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.