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.
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.
