I’ve spent the past couple of days circling Jacob Harrison’s new piece like a wild animal.  Pouncing in here and there to toy with my prey, sometimes clawing away at the poor beast.  In other words, I’m tightening up the whole thing.  The low point just before the coda finally fell into place, and some of the busy bits near the beginning are looking much more acceptable.  Little tweaks to orchestration happen constantly.  Score and parts are due middle of next month…so it’ll probably be right down to the wire with this one!  Still, every little edit makes me feel better, so it’s worth it to know it’s right.  It’s also exciting to know that the premiere is only a couple of months away!  One week of hanging with the good folks in the music department at ISU, where the carilloneur is apparently really into Lady Gaga.

Joey is also in one piece, although we probably shaved a few hours off the end of his life.  He hates the car.  More specifically, he hates the ten minutes after we get in the car and the ten seconds between the time we set the parking break and the time we open the door to get out.  In our defense, Joey got to lay claim to several dozen trees that he would never have encountered otherwise.  Here then is the travelogue for Andrew and Rico’s (and Joey’s) Great American Academic Cross Country Expedition of 2010.  Think of it as Lewis and Clark in reverse.  Only gay.  And with better food and company.  And without the death and disease.

Day 1: Mesa, AZ to Limon, CO via Santa Fe, NM

Day one began with unusually muggy weather in the Valley of the Sun.  The summer rains had only arrived the day before, so the moisture in the air had produced humidity and temperatures both in the 90’s, in addition to intermittent rain.  The landscape heading east out of Mesa toward Heber through the Tonto National Forest is some of the prettiest and strangest I think I’ve ever seen.  Huge rectangular boulders laid right next to one another as if sculpted specifically for that spot.

Between Heber and Holbrook is high desert; flat, dry, low lying brush.  It’s beautiful, but not terribly fun to write about.  Not nearly as much fun as writing about dinosaurs!

There are dinosaurs in Holbrook, AZ!!!

Holbrook is where AZ 277 meets I-40.  40 took us into New Mexico, where we saw stunning Mesas (I guess that’s what they’re called!).  It was also our first leg on one of the big east/west freeways carrying tourists, big rigs, buses, all manner of motorized vehicles whizzing along the edges of the enormous layered rock formations.

During our second gas stop, I snapped a picture of myself and Joey.  It pretty much sums up a large portion of the trip.  I’ve included the conversation that would have taken place here if Joey could talk.

Andrew:  Joey, isn’t this fun!?

Joey:  Screw you, and screw that other guy that’s with us, and screw this trip.  Screw it.

"The sullen teenager was played by Joey the Dog."

By the time we reached Albuquerque we were pretty hungry, but it was only a few more miles to Bert’s Burger Bowl in Santa Fe!  I’d heard about Bert’s on The Splendid Table a few months back.  Jane and Michael Stern had been waxing poetic about their burgers served with roasted chiles on top and I had to try on.  Think of the best greasy diner burger you’ve ever had, then add a wonderful, slow-growing warmth that slowly takes over your mouth.  Add to that the wonderful crinkle cut fries that only a roadside diner can manage to pull off and that’s it.

Bert's Burger Bowl...Santa Fe, NM

While we ate outside we met another couple driving from Houston to Aspen with their dog.  They were nice enough to snap a picture or two.

Post-lunch: notice grease spot on Andrew's shirt, aloof passive-aggressive dog.

The second half of the day was a bit sketchier.  The route from Santa Fe to Limon, CO (where we were to catch I-80) involved mostly country roads.  At one point we went about 60 miles without encountering another human being.  No towns, no lonely farmhouses, nothing.  The GPS insisted we were going the right way.  Pile on top of that the encroaching darkness, the lightning, the narrow, unmarked roads, and my irrational fear of cornfields and the situation was ripe for a grade-A, first-class freakout panic attack.  At one point I actually told Rico we were “going to be eaten by the children of the corn,” and that no one would even know where we were so they could recover our bones.  I don’t even know what “Children of the Corn” is about, but it seemed appropriate.  The last two hours of our day involved driving down said roads in pouring rain, blinded by the occasional oncoming car and by the frequent lightning.  This would have been more acceptable had our destination not been the Econolodge in Limon, CO, a town whose motto should be “Limon: Where Dreams Go to Die.”

Next up: flying blind in Nebraska, getting in touch with my Germanic roots (using fast food), and salvation in the form of Jacob and Kathy Harrison.

The nod is positive reinforcement; I’m currently making a concert-length piece for solo flute and strings from the Laramie Project music.  Other nominees include director Mark Stoddard as well as technical guru and resident cut-up Erik Reid.  This was a fun and fulfilling project, despite the fact that I didn’t have much to do until tech week.  It’s wonderful to keep one toe in the theatre pool; I never tire of doing my little bit to bring something  as good as this production to life.  Special thanks is also due to Duo46 (Matt Gould and Beth Schneider) for their impeccable recording of the work.

]]> http://www.andrewardizzoia.info/?feed=rss2&p=801 http://www.andrewardizzoia.info/?p=794 http://www.andrewardizzoia.info/?p=794#comments Sun, 25 Jul 2010 05:53:14 +0000 admin http://www.andrewardizzoia.info/?p=794 I spent the bulk of today sitting at the only table left in the house working on the Laramie Variations (our desks are disassembled and stacked in the corner of the dining room).  It’s been surprisingly smooth; the original music lends itself pretty well to both solo flute and the string orchestra accompaniment and I’ve done enough reworking and developing to satisfy my composerly instincts.  Last night I did something I often do at the outset of a piece: I made a fairly detailed flow chart of the work: which materials would appear where, which instruments would play what, high points, low points, salient points about the work.  Then today I did something I rarely do: I stuck to the chart with little vexation or second guessing.  Increased confidence in my ability to handle large-scale form?  The pressure of other projects and time constraints?  Who knows…but it’s working so I’m not going to question.  All in all I arranged about 100 measures, starting with the opening “Wyoming” theme, followed by the first two of the “Fence” variations.  Up next some obbligato passages for the soloist, a big arpeggiated bit for the tutti orchestra, the “Parents’ Concern” theme, and a cadenza for the flute.  The best feeling in the world is the one when the whole piece opens up before you!

Things I always keep close at hand: bubble wrap, Cuisinart.

In other news, Rico and I spent the evening planning lunch stops on the Great Academic Cross-Country Tour of 2010.  Roadfood.com came in handy, as did Yelp! Our trip at this point takes us through eleven states, stopping in eight, across the southern edge of the Great Lakes.  The places we’ve picked for our midday stops include a joint in Lincoln, NE that specializes the runza, an eastern european staple of dough, ground meat and cabbage, as well as a place that serves the “best Chinese food in Northwestern Indiana.”  I’m going to try to blog about each leg of our trip with lots of pics of stops along the way, friends we’ll be visiting, and of course our trip’s mascot, Joey.

The two redeeming qualities of the Laramie Variations project are a) the work is guaranteed a performance, and b) the main bulk of the materials I’ll be using already exist, albeit in a drastically different form.  This second point, however, is an interesting one; apart from the orchestral settings of the Lorca Songs, I’ve never arranged my own music for another medium.  One of the issues that’s already perplexing me is how much work must one do in order for the piece to feel like as if it has been created anew.  Is it enough to simply copy and paste material into a new score?  Or must the composer endlessly rework, refine, vary, develop in order to prove his or her mettle?  In other words is arranging “cheating?”  I don’t have an answer yet, nor am I sure that I’ll find one during this process.  Now you’re bummed that you read all that and didn’t get an answer.  Sorry.

Only five more days until the movers, only six until we leave for Hartford, CT via Denver, Ames, and Kent!

Some Assembly Required is turning into quite a piece.  The idea of construction, assembly, and craft looms large in my mind as I work.  Seemingly unrelated bits of material brought together under the umbrella of a ten minute rhapsody for orchestra.  Moments of highly rhythmic activity bump up against sweeping, broad-beamed violin lines.  Structured materials right next to aleatoric passages.  And yet the hope is that it all works together somehow.

This idea of “putting it together” (to quote Sondheim) works on so many different levels; large sections (of, say, a minute or more) can be reordered in a number of ways.  So too can gestures or motives of a bar or less.  How do they change over time?  How does their reordering, or reconstruction change their impact?  How does repetition heighten or make insignificant a musical moment?  All thoughts that bring various degrees of frustation, elation, success and (in the mind of the composer) failure.

University of Oregon

West Orient

This morning I made edits to the Dance Rhapsody movement of the Modular Suite for Horn and Piano in preparation for Rose French’s performance of the work in Australia later this month.  Being a former horn player (or perhaps “reformed” horn player!) I should have realized just how much time Rose spent with the horn on her face in this movement.  My bad, Rose.  The edits not only give the performer a chance to recover a bit during the course of the work, but also makes things a bit more balanced in terms of the horn/piano relationship.

Jacob's new piece

Luckily, I’d sketched out more than I remembered, and the raw materials were pretty much in place.  I’d also had several months to let the piece “bump around in my head” and I was able to resolve some of the formal issues that I’d been struggling with since I started thinking about the piece last year.  For the last three or four weeks I’ve been pouring out music, which happens sometimes, though very infrequently.  Over the last couple of years I’ve bemoaned the fact that being in a graduate program drastically changed my process.  Before grad school, I could write for hours on end…sometimes up to eight or nine hours a day.  Once I came to ASU, I had to carve out little chunks of time here and there between classes, grading, working, and office hours.  My most productive times turned out to be the summers when I had long stretches of free time to let my mind wander (you can’t do much else when it’s 115 degrees outside).  The same is true now.  Without papers to grade or lectures to prepare, I find myself with more than enough time to get on with the work I need to do.

All this has got me thinking a lot about process and craft; two words that are often avoided by composers when they talk about what they do.  Visual artists tend to be more forthcoming about how they produce, but composers still obscure their creativity with Romantic notions of inspiration and mystery (some more than others).  Worse still (IMHO) there are others who don’t think about it at all.  “It’s all very cosmic,” you hear them say.  Still, all composers sit down at a desk, or a piano, or at a computer and develop the ideas that will eventually form a finished piece.  Our process may be exactly the same everytime, or it may change drastically from piece to piece, from year to year; Some Assembly Required began with copious sketches and false starts, but now I find myself working directly on the full score from ideas I wrote down more than six months ago (a way of working that is very different for me).  Still, it feels good, and I like the materials, so why fight it?  Why limit oneself to only one way of working?

This is where I've been working lately

I think part of this sudden productivity has to do with the fact that I’m teaching a private student at Paradise Valley Community College.  One of the things we’ve been working on is process.  Like many composers in their early 20s, my student doesn’t really know yet how to write down everything that comes into his head, nor does he have a set way of working out ideas.  At our lessons, I find myself saying things that I’ve come to take for granted.

• Write down everything.  Just because an idea might not end up in this piece doesn’t mean it won’t be useful down the road.
• Find time to compose everyday.  Eventually skipping a few days will start to hurt and you’ll need the “fix.”
• Work your materials, then rework, then rework again.
• Use up lots of paper and erasers.
• What is your concept?  Do your materials support that concept?
• Create a comfortable place to work, have everything you need at hand.
• If you feel the need to create new materials, don’t.  Go back to your original ideas; if they’re solid, they will yield up new variations of themselves.
• Break your work into manageable chunks.  Sometimes starting at the beginning isn’t the best idea.

In many ways, we’re both taking lessons.  I can sympathize with his challenges because I’ve been there myself and at the same time they’re issues that I continue to address, albeit in an very different way.  It’s good to be mindful of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whether there’s a way to improve what you’re doing.

My best friends

I’m sending the rest of the work off to Rose in the next couple of days, and then it’s Brisbane or bust!

Now onto a new work for the orchestra at Iowa State University, and some other new projects!

I automatically assumed that his email was meant to solicit a new piece (presumptuous of me, I know!).  I was partially right…he was looking for a work for solo flute and string orchestra, though not necessarily from me.  After some questions and answers by email, we decided that I should make an arrangement of some incidental music I wrote for PVCC’s production of The Laramie Project.  My working title is, simply, A Laramie Suite, and the work will be about ten minutes or so in length.  Luckily, I don’t think I’ll have to produce a huge amount of new music, as the main ideas are already extant.  I will, however, probably have to punch up the solo line so that it offers plenty of spotlight moments for the soloist!