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.
9 comments:
It does all sound rather suspicious, but my first reaction to someone's rejection is usually, "Well, it's all arbitrary, anyway. Maybe the judges themselves couldn't even put their finger on why they didn't think the piece was good enough, or maybe they liked it as much as another piece and had a very hard time deciding. When you only have the absolute final fact, it's hard to say."
Recall the meetings with the Mostly Live Composer Society in which we discussed which pieces we thought should win the contest. Granted, the entire group's vote still only counted as less than half of a single faculty member's vote, but I'm sure the airheaded debate is analogous to any you would find on a legitimate committee.
I don't know. I'm not trying to blow sunshine up your ass, and I'm not trying to belittle your cynicism with my own. I've never even submitted anything to a contest, so what do I know.
But you mentioned that Dream Meditations has its weaknesses... what do you suppose those are, and how do you suppose they would have been discussed by the committee?
Just curious.
Hey, this is one of the rare times that I actually have the whole discussion on the phone prior to your posting... I feel so informed!
I suppose I feel the piece's biggest weaknesses are two.
The first is that I think at times it's over-orchestrated. This is a relatively easy fix. I don't really know why I needed 4 trumpets and 4 trombones, just that I wanted them. Perhaps it's the big band experience in my coming out. I also don't necessarily think that I needed 3 bassoons. It would have worked just as well with 2 bassoons and the bass clarinet doubling any inside voices between the two.
The second is that it might have too many ideas in it for a 10-minute piece. One could argue that this follows the programmatic element of the piece itself. Having its basis in dreams and that dreams are fleeting, often schizophrenic spaces within which anything truly is possible might actually strengthen certain aspects. The flipside to that argument is that it is actually a 15-20 minute piece crammed into 10 minutes because that's all the time McClure told me I could have.
Formally I think it's fairly solid and has a lot of appreciable things. And when you strip away a lot of the over-orchestration it's a really colourful piece that may still have a lot of potential.
I typed an extremely lengthy response to this, but I decided against it. I deleted it all, to give you the short of it.
I'll just say that I don't consider those things weaknesses. They are completely arbitrary, bordering on hypocritical. I've heard every enalytical argument imaginable, and I don't really want to have to nod along to some menopausal faculty explanation regarding the "why". I've heard so much of it that the arguments have actually canceled each other out.
It sounds to me that you're clinging too tightly to the opinionated advice of Dr. Gooch. He's a great teacher, but a lot of what he tells you you "need" to do is still just opinion.
Dr. Gooch's The Stones Speak of Eternity had two versions, a really long one and an abridged one. He had different people swear up and down that one version was superior to the other.
If you want to make Dream Meditations longer, to develop the undeveloped, do it. As long as the piece does what YOU, THE COMPOSER thinks it "needs" to do, intuitively telling what "needs" to be told. If you want to keep it short, do it. If you want to omit something... do it? I like the piece the way it is. That's just one white boy's opinion. It's your piece. If you want to add a section in which Greedo shoots Han first... well, I wouldn't recommend it, but... whatever.
As for the "over-orchestration"... that is bullshit. If that's the sound you wanted, and that's what you can get away with... HOW THE FUCK IS THAT A BAD THING?? Two words: Richard Fucking Wagner.
That's not a weakness... it's an excuse. Some committee member grasping at straws to find a reason to sink it may find this a reason, but I've seen a WHOLE helluva lot of overly-orchestrated pieces by revered guest composers, contest winners, etc. I don't accept this as a weakness to the composition.
There. That's the short version of my response.
Hallelujah--holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?!
Actually, Wagner isn't over-orchestrated, often just badly played.
People think that all of his music is big and bombastic when, in fact, it's just the music people know of his that's such. Just because he calls for an armada of harps and a phalanx of french horns doesn't mean he uses them all the time. Actually, he rarely used the whole orchestra at one time. There are times when it almost sounds like chamber music! It just has to be molded in the hands of a master conductor like Pierre Boulez in order to get all the subtle gradations in timbre and clarity of line. That's just not what people think of when they hear Wagner. (And say what you want about ole' Pierre, he's a helluva conductor when it comes to balancing large orchestral textures.)
And as far as Dream Meditations is concerned I'm the one who thinks it's over-orchestrated in a few places.
I know all that about Wagner and more. I wasn't even coming close to saying he uses big, bombastic over-orchestration all the time. Just pointing out the fact that he does so at all. When he does, it works, so he gets away with it.
If you say so, you say so. All I'm saying is, if this turns into a bar brawl with committee members, I got your back.
I also feel my thesis would be considered too "conservative" to accept, ironically enough. I also think it's under-orchestrated, but that's a blog post for another time.
big ups to you for submitting! teach me.
Show us the ways of the composer.
Did I miss something? Did I get promoted?
I haven't composed anything for weeks. Furthermore I decided a week ago that I'm taking a bit of a sabbatical as well.
I can't remember how long it's been since I slept so well.
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