue the music with subtextual meaning). So I did a lot of listening and studying of Adams' works and transcribing bits of The Matrix that seemed most representative of the score as a whole.

It was during this time that the president of the Phi Mu Alpha chapter at my alma mater called and asked if I would like to contribute a piece to a concert they were putting together. Sure, why not? That was March 31st. 13 days later, after much hemming and hawing about how little time they'd given me, May Music was born and I conducted the premiere on May 3, 2003. Later I revised the piece to its present form (making the woodwind parts more noodly mostly). It's not a minimalist piece. It utilises minimalist techniques. That's it. Because it also has elements of rock, jazz, film music and anything else I could think of whirled together like some sort of postmodern cocktail. To this day I still think it's one of the best things I've written. At any rate I'm pretty excited and moderately nervous because this will be its fourth performance but the first in which I haven't a) been conducting or b) had an office down the hall where the conductor could ask questions about the piece.

Film Score Friday: Box Office Blowout!

Today's listening list comes from the top 10 U.S. grossing films ever:

1. Titanic (1997 - $600,779,824)

2. Star Wars (1977 - $460,935,665)

3. Shrek 2 (2004 - $436,471,036)

4. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982 - $434,949,459)

5. Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999 - $431,065,444)

6. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006 - $423,032,628)

7. Spider-Man (2002 - $403,706,375)

8. Star Wars - Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith (2005 - $380,262,555)

9. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003 - $377,019,252)

10. Spider-Man 2 (2004 - $373,377,893)

Somehow I don't think it's a coincidence that all of these films (whatever their merits) have great scores.

Update!

I'm still around. This blog is not abandoned. I just haven't had anything to say for awhile.

I'm sure something will occur to me soon.

New Ear Candy

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Saxophone Concerto, Mimo II, et al.

I have long admired the music of Mr. Salonen and am quite delighted that he's retiring from conducting to compose more. By the by, for those that don't know, Salonen is NOT a conductor/composer, he's a composer/conductor. HUGE difference.

Rautavaara: Orchestral Songs

This is the 15th Einojuhani Rautavaara recording in my collection. His music is unbelievable. It’s neo-tonal with that cool Nordic approach to Romanticism descended from Sibelius and Nielsen. You'll find neither sappy American neo-Romanticism nor icy central European music here. This disc is full of songs originally written for voice and piano that were subsequently orchestrated (except for three excerpts from his opera Aleksis Kivi, about the Finnish writer and poet).

Lou Harrison: Concerto for Pipa and Strings

The Symphony is performing Harrison's concerto next season. It's terrific. It exudes beautiful melody throughout and just simply dances.

John Luther Adams: The Far Country

“The Other” John Adams composes some of the most beautiful soundscapes around. This is music rich in color and texture and evocative of Adams’ native Alaska.

Philip Glass: 600 Lines, How Now

Early Glass works that have never been released commercially. The Italian contemporary music group Alter Ego performs Glass' 600 Lines, which is 40 minutes of some of the tightest unison ensemble playing you'll ever hear and How Now is 20 minutes of pure bliss.

Paul Dresher: Cage Machine, Dark Blue Circumstance

Paul Dresher is a New York composer that just came into my musical field of vision relatively recently. What I’ve heard so far is terrific. It’s music that has its roots firmly planted in the musical language of rock and postminimalism. Cage Machine is his concerto for violin and electro-acoustic band. It’s an interesting mix in which the first movement calls to mind the musical machinations of Stravinsky while the second seems to evoke the more organic developments of the great works of Sibelius (the mechanic and the gardener, respectively). Dark Blue Circumstance is a great disc of works that highlights the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio. The ensemble is respectively comprised of violin-piano-percussion and several of the works include additional players. Awesome!

And finally the pièce de résistance:

Ligeti: Clear or Cloudy (Complete Deutsche Grammophon Recordings)

This collection of masterpieces was put together by DG (for the ridiculously low price of $31.99) last November and comprises – as the title would suggest – everything of Ligeti's recorded on their label. No small amount of stuff. When we’re far enough away from it that the history of music in the 20th century can be written with some sort of accuracy I can’t help but think that György Ligeti will be seen as one of the most gifted and influential of post-WWII music inventors. In the meantime we get amazing recordings of even more amazing works.

It looks as though I have my ears full for a while.

On Vacation

Hey!

We're on vacation in the Windy City. I'll be returning for regular posts this weekend. I've got good stories including a hyperactive kid who works in a meth lab and Leonardo da Vinci's relevance to Chicago.

We're off to the CSI Experience at the Museum of Science and Industry and then lunch in Chinatown.

I hope everyone is having a good time!

Why is the Meat Counter Bulletproof?

Go see Hot Fuzz.

Now.

This is, without doubt, one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. To call it a spoof doesn't do the movie justice. It's equal parts comedy and all-out, over-the-top action movie.

3 words: Rooftop fight scene.

That's it. That's all you get.

Why are you still sitting there?

Film Score Friday: Miklós Rózsa Edition

Wednesday April 18 was the 100th anniversary of Miklós Rózsa's birth. He died 10 years ago just a few months after his 90th birthday.

Rózsa was one of the first composers to come to Hollywood that didn't try to emulate the sound of Korngold or Steiner (and central European late Romanticism). He was also one of the few composers of Hollywood's Golden Age to maintain a parallel career as a composer of concert music as well as film music with lots of great stuff including a violin concerto for Jascha Heifetz, a cello concerto for Gregory Piatagorsky and a large-scale symphony that smacks of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (written about 20 years after Rózsa's Symphony). His autobiography A Double Life is both an entertaining read and a scathing critique of Hollywood during its Golden Age (his story about how he met Stravinsky is particularly entertaining).

Rózsa is interesting also in that had three distinct phases to his film scoring career. The first deals largely with exoticism like The Jungle Book and The Thief of Baghdad. The second phase deals largely with psychological dramas like Hitchcock's Spellbound, Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend. The third phase deals largely with historical epics. This began when he signed with MGM and was given one of the best contracts a composer had received since Korngold worked for Jack Warner. It was in this part of his career that he got to dive in to musicological research that he loved so much (his Ph.D. was in musicology from the Leipzig Conservatory). This period includes films like Quo Vadis, Ben Hur, King of Kings (Rózsa is the only composer to ever be required in the course of his assignments to score the crucifixion 3 times!), Knights of the Round Table, El Cid, Beau Brummell and Sodom and Gomorrah.

Today's playlist is to be drawn mostly from the historical epic category...mostly.

Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ

El Cid

Knights of the Round Table (good score, baaaad film)

Julius Caesar

Ivanhoe

The Epic Film Music of Miklós Rózsa

Spellbound: The Classic Film Scores of Miklós Rózsa

King of Kings

Time After Time (Nicholas Meyer's first version of Star Trek IV)

Yeah. I'm a big Rózsa fan.

Don't Let It Sneak Up On You!

It's spring and it's getting warmer. The ground is beginning to thaw. The smell of rain, freshly grown grass and fresh herbs is in the air.

You know what else it means, right?

BASEBALL SEASON!!!

My Cardinals will be kicking off the season against the New York Metropolitans on ESPN Sunday night. Don't think for a moment I'll be doing anything else that night!

It's just a pity that there's no professional baseball team here in Kansas City.

Rejected!

A while back the composers organisation to which I belong announced a collaboration with a regional orchestra in Iowa and held a call for scores.

Naturally I submitted the only orchestral concert work I'd finished to that point, my master's thesis composition, a ten-minute work entitled Dream Meditations (several of you are already familiar with this work; dammit! I need to get a myspace music page going). Dream Meditations has its weaknesses but I think it also has its strong moments. It's definitely programmatic and has a dark cinematic bent to it (would you really expect much else from me?). I also think it happens to be nicely constructed in a lot of ways and musically doesn't really betray any direct influences (though they're certainly there. I'd be a liar not to admit that).

So the submission deadline was a while ago and I've finally heard back. As you've probably guessed...rejected!

Am I surprised? Not really. I more-or-less expected that this would happen. Why? I don't know. Myriad reasons, I suppose. The piece is too conservative (though I don't think so). The piece isn't conservative enough. It's too short. It's just not good enough. These are all reasons I can handle.

What would really piss me off, though, is if my piece was rejected based on my age or my scant 1-year tenure within the organisation.

Those that were selected are largely older than me.

Through some cunning detective work I was able to find excerpts of recordings of a couple of the works. One has been professionally recorded. On that alone I think it should be disallowed. Good on that composer for getting his work recorded recorded. I think, though, that because of the relative small size of our group, that there should have been a stipulation in the rules that you just couldn't do that. It automatically unlevels the playing field. My second issue with the piece is that it sounds like warmed-over Shostakovich and Copland mixed together. There's nothing wrong with those composers but why continue to reinvent the wheel?

The other piece (out of 7) that I was able to find was a work for soprano and orchestra. It was like Ives without the brilliance or the ballsiness (thanks to the Bard for the description) therefore was more annoying than anything. Both the soprano soloist on the recording and the text setting were just plain bad and the orchestration was really uneven.

So if these two pieces are indicative of the remaining 5 pieces from which to select the concert program I'm going to be quite disappointed. It's one thing not to be selected because of superior work, but it's another thing altogether if other things are coming into play.

Aural Potpourri

Nothing to report. Except an early-life artistic crisis. I'm working it out. Details to follow.

Meantime here's today's listening list:

Erik Bergman - Concertino da camera; Triumf att finnas till; Lament and Incantation; Silence and Eruptions - Almaviva Ensemble, Ulf Söderblum, cond.

Esa-Pekka Salonen - Piano concerto - Yefim Bronfman, NY Philharmonic, composer cond.

Evan Ziporyn - Frog's Eye - Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, cond; This Is Not A Clarinet - Evan Ziporyn, clarinet(s)

Steve Martland - Horses of Instruction - The Steve Martland Band

Messiaen - Turangalila Symphony - Orchestre de l'Opéra Bastille, Myun-Wung Chung, cond.

Ligeti - Violin, cello and piano concertos - Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez, cond.

Goin' International

So I found out that recently that a short I scored in May of 2005, The Importance of Blind Dating (which I've discussed before), was screened for a Valentine's Day Film Night at London's Carnsforth Station.

Does this mean I get to say my music has been heard internationally?

Or is that in poor taste? I mean, it's not like it's a big-budget international film or anything.

78 Years Ago Today

Jerry Goldsmith was born in L.A.

There's an article in Newsweek about Ennio Morricone (since he's being given this year's lifetime achievement award at the Oscars) which refers to him as maybe the greatest film composer ever. For my money, after Herrmann, it was Jerry. He may not have created instantly recognisable scores for certain iconic Spaghetti Westerns, but he did score a lot of iconic films, many of which have withstood the test of time pretty well (Charlton Heston's bellowing aside!).

Memorandum

I have come to a conclusion.

Like it or not, love it or hate it, the single most influential piece of popular music written in the past 5 years is (drumroll please!)

Pirates of the Caribbean.

Now I know you're thinking, "Herr, that can't possibly be true, can it?"

Yes, Bambi, it's true.

I've done a painstaking amount of passive research on the subject. Watch any broadcast sporting event, sports show, reality tv or anything else that requires energetic music and you'll discover it's being ripped off; most of the time not so lovingly.

For the record I like the Pirates of the Caribbean films and their music.

Yo-Yo Ma(nia) Film Score Friday

Yo-Yo Ma is in town this weekend for what is probably the biggest series of concerts we've ever done.

To that end I offer the following hodge-podge for Film Score Friday:

Hero - Tan Dun
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - Tan Dun
Memoirs of a Geisha - John Williams
Yo-Yo Ma Play Ennio Morricone
Fire, Water, Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio - Elliot Goldenthal
Concerto for Cello - John Williams
Silk Road Journeys - Silk Road Ensemble
The Protecting Veil - John Tavener (who is an honorary member of the category as he wrote some original music for Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men)

Contemplation Music for Sad Days

Choir Concerto - Alfred Schnittke
Coptic Light - Morton Feldman
You Are (Variations) - Steve Reich
Requiem - Herbert Howells

By the way...

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas, Festivus, Chanukkah, New Year, Kwanzaa...whatever.

I would also like to contribute the following:

We made it. It was tough and not a little grueling but it's over. It's like the elephant in the room and nobody seems prepared to discuss it. You know what I'm talking about.

The Mozart Anniversary Year

Congratulations, everybody. I think we managed to go the entire year in the call center listening to virtually none of Wolfgang's works. I understand that the concert season isn't over yet so there's still some to endure, but the technicality is the thing and the year is officially done.

And since the demise of our "Mozart Anniversary Year Countdown" clock you will (hopefully) notice that it has been replaced with a new clock that is simultaneously depressing and hopeful.

Happy New Year!