Joshua Shank

I'M A COMPOSER FROM MINNESOTA'S TWIN CITIES CURRENTLY LIVING IN AUSTIN, TEXAS.

OCCASIONALLY I MIGHT HAVE SOMETHING INTERESTING TO SAY.

Okay, so I'mma start this off by saying that, despite the fact that I'm not a particularly religious person, I friggin' love Christmas music, you guys. I love it. I'm not exactly sure what it is. Maybe it's the fact that there are very few tunes that seemingly everyone knows and these melodies are among them. Maybe it's that I'm associating it with how much I loved getting presents when I was a kid and I'm just carrying that optimism forward. Maybe it's that one time I got to go caroling with the guys from Cantus and we ended up shoveling some lady's driveway for her whilst jamming out on “Good King Wenceslaus” and that reminded me of how awesome it feels to do good deeds and then it was Christmas-themed and also there was booze. Maybe it's the rampant consumerism. No, it's definitely not that. In any case, I love Christmas music...and two really, really good albums-of-it got released this year that I've really been enjoying.

So have you guys all gone out and obtained (via Spotify, iTunes, or whatever) the new album by The Singers? It's called Dulci Jubilo: Christmas with The Singers, and if you don't have it yet you need to get on that right-quick because this thing is really, really good.

In terms of Christmas-themed albums that choral ensembles put out, I feel like there are generally two types, the first of which is an album full of music "for the time." In other words, there are arrangements of traditional carols mixed with pieces that are appropriate for the Advent and Christmas season. The first album that The Singers put out, Shout the Glad Tidings, is one of these. They've got Jocelyn Hagen's (brilliant) arrangement of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” just a few tracks away from Arvo Pärt's blistering, minute-long setting of the “Bogoroditse Dyevo” text. Seraphic Fire's newest album, Silent Night (which Paul Carey reviewed beautifully, btw), also falls into this category.

The second type of Christmas choral album is the kind The Singers just released and one, I think, pioneered by The Dale Warland Singers in their Christmas Echoes volumes: a whole mess of carols in a bunch of new arrangements.

And The Singers knock one out of the park, IMHO. Abbie Betinis's arrangement of “In The Bleak Midwinter” is brittle and triumphant at the same time, Timothy Takach forms a section of the simple “'Twas in the Moon of Wintertime” into this beautiful, running tableau of counterpoint that I can't get enough of, and J. Aaron McDermid takes a carol I have always hated—“I Wonder as I Wander”—and crafts something I actually really enjoy out of it.

However, Artistic Director Matthew Culloton's contributions to the lineup are, for me, the absolute standouts. Especially the title track, the traditional Norwegian song, “Kling No, Klokka,” and his transformation of “Angels We Have Heard on High” from the familiar, pedestrian melody that everybody mindlessly sings into a piece which gives grateful service to the poetry in the text. That is incredibly difficult, you guys...especially for such a familiar piece.

For me, his arrangements seem to fiercely (but optimistically) argue for the relevancy of traditional music like this in the context of modern society. Or I might be reading into that. I don't know.

In any case, here's one of Matt's arrangements that somebody sent me a few days ago which isn't on the album—his arrangement of “Still, Still, Still”—premiered by The Singers with the man himself at the podium. It's intimate but not precious...and that harmonic turn around the 1-minute mark always gives me some good, old-fashioned Midwestern nostalgia for some reason (perhaps because it's "winter" in Austin and it's currently 80 degrees).

But seriously, you guys, Dulci Jubilo: Christmas with The Singers is incredibly beautiful music sung with the laser-like precision and emotional weight that the ensemble brings to “serious” stuff like their gorgeous album of Morten Lauridsen's work. You should all rush out and get it. I ordered a copy direct from the ensemble before I found out I could just search it on Spotify. But then I was like, “Whatever. That's actually great because I just contributed to an organization that I absolutely love.” Maybe I should order it on iTunes as well just to be, like, consistent.

The other Christmas album I'm digging at the moment is Sufjan Stevens's's new release, Silver & Gold. It's a five-disc compilation so there is a ton of music on it and it's all vintage-y, banjo-y, oft-introspective-y Sufjan. But he can be damn funny too, you guys. He gets all up in a vocoder for “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and the first release was a song called “Christmas Unicorn” which is hands-down my favorite thing on there.

It starts off slowly with the personification of the holiday all darkly talmbout itself (“I am hysterically American/With a credit card on my wrist”) but, around the the six-and-a-half-minute mark, it explodes into this beautiful, optimistic anthem (“I'm the Christmas Unicorn/You're the Christmas Unicorn/It's alright...I love you”) that had the crowd jumping around and singing along at the concert here in Austin that I went to. Here, check out this cel phone video of said song in which Sufjan is dressed as the unicorn and totally fucks up a lyric.

It was just a giant, fun, sing-a-long party (entitled “The Surfjohn Stevens Christmas Sing-A-Long Seasonal Affective Disorder Yuletide Disaster Pageant On Ice”). See that thing behind him? It's called the Wheel of Christmas. Audience members got to intermittently go up and spin it to see which carol we would all sing together.

All that fun eventually dissolved into some of the intimate, confessional songs that Sufjan does so well. Check out “The Owl and The Tanager” from the All Delighted People EP if you don't know what I mean. My friend, Mary, was with me and during “For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti” I started crying. She's never been to a concert with a weepy composer before so she got all concerned and was like, “Oh my gosh, Josh. Are you okay?” I was like, “Oh, yeah I'm fine...*sniffle*...I just cry a lot at concerts is all. I'm not sad. This shit is just so damn beautiful.”

Happy holidays, you guys. Go give your Christmas Unicorn a hug or something.

Last December Austin's own Conspirare performed the arrangement of "Where is Love?" I did a few years back and I finally got a chance to listen to the new live album from that concert series. Christmas at the Carillon is sort of a local tradition and I'm honored that Craig found a spot for my little piece amongst some other really, really great pieces that range from an incredibly intimate reading of Björk's "All is Full of Love" (which is probably my favorite song of her's) as well as Mela Dailey's beautiful performance of "Vaga Luna."

The program itself was one of the ensemble's signature "collage" concerts in which all these different musics sort of mingle with each other--sacred and secular; "pop" and "classical"--in this really beautiful universal way. I never really get tired of hearing how Craig puts it all together and this was no different. He leads into "Where is Love?" by having Matt Alber sing a short, restrained verse from "Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem".

Photo by Hornaday Design

One of the other pieces they did for that concert series was Craig's arrangement of Carly Simon's "Let The River Run." Do you guys all know this piece? It's from the soundtrack to that Melanie Griffith/Sigourney Weaver/Harrison Ford movie from the 80s, Working Girl. Check out the video from the 80s. There be some crazy 80s hair up in there.

I was watching that with Jocelyn Hagen one time and she was all like, "My mother used to have hair like that...and I loved it." All joking aside, though, it's a great song. My mom was crazy about it...and had similar hair...and used to play it in the family minivan all the time. When I heard the choral arrangement of it for the first time all I could think about was hairspray and that wood paneling on the side of our van.

It's been way too long since I've posted anything here but it's been an incredibly busy last 6 months. Luckily, that means there are some exciting things that will be coming down the pipeline and the stable of bloggable nonsense will be cleared in fairly short order.

Some incredible albums have come across my path since I last posted here. I don't know if you guys have all gotten hooked up with Spotify yet but, if not, it is definitely worth checking out. It's a bit easier for me to get all down with it since most of my music consumption happens while either working at my desk or out hoofing it at various speeds in the city of Austin.

Do you guys all know the Bedroom Community label out of Reykjavik? I first heard about it when a friend hipped me to Nico Muhly's album, Mothertongue, but they've got an entire roster of really incredible artists as well (Sam Amidon is one of my other favorites). In any case, they just released their first collaboration with a new artist named Puzzle Muteson. He's a singer/songwriter from the Isle of Wight and his first album, En Garde, has some of the most intimate music I think I've ever heard (this side of Doveman). Listen to "Glover" when he sings, "I swear...I'll find a gun," and you know he's probably not talking about using it on somebody else (or at least that's what I'm reading in to it). It's weird to hear that notion spoken out loud but it just goes to show that he's willing to let you all the way into his psyche. Nico provides orchestrations which work to lift the sometimes-bleak lyrics into a hopeful optimism and the album as a whole is really good.

Also worth checking out is the gorgeous video for the title track. It starts out very close-in and then swells into a beautiful, passionate release of emotion. Love love love this album.

The Fleet Foxes finally came out with a new album, you guys! But...damn...it was worth the wait, right? The title track for Helplessness Blues contains maybe some of my favorite lyrics ever:

I was raised up believin' I was somehow unique

Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes

Unique in each way you can see

And now after some thinkin' I'd say I'd rather be

A functioning cog in some great machinery

Serving something beyond me

Listen for yourself.

I've often said that my musical tastes don't run a gamut. They are either what people would call "sophisticated" (via lyrical content or maybe, you know, the fact that I'm a composer) or "trashy" (I have seen Ke$ha twice...and am unrepentant about it). Well, Beyonce's new album be some classy trash up in here...or maybe some trashy classiness. I don't care. You figure it out...because when "Start Over" drops off the map around 2'45" and subsequently erupts I am unable to pay attention to anything else. Then when the producer fills in the high end with some bitchin' piano licks I start to think it's just classy.

I've mentioned Twin Cities singer/songwriter Adam Svec here more than a lot of other musicians and I was really excited to see that his new album, Weaks In The Waves, came out this year. It's definitely a next step for him. This isn't to say that his previous two albums weren't good...because they definitely were ("Breaking Strings" will always be a favorite of mine)...it's just that there's a real "finished product" sheen coming off this one.

I have so many favorite songs on this album but "Chariot Swinging Low and Mean" has this running guitar part that I love which eventually spills over into a duet between Adam and singer Karen Salter. Then there's "Choir Robes." Whenever I feel homesick for the Midwest I pop this track on: "Cause when I'm lost, I will haunt them all/Cause what I found in these things is beautiful". It's a simple observation, to be sure...but it's also something that people rarely have the presence of mind to say; and I'm grateful there's somebody like Adam to remind us of these things every now and then.

I know this next album is two years old now...but I had never heard it until just recently. Damn. By the time "Cosmic Love" becomes the hurricane it eventually does I'm glad there's the album they just released I can listen to when I get sick of Lungs.

I'm a Death Cab for Cutie completist. To date they're the only band I've seen three times (in progressively smaller venues). The first single off of Codes and Keys was pretty good ("You Are a Tourist") but I think I love the simplicity of "St. Peter's Cathedral" and where it eventually goes even more.

And now a huge mea culpa: I had no idea how amazing Björk was until her most recent album, Biophilia, came out. I think I used to dismiss her music because some of those lyrics don't always make sense and I thought it was more fun to be sarcastic about that than actually listen. What seems to have turned me around on this album is her use of a bunch of obscure and interesting instruments. During "Thunderbolt" she actually plays a Tesla coil. I know that's been done before...but not like this (to my knowledge). "Crystalline" features something called a "gameleste" which Wikipedia tells me is a celesta modified with elements from a gamelan. Then there's the creepy organ part in "Hollow" that I will be looking for a way to steal.

As I mentioned with the Florence + The Machine album, I'm glad there's a deep well waiting for me to wade through once I get sick of Biophilia (not that that is going to happen any time soon).

Mahalo.

Everybody knows that summer vacations are the most fun when they're paid for. Case in point: the 10 days I spent tooling around the northeast with the University of Texas Chamber Singers. The gigs were relatively light and the free time relatively heavy and, best of all, the vast majority of the trip was on UT's dime.

That being said, I feel as if I should say here that I sometimes feel weird about posting a travelogue here. It's my space to do with what I want but I'm always reminded of that episode of The Simpsons where Patty and Selma make everyone watch their slides from their Recent Trip to Wherever and it's (probably fairly) played as something that is incredibly boring. I remember this whenever I start talking about Where I've Been Recently and it makes me think sometimes that this might come off as bragging but, honestly, seeing new things is something that enriches me as a person and I can't help but be excited about going to places I've never been. I've had a terrible case of wanderlust ever since I was teenager and any time that gets a little stretch it's a great and worthwhile experience.

We started off in the Boston/Cambridge area and, unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of time to see anything; really just a morning. Because of this I decided to camp out in the MIT music library and work on the libretto for this new piece I'm writing for The Singers. It's a heartwrenching text about a man that died in the recent earthquake that struck Haiti and it's told mostly through interviews with his wife so if you can imagine me amongst all the MIT smart people crying by myself at a table then you've probably got it right. The story is truly moving and I'm excited to attempt to do it justice. More on that later.

Once I got that put together I sort of wandered the campus because I knew there was a Frank Gehry building somewhere. I walked around for a bit looking for it and eventually stumbled on what I was looking for. Behold! The Ray and Maria Stata Center.

My architect mother and I get into debates about Gehry's work on a fairly regular basis. I am of the mind that it's interesting to look at and she is of the mind that you can't find your way around inside one of these things. We are both right. I legit got lost inside this building and had to Hansel and Gretel my way out of there. I've had similar experiences inside the other three Gehry buildings I've been in (Walt Disney Hall in LA, the Experience Music Project in Seattle and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis) but I still love these things.

Here's the venue for our concert in Cambridge. I forget the name...but it's a church. If you've seen one you've seen almost all of them. Nice space to sing in, though.

The next stop on the tour was a very brief stay in New Haven. I think I had maybe 90 minutes of free time so I didn't get to see a damn thing or, more importantly, go to Pepe's. When I told my friend, Andrew Davis (a Yale grad and brilliant composer), that I was headed to New Haven, he got all up in my face about this pizza and how it was sort of a moral imperative that I go there. I guess it was the first pizzeria in the United States or something.

Sadly, I didn't have time. I did, however, make it to another place in New Haven (called simply Bar) that serves--ready for this?--Mashed Potato Pizza. I know that sounds weird but, seriously, that shit was unbelievably good; a perfect crust with garlic butter, garlic mashed potatoes and thick, slab bacon on it. I'm a vegetarian of sorts but I make an exception for both seafood and (just because) bacon and this pizza was unforgettable.

I had wanted to see the two buildings on Yale's campus designed by Louis I. Kahn but, unfortunately, didn't make it so that Gehry business I was just talking about will have to be the sole entry which speaks to my fetish for interesting architecture (of which there is a dearth here at UT...sorry, Longhorns).

After New Haven we took a train to New York City. As a "pleasure tourist" NYC doesn't hold too many new things for me because I've been incredibly lucky to have been there a few times before (all music-oriented trips) and all the major stuff has been taken care of (you can read about the adventures of a much more naive Josh here, here and here). Because of this it can be difficult to find things to do but I was lucky enough to meet up with Michael Kerschner (director of the brilliant Young New Yorkers' Chorus) for dinner at the I Tre Merli Bistro in the West Village. I had this incredible horseradish-encrusted salmon and Michael and I talked about the YNYC's amazing performance at the national ACDA convention in Chicago this past winter. It's on iTunes and the Clare MacLean piece is worth the price of admission for the entire album. Seriously.

After a stop at a hipster bar in Williamsburg called Barcade (they have a shit-ton of old arcade games, you guys!), I witnessed a massive Times Square advertising fail. I'll wager spell check is to blame.

One of the things I realized whilst walking around Manhattan is that I had never been to Central Park so, in that interest, I took about five hours and fixed that situation. I basically just walked the entire southern part of the park and listened to the new Gaga album as well as get my phone call on with Jocelyn Hagen for a solid 45 minutes (with a brief guest appearance by Dan Nass). It was a relaxing--and free--way to spend a morning.

While I was walking around the park I stumbled on a shoot for Law & Order: Criminal Intent but, unfortunately, the pictures I took were too blurry to include here. You'll just have to take my word for it that I awkwardly scrambled up some rocks and took a few pictures of Vincent D'Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe shooting a scene.

Afterwards I was like, "That's a pretty New York thing to see, right?" Then on my way back I saw a sign advertising a soup restaurant and immediately had a craving for soup. It turned out to be the dude who was the inspiration for the Soup Nazi character on Seinfeld.

I had the lobster bisque (it was so good) and was like, "Wow. That's definitely something that's really associated with New York. That's pretty lucky that I saw it."

Then I stopped at the intersection of 53rd & Broadway and noticed I was standing next to Yoko effing Ono.

Now that's some New York shit for you. I didn't want to bother her because (a) she was talking with someone and (b) that's rude. What I did do was hang back and take this creeper picture of Yoko and her companion. I was able to rationalize this act because there is no way in hell that anyone would believe me if I didn't.

So...thank you, New York City. I basically just walked around and ended up in a bunch of situations that most of America would identify with that locale. They all had to do with pop culture but, still, it wasn't not cool (double negative and all).

Here's the venue in NYC. The windows in the church were almost exclusively made by the Louis Tiffany himself (not his studio). Unfortunately I have yet to invest in a good camera so all my pictures of said glass look like crap despite the fact that they were really impressive.

From the church I headed down to Greenwich Village to meet a friend of mine from my summer at Interlochen. We ate good food and drank a lot of good beer at the Blind Pig on 14th Street. Here ist some photographic evidence. I like to call this picture, "Josh + Kristen: You Just Got Sexy-Faced."

I had never been to Washington Square Park. Check it off the list.

Next stop: Washington DC. I sang a gig there back in 2003 with the Luther College Nordic Choir (Go Norse!) but we didn't get very much time to do anything...and it was January (read: winter). Consequently, I only got to see the National Gallery and the National Air and Space Museum (both awesome). This time around I had almost two entire days free to explore the District and I saw a bunch of really cool stuff which partially satisfied my fetish for The West Wing.

Most Americans have been brought up with images of these really iconic places in DC but, honestly, seeing them in person is something which shouldn't be lost on anyone. It was interesting to note the obvious cross-section of US citizens parading through these places which, although they're commonplace in the imagery of America, are best seen in the flesh.

One of the more interesting places I went was the National Museum of the American Indian. This thing was still under construction when I was in DC in 2003 but it has been since completed and is now open for business. The architect is the Canadian Douglas Cardinal who, according to Wikipedia, is a University of Texas alum. Hook 'em!

The impression I got of this place is that it's a museum still very much trying to find its place. There's certainly a huge part of it that's about the history of Native Americans (Does anyone else find it weird that it's called the National Museum of the American Indian?) but there's also a huge portion of the museum dedicated to the current state of those particular cultures...and it's fascinating. One part of the exhibit has a movie being projected on a wall of white feathers which, in person, is beautiful and strangely delicate.

Afterwards, I hit the National Museum of American History. There was an exhibit on the inaugural dresses of all the First Ladies dating back to Mamie Eisenhower and, since I have a mild addiction to presidential trivia, I took a walk-through so I could peep the gowns.

Quick story: here's the official portrait of Lady Bird Johnson or, as composer and friend Paul Marbach likes to call her, the "Patron Saint of Joshua Shank's Heart." He's not wrong. I love this woman like she was my own fierce granny. I can take or leave LBJ himself but his wife was fabulous and amazing.

Since I moved to Austin, Texas I've been rigorously educated on just how much she did for this particular city (they renamed a lake after her) and, subsequently, I went to the LBJ Presidential Library which, coincidentally, is across the street from the music building here at UT. I seriously don't know why I have this mild (very mild) fixation on this particular former First Lady. I guess I just sort of love her name or something (her given name was "Claudia"). During one of the first cab rides I took here in town the cabbie and I talked about Lady Bird. He called her "a mean, old bitch" (he had what could be called "personality") but I refused to believe it.

Nine months later a friend of mine, Brian, visited town for the South by Southwest Music Festival and, upon returning to my apartment after a visit to the LBJ Library, he looked at all the papers strewn in a semi-circle on the floor around my desk chair and said, "You're just like Lady Bird!"

You see, she liked to have a "To Do Pile" on the floor near her desk and the museum goes to great pains to illustrate this. I happen to subscribe to the same method of organization as the former First Lady and, having seen this, Brian declared me to be Lady-Bird-like.

And that is the greatest honor of my life (*stands up and salutes*). You heard it here first, folks.

In any case, whilst in DC, I stumbled upon her inaugural gown at the Smithsonian and, as much as I adore her, it's a bit tragic and fussy (what with the arm-muffs). Here's the picture they had on file of sweet, sweet Lady Bird. She looks like she could easily be Natalie Portman's mother in one of them Star Wars movies.

But enough about her. How about a sculpture of George Washington looking all ripped and Greek and what-not? I like to call this "George Washington: Rad-to-the-Power-of-Kickass." There's a history behind this piece, I know, but irony won't allow me any further than one of the quote-unquote Fathers of Democracy in a toga. That's just ridiculous...and kind of trashy...and I love it.

Also contained within the walls of the museum is an exhibit about transportation in America and, amongst other things, there was this example of a mini-van. When did wood paneling go out of style? The Shank family circa 1989 totally had one of these things and, in a tribute to National Lampoon's Vacation, we called it "The Family Truckster."

Like most tourists who visit DC, I spent the majority of my free time walking around the National Mall. I have a sappy sense of patriotism (in contrast to, say, a militant one...which is useful in a different way) and seeing all these monuments is something I'm glad I had a chance to do. The World War II Memorial was particularly moving what with all the families wading into the pool (which you're sort of not supposed to do).

All of the things in these pictures are, of course, nothing new to people who have spent the majority of their lives in the US. I include them here to say only that I am incredibly grateful that the University of Texas paid for me to come out here and see these things in person. I've seen pictures of these places in textbooks and historical photographs for as long as I can remember but to see them up close is entirely different and inspiring in a way completely devoid of the political divisions that create so much drama and distance between people. That's a pedestrian observation, I know, but I rarely get to rise above my own politics and, for me, that's a special thing.

Unfortunately the Capitol Reflecting Pool was undergoing maintenance but I suppose that just means there's still something left on the Mall I haven't seen yet. Despite that, it still made for a good picture (props to the weather at the time!).

My dad and I are both sort of mutually obsessed with history so I ended up texting him pictures of pretty much everything I was seeing and, by the time I got around to the Lincoln Memorial, all I got back from him was one word: "Jealous."

That night myself and a few of the Chamber Singers went out to see a great show at Twins Jazz. Before the show, I stopped next door at Al Crostino for this incredible salmon filet which, while good, wasn't near as amazing as the grilled vegetables that accompanied it. As a vegetarian who eats fish every now and then (yes, I know that makes me a "pescetarian"...that just feels pretentious when I say it), I'm always impressed when a chef can make something as simple as grilled vegetables taste crazy good. Wow.

The act playing that night was Ramzy & The Brothers Handsome and, as it turned out, they were recording a DVD. If they had more material available on the Web I could show you how amazing they were but, for now, you'll just have to take this abbreviated trailer and my word for it.

After the final concert in DC (an evensong appearance at a local church) we headed to Vapiano in Chinatown for some great Italian food. It's a chain restaurant but one of the singers had a connection which resulted in better seating or something. Nonetheless, it was fresh pasta with made-to-order sauce...which is just about the best thing ever. Seriously.

They also do this rigamarole where they halt you as you walk in the door and hand you this credit-card-looking thingy which is used at every station (pasta bar, pizza bar, booze bar, etc.) to charge you for That Which You Have Consumed but, honestly, the hassle is completely worth it because it was some kickass food. In the end, my favorite thing about Vapiano is that it's a German chain (headquartered in Beethoven's hometown...holla!) specializing in Italian food which the UT Chamber Singers dined at in the capitol of the United States. Try not to have a seizure from the irony all up in that.

At the beginning of this diatribe I talked about how viewing someone's travel slide show can come across as totally boring. That being said, I'd like to take this chance to (a) acknowledge that this might have been the case with this lengthy blog entry and (b) thank you for getting this far (both of you). I'm not nearly as well-traveled as some of my more worldly compositional colleagues but, as I've said before, I'm incredibly enriched when I'm able to go see new places. This blog is an occasional testament to this fact.

What made this trip even more special is that I got to make it with a group of amazing people who are both unbelievably talented and wonderful to be around. The last time I went on a tour like this was with the aforementioned Nordic Choir in 2003...but that was with, like, 75 singers plus a staff of tour people. The UT Chamber Singers are a tiny insurgency of 20 musicians plus a conductor and, therefore, this trip had way more shared moments that pulled me in closer to some of the best people I've ever met.

I don't have many pictures of us and, in fact, I'll thank Caity Anderson-Patterson here for the use of a few pictures she snapped that are about to show up. Here you've got alto Sam Miller and I posing in Times Square. We had a great time together that day and, since it was Fleet Week, the person on the other side of the camera is a US Marine (Semper Fi!). Sam just adopted a beautiful little girl from Russia (who I still have to meet...Hi, Micah!) and I'm grateful to have been the one who distracted her whilst all the paperwork was going through.

Here's a gaggle of UTCS peeps at a Washington Nationals game at RFK Stadium. The classiest baseball fans in the world!

Finally, here's what Caity dubbed "The Incorrigible Eight" (although three are missing). Our connecting flight from Dallas-Fort Worth was cancelled so the airline routed the 21 of us in the ensemble from Baltimore to Houston to Austin in three separate groups. I was a member of the third group to leave the Houston airport and we were supposed to have close to a 6-hour layover...and it only takes something like 3 hours to drive the distance between Houston and Austin. Taking that into account, the university rented us a bigass passenger van (church camp style!) and we drove it to get back home before Group #2 even touched down at ATX. Here we are in the Enterprise station about to leave for Austin.

Caity's caption says it all: "On our mission trip to Awesome. Fighting transportation adversity at every turn."

I'm truly grateful to have been let into this wonderful ensemble (thanks, Dr. James Morrow!) and then befriended by such awesome and interesting people. Spending 10 days on the road with me couldn't have been easy because, when free time is available, I tend to put on my headphones and march off in whatever direction I want. But travelling with them for the same amount of time was incredibly easy.

To be a musician of any stripe is to be given these occasional opportunities to see the world--oftentimes with a bunch of other people alongside you--and these 10 days will be a cherished memory.

Hook 'em!

A friend sent me a hilarious-but-really-good version of Holcombe Waller performing Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U" a few weeks ago and it got me curious as to who this guy is. In that video it's pretty clear that he's damn good so I checked out some of his other material and stumbled on his video for "Hardliners." Said song is incredibly beautiful and it lead me further down the path of hearing some of his stuff so, after cherry-picking the majority of the album on iTunes, I just threw my hands up and decided to blindly buy the entire thing. Not a disappointment at all. It's all incredibly moving. The beginning of "Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan" seems impossibly high but it ends up being a testament to just how unique this guy's voice is.

How many times have you had to sit and and get all Barococo with one or more of Vivaldi's Four Seasons? At least an annoying amount, right? Max Stoffregen told me about this Il Giardino Armonico album a couple of months ago and, although I was skeptical at first, he wasn't kidding around (I should know this about Max by now...he's brilliant). I don't know exactly what kind of strings the ensemble is playing on (I'm assuming gut, maybe?) and, due to the ubiquitous nature of this music, I haven't studied the scores for these pieces but--damn--whatever they did here makes them actually interesting; like the first time you heard The Black Album or The Rite of Spring. The second movement of the winter concerto is especially different than anything I've heard. There are sul ponticello effects all over this entire album which lift the music out of any of the quotidian nature its acquired. Or I could be wrong about all that and it just turns out that I'm woefully unlearnéd about this type of string playing. Either way this album effing rocks.

I was talking to a colleague the other day and he challenged me to sum up my musical tastes. All I could come up with was that I either like my music super sophisticated or super trashy. So...res ipsa loquitur. Especially "Criminal" what with the janky, MIDI flute.

On the sophisticated side (at least with regard to the hyper-literate lyrical content) I'm in love with The Decemberists' new album, The King is Dead. This might be their last album for a while and it's a good one. "January Hymn" reminds me of growing up in the Midwest ("How I lived a childhood in snow...stuffed in strata of clothes") and "Don't Carry It All" is loaded with positive vibes ("A neighbor's blessed burden within reason becomes a burden born of all and one"). They just announced that keyboardist Jenny Conlee has been diagnosed with breast cancer so here's hoping she'll be back to the stage soon.

Julius Eastman, you guys! He was a singer/composer/provocateur (1940-1990) who wrote some proto-minimalist stuff back in the day and then died penniless and destitute way too early.

"Stay On It" is an exercise in this really bubbly vibe that persists for almost 25 straight minutes. And then there's this crazy piece called "Gay Guerrilla" for four pianos which is even longer. So far there is only one anthology of his work out there called Unjust Malaise (thanks in no small part to Mary Jane Leach) and you should definitely check it out. Eastman ran in so many seemingly disparate circles it's ridiculous and, if you have some time, his Wikipedia entry is worth a read.

This entry is woefully late due to life getting in the way (I meant to get this done all the way back in February) but I really needed to write it. I flew up to Minneapolis last winter to attend the premiere of Jocelyn Hagen's amass and have a generally awesome time.

Jocelyn is a dear friend and she was kind enough to ask me to write the program notes for her evening length piece. I think I convinced her to let me do it because a) she doesn't like to write these things and b) I like to run my mouth off about music so, in a sense, it was the perfect marriage (but don't tell her husband). The piece I wrote for her now appears in the "Writings" section of my website so, if you're interested, you can see how my ramblings look when they're actually, like, edited and (hopefully) well-constructed.

But that's neither here nor there. This piece, you guys. This. Piece. Ohmygodit'ssoeffinggood!

It's difficult for me to put into words how amazing the experience of sitting through this thing was. It's a sort-of "chamber oratorio" that takes the Roman Catholic liturgy and supplements it with ecstatic poetry from pretty much every other faith tradition in an attempt (a successful one if you ask me...and you didn't) to describe her idea of the nature of God. It was commissioned by The Singers - Minnesota Choral Artists and, aside from the 40 voices in the choir, it featured soprano, tenor and baritone soloists, a cello quintet (with one of them taking a prominent soloist role) and a battery of percussion instruments. She wrote some pretty cool stuff and, at one point, the percussionists are playing an array of bells made from sawed-off oxygen tanks as well as banging tiny gongs and dipping them into buckets of water to alter the pitches. Way cool.

But that's just the upfront statistics on the work. What Jocelyn has done is construct something of incredible beauty and--not to sound too dramatic--a sort of timeless relevancy. Honestly. I know that sounds like I'm painting in broad strokes and being hyperbolic, but I swear it's true. To take on a subject as enormous and contentious as what the Dalai Lama calls "interreligious harmony" is incredibly ambitious. To then go on to write a piece as moving and successful as amass is another thing altogether. Very few composers would have the courage to put themselves out there like this and even fewer have the generosity of spirit to bring an audience--all of whom have their own ideas of faith and religion, mind you--along with them.

The experience of sitting through this piece is something that, as a concert goer, I don't think I'll ever forget and it's easily up there with some of the best pieces I have ever heard. The fact that I've known Jocelyn for years and had the opportunity to work with amass before it was premiered had little impact on my eventually internalizing the piece as a listener and, from the reaction the audience had, it's obvious they enjoyed it with a similar enthusiasm. By the end of the final movement everyone around me was openly weeping (myself included) and, after the final chord, there was a stunned silence in the hall before the entire audience immediately stood up and rabidly clapped for 10 straight minutes. Every single performer walked off the stage before the applause was over with. I've never seen anything like it.

If you don't know Jocelyn's music you need to go to her website and listen right this very second. I'll tell you that I'm not surprised she was able to construct something so beautiful and moving but I'll be damned if I can figure out how she did it. The patience she must have had to shepherd such a large work from concept to concert speaks to her vision and skill and I'm unbelievably inspired to count her as a friend and colleague.

And just as a counterbalance to this dramatic entry I'd like to say that, on the way back to Austin, I connected through the Denver airport and stumbled on this heinous advertising mistake. The amount of people this got past is ridiculous. It was backlit and rotating, you guys. Fail.

I studied composition with Daniel Catán for the past semester and since he passed away suddenly a few weeks ago I’ve been trying to think about a proper way to memorialize him in this space. At first I thought that perhaps it wasn’t my place to do that because I knew him for such a short time compared to dozens of other people in his life but, in the end, there are many ways to honor someone’s memory and my time with him meant a lot to me.

When people eulogize someone important to them I feel like it can sometimes veer easily into hyperbolic statements about the faultless virtues of the deceased; clichés can run rampant and nothing much is said about the person in question. But, as with any sort of cliché, it exists mostly because it's probably true. So that being said, I’d like to make the following statement:

Daniel Catán was an amazing human being. Cliché? Yes. True? Totally. And my story about how I came to know him starts a few years ago.

Smash cut to…

…Germany: the summer of 2006. I was on one of those semi-requisite, post-collegiate backpack traipses through Europe with a friend. Via the European train system, we ended up being on the road for about a month and a half and one of our stops was the town of Heidelberg in southwestern Germany. Like most of the places we ended up it was a process of getting off the train, finding and setting up the campsite we had booked and subsequently filling up any remaining time we had by seeing the sights, eating the food and, inevitably, drinking the beer. During this particular stop we were walking through the downtown area and, for probably the third day in a row, I was wearing a shirt from my undergrad choral days that said “Luther College Nordic Choir” on it. The fact that we weren’t able to wear fresh clothes every single day necessitated bringing along the kind of crappy t-shirts that Life sort of gives you once a year (think about it…you have a closet full of them, right?). In any case, as we were walking someone out in the crowd of people shouted, “Nordic Choir?!”

The shouter in question turned out to be a Luther alum who had graduated just a few years before us. He was working in town as a singer for the local state opera at the Theater Heidelberg and he ended up showing us around town, taking us out to eat (I had some crazy good semmelknödel) and eventually securing us comp tickets for that night’s production of an opera called Florencia en el Amazonas. It was sung in Spanish with German supertitles so, due to the fact that I only speak a little bit of either of those languages, it was a bit hard to follow. The beer secured after the first act and a question and answer session with a German couple also in attendance helped clarify things a bit.

And that’s where that part of the story ends. We had a good time at an opera we hadn’t planned to see and only half understood.

Smash cut to…

…Austin, Texas: the winter of 2010. Here I was slogging my way through graduate school and, during registration, it’s brought to my attention that there will be a composer-in-residence for the spring semester. His name is Daniel Catán and he’s been commissioned to write a new opera in honor of some local mega-patrons who gave $55 million to the School of Music (which was subsequently named after them). Supposedly he's written some pretty incredible stuff but I am skeptical at first because I’m a bit wary of signing away 25% of my lessons to somebody I have never heard of before. To this end I bring up his Wikipedia page to investigate a bit more and it becomes obvious fairly quickly that this guy is the Real Deal. Operas produced everywhere; widely respected, etc. In fact, as it turned out, the last thing he worked on was a commission from the Los Angeles Opera to write something for Placido effing Domingo. Whoa. Maybe I should study with this guy after all.

That’s when I scrolled down to the section where it listed all the operas he had written. There, listed amongst the others, was Florencia en el Amazonas; the opera I had seen by pure coincidence in the summer of 2006. The composer of that piece (whose name I had long forgotten) was Daniel Catán.

I took this as a sign and immediately put my name in the hat to study with him. “He’ll have some incredible advice on that opera I’ve been writing for the last few years,” I thought.

From the very first lesson (in which I recounted my story of seeing Florencia in Heidelberg) it became starkly evident that Daniel was an incredible human being who, through his compositions, wanted to take as many people on a beautiful journey as he could and he cared deeply for all of his students as both people and fellow composers.

For the uninitiated, I feel I should say that sometimes music lessons can devolve into a sort of empirical hegemonic exercise whereby a student is instructed by a master but, every Wednesday at 3pm, Daniel made it known through no uncertain terms that he considered his students equals and this was the position he wanted to talk about my music from. He would often lean forward, point at various measures on my chicken scratch manuscript and gently ask, “What are you trying to say here? I just want you to talk for a bit and I’ll listen.”

He was gracious and he was challenging but, above all, he was nurturing. Not every composition student needs this but, in my case, it helped me to get work done because I didn’t dread showing my music to him (and I hate presenting my music to other composers). We would often just sit and talk for a while; spending maybe 10 minutes of the hour on actual music I brought in. We talked variously--and for no apparent compositional reason--of a Norwegian dessert called rømmegrøt I had recently made for a dinner party as well as the different ways he felt Musetta could be played in any number of productions of La bohème (clearly he was the one who was on-task). At one point he found out that I played banjo and grilled me on notation for that instrument because he had planned on using it in the opera he was working on.

At our final lesson together, I brought in a piece for viola and piano I had written. I played it for him and he said, “Well, it doesn’t sound like you’re stuck on this. What else have you brought?” As this was 15 minutes into our lesson I freaked out a little because I didn’t know what I could play for him but, as it happened, I had the 50 pages of music I've got written for my opera, We, The Boys, with me. I took it out and he proceeded to school me at length on what I was doing right and wrong. At one point, he looked at me and said, “This is a song. You’re inspired by the troubadours, aren’t you?” I had to honestly say that I wasn’t...and I’m unsure if I’ll ever be compared to a composer of Occitan lyric poetry in the High Middle Ages again in my life. It’s certainly something to strive for.

In a sense, though, he was right. I’m woefully unfamiliar with the canon of troubadour music (for the moment), but the music of various singer/songwriters is something that informs my music in a deep way. And couldn’t modern-day musicians like Holcombe Waller or Ben Gibbard or Justin Vernon (to name a few) be said to have a connection to that ancient music. I definitely think so and he had heard the residue of those people in the aria I played for him. But that was Daniel Catán for you. He was one of the most perceptive people I have ever met.

He also had a wicked sense of humor that was as dry as the desert sand. It always took a second to figure out that he was even telling a joke in the first place because he wouldn’t say it any differently than he would any other sentence. During one of our lessons I was telling him about a new opera that I was excited about. He sat and quietly listened until I finished the story about the plot of the piece. Once I reached this point you could sort of see the gears turning in his head before he very calmly--and without a trace of invective or hyperbole--said, “You know…[beat]…this sounds like fucking bullshit to me.”

He was incredibly funny.

Also, due to the fact that he grew up for a time in the United Kingdom, he would often pepper his speech with the word “bloody.” He was born in Mexico but had lived as an English speaker for the majority of his life so he had this sort-of muddled Spanish accent that was hard to place. But here he was talking about how things were “bloody difficult” or “bloody great.” The passion of a Hispanic man crossed with the erudition of an English toff. Whenever I tried to imitate him I ended up sounding like a cross between Antonio Banderas and a leprechaun (I am not a very talented mimic).

And I will miss him dearly. As clichéd as this sounds, I learned more from him in our short time together than I had in the previous 10 years. He made me feel as if some of the decisions I had made about being a composer--decisions that I attribute to just blindly feeling my way around that particular endeavor--were the right ones and that, in fact, he toiled in the same proverbial vineyard as I did. The overwhelming message was, "Just write what you want to write. Everything else will take care of itself as long as you're truly happy with what you've written." And it’s not often that you find a compositional mentor that attempts to impart this very simple notion to you.

In talking with his other students, it turns out he had the same effect on them as well. He had the talent of saying the exact thing that needed to be said. Without malice or pretense he encouraged us all to be the composers that we were rather than the composers we wanted to be (and there is a vast difference between those two). To quote the beautiful obituary that Mark Swed wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

Everyone--even the singers and stage directors and opera administrators--liked him. Critics and some important people in the music business were put off by Catán’s unabashed neo-Romanticism, but no one had a bad word to say about him. His students adored him. He always struck me as someone who cared about people and who cared about music and had no intention of letting one form of caring obstruct the other.

Very, very true. One of the things that Daniel was quoted as saying is, “Love and art are the vehicles to self-realization as a human being in the fullest sense of the word.” Just take a second and figure out what that statement means to you.

Those words have resonated with me since the very first time I set eyes on them both because I was lucky enough to know the man that said them...but even more so because I think they’re bloody true. Love and art represent emotional purity and, ultimately, the power of truth. It’s a notion that I think he strived--sometimes willfully, doggedly so--to live up to. And that might be the noblest endeavor that anyone can undertake whether they write incredible operas or not.

Gracias por todo, Señor Catán. Te echaremos de menos.

Myself and a bunch of other composers have just been commissioned to write a piece each for the Blanton Museum of Art and last week they had us all out to view the pieces--all in the permanent collection--that they'd like us to respond to. The scope of the project and the long-term involvement with the museum's archives is still being worked out but I'm excited that I get to work with a painting again. Last time I was asked to write with a piece of visual art in mind I got to know Gregory Euclide's floor bloom drop needles in a profound way and the resultant piece of music yielded a trip to Seattle where, amongst other things, I tooled around the city in one of those boat/truck thingies and learned that the local economy was propped up during the old days by taxes on hookers. That probably won't happen this time around (never say never, though...) but, at the very least, I'm completely satisfied with a free tour of one of the largest repositories of art in the bigass state of Texas.

The museum had prepared a list of pieces for us to start with and the first stop was Cildo Meireles's How to Build Cathedrals. From the outside of the work it looks--at least to my eye--flowing and restful and beautiful and contemplative and what-have-you. However...

...once you step inside it's patently obvious that it's quite a bit more macabre than it looks at first blush. There are hundreds of cattle bones hanging from the ceiling...

...and $6,000 worth of pennies littering the floor. These two aspects of the piece are connected by a column of communion wafers so, as you can imagine, it's fairly political. Check out the museum's page on it if you're game. It's quite interesting.

They took us all around the museum and the works of art ranged from the 20th century all the way back to pieces from the 1600s.

The painting I ended up choosing was Robert Henri's The Old Model. It wasn't on the Blanton's initial list they had proposed but there's something incredibly beautiful about her gaze as well as the brushwork.

After staring at this for a while I feel as if someone else in my position might try to find out about her but I ended up deciding that I won't do that. She has a sort of quiet dignity that's starkly evident right there on the canvas and that's enough for me.

What I did end up looking in to was Robert Henri himself and the results were fascinating. On a side note, I initially pronounced his name in the French manner until I found out that he was, in fact, an American artist. It seems that years of language-centric vocal training has completely fouled my ability to not think in a pretentious manner.

Turns out he was a patriarch of sorts to the Ashcan School of painters that worked to depict the lives of poor people (mainly in New York City) in the early part of the 20th century. Here's a great picture that Wikipedia yielded of what appears to be the lot of them just hanging around John French's studio.

A good example of Henri's work is his 1902 painting, Snow in New York. It definitely seems to fit with the description of Henri's philosophy that he "wanted art to be akin to journalism. He wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter." I can dig that.

One of the more interesting things about Henri is that he was a passionate teacher as well and it turns out he wrote a book on the subject called The Art Spirit which I now have in my possession. After cracking the first two chapters it was pretty obvious that I had made the right choice because the writing is wonderful. In fact, I think I should probably get my own copy because the urge to mark up the library one I have now is fairly strong. It reminds me of when I read Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet a few years ago. Check this little nugget out:

"Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. They can help you. All the past can help you."

You'd have a hard time figuring out what type of artist said that, right? It might as well have been a composer or a choreographer or a playwright for all we know. It's certainly not anything new by any means but, in verbalizing it in such a sober and dramatic way, it makes what he's saying sound almost mystical; as if it were part of a ceremony. "All the past can help you." That could easily be straight out of Tolkien (which I still have yet to read).

But, frankly, I like it when great artists get all professorial about their art. It makes me feel a deeper connection with the past and, for some reason, I feel like it gives my own struggles as a composer some sort of validation. This may or may not be the journey that my colleagues will go on with their own respective works of art, but it has somehow turned out to be mine. Me and Robert Henri and his old model are going to spend some quality time together.

Now, having written this entry, I think I'll heed Henri's advice and get to work:

"It is not enough to have thought great things before doing the work."

Agreed, sir. Res ipsa loquitur.

Time to clear the stable of bloggable nonsense so I can write some stuff that's actually substantive here in a few weeks. I've got two new pieces to write about (one of which is a really interesting collaboration with the Blanton Art Museum) and I need to get this off my chest: I saw Ke$ha in Dallas on Super Bowl weekend. Holy shit, it was awesome. Her shirt, as you can see, appears to say: "I ate the worm."

A friend secured us some free VIP tickets for a huge private-ish party that Bud Light put on the day before the Super Bowl. I usually hate hanging out with douchey, rich people (someone told me that tickets were going for $400) but since we got ours for free and the acts were going to be crazy good, we drove the three hours up to Dallas-Fort Worth.

The concert featured Pitbull (who I had never seen but really enjoyed), Ke$ha (res ipsa loquitur) and Nelly (who I had also never seen) and being surrounded by drunken people gyrating to the insane concert that they put on was probably the second funnest part next to the ridiculous spectacle on stage (she played a theremin at one point...a theremin!). Here's a picture from the concert I pulled off the interwebs that shows her playing a guitar shaped like an assault rifle. See that cannon-looking thing on top of it? I'll bet that's a flamethrower for arena shows.

The show was held in downtown Dallas inside a massive tent in the parking lot for the Aloft Hotel which had been bought out by Anhesuer-Busch and re-christened The Bud Light Hotel. You can guess what they served there but, aside from swilling shitty beer, I had what amounts to the most expensive ($14), smallest (tiny plastic cup) and best Long Island Iced Tea of my life (only top shelf booze for a Ke$ha concert, my friends).

So, I went to a Ke$ha concert and had a blast. I sang my voice ragged and danced like it was the end of the world (as is my wont) before heading back to graduate studies and Baroque counterpoint. It was a great distraction. There was even this old dude in a hilarious (but, sadly, not ironic) red sequined shirt walking around that totally made the paper the next day. That's the closest I'll probably ever get to going to the actual Super Bowl and probably the most exclusive party I'll ever attend. It was pretty damn epic.

In other news, I just got Jónsi's new DVD, go live. It's a recording of his go tour's stop in London and it's the same show I saw in Minneapolis last May and Austin last November. There are some interpolations of rehearsal footage that lend to a really interesting--if occasional--documentary feel but the live album that comes with it is totally worth it for no other reason than that you get a few tracks that weren't on the studio version of go. "New Piano Song" is way more interesting than it's title would suggest and "Stars In Still Water" is an absolutely perfect song; it could be performed at a campfire or in an amphitheater. Hearing go rendered live in its entirety is interesting enough...but those two songs alone are worth the price of admission.

One of the really cool things about where I live and work now is that Lyndon Johnson's presidential library is right across the street. For some nerdy reason, I became an armchair presidential historian a few years ago (mostly due to my quasi-obsession with The West Wing) so the ability to just walk across the street and see this thing satisfies my fetish for all things presidential. The George H. W. Bush Library is only a few hours away so, at some point, it might be fun to go see that as well.

The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library is in Iowa and, having been there on a middle school field trip, I will say that the LBJ one is much more impressive (as you'd predict). Here are a few pics I snapped whilst walking through. Included are:

A moon rock.
LBJ's bowling ball.
The teletype hotline thing used between the White House and the Kremlin during the Cold War.
A portrait of LBJ etched out on a whale tooth (what presidency is complete without one of those?).
Racist signs.
The presidential limousine.
The fumbly animatronic version of LBJ which tells jokes (and creeps you the hell out).
The Great Hall where all of the archives are kept.
The insanely un-stylish furniture in the Oval Office at the time. The replica is at 1/8 scale for some odd reason and kind of claustrophobic to walk around in.

It was a massively fun way to spend an afternoon. I didn't really have a good idea what he did during his time as president other than my tacit knowledge of the Vietnam War so it was really interesting to see the exhibits. Homeboy helped found the National Endowment for the Arts. Holla!

Christmas is always good because I usually end up with a bunch of gift certificates which, in one way or another, feed my terrible addiction to downloading tons of new stuff. First off, Robyn's Body Talk is on loop when I'm running through downtown Austin. This album has been on every "Best of 2010" list I've seen and it's not hard to understand why. Club-ready and kickass. "Call Your Girlfriend" and "Love Kills" are two favorites but I love bubble gum vibe of "Fembot."

I've been listening to a lot of electronic stuff lately while I engrave stuff into Finale and the new Deadmau5 album, 4x4=12, is pretty prominent in the mix. "Animal Rights" is my favorite cut but, if you don't know anything by this guy, you need to check out the track "Strobe" from his album, For Lack of a Better Name. It's almost 11 minutes long with one of the most intense crescendos I've ever heard.

I also sat through an obligatory viewing of Tron:Legacy with my college friend (and brilliant cellist), Eric. That movie was stupid, y'all. Like truly dumb. But the soundtrack is incredible. "The Game Has Changed" makes me want to get all Mason Bates symphony/electronica and "Derezzed" has this throwaway chromatic drop that gets me every damn time. It never comes back so its effectiveness is never diluted. Brilliant.

The last entry from the electronic front is Minneapolis dubstep prodigy, Vaski. He entered the scene at what seems to be the exact right time because it blew the hell up pretty much immediately after he started making records. The title track from the World On Fire EP is absolutely incredible but his other EPs are pretty good too.

Son Lux's Weapons EP is an exploration of one of the standout tracks from his full-length At War With Walls and Mazes. I saw him a few years ago in a concert with Nico Muhly and it's good to hear some new stuff. In fact, Nico's "remix" is probably my favorite track what with the frenetic viola writing.

On the quasi-ambiant front, composer Hugh Lobel totally hipped me to the Danish group Efterklang. Their album, Tripper/Springer, will fill the void in the time it takes for Sigur Rós to come out with some new stuff. I love the one-two punch of "Doppelgänger" followed up by "Torturous Tracks."

And last-but-in-no-way-least is the incredible new album of music by Morten Lauridsen that The Singers - Minnesota Choral Artists just put out. The amount of his music that has been recorded over and over and over again is absolutely staggering but here Matthew Culloton & Co. manage to add some startling new entries from the 1970s that are so rarely performed that these are actually the world premiere recordings. "Three Psalms" is finally heard in its entirety (Stephen Layton and Polyphony recorded a great version of the first two movements a few years ago) and his Four Madrigals on Renaissance Texts is on record for the first time since it was written in 1970. (The central two movements of that cycle are my absolute favorites on this album.)

And, in the way of diversity, the a cappella "Slow, Slow Fresh Fount" is a lot thornier than we're used to hearing from Lauridsen. It points forward to the music he would write in the Madrigali as well as his brilliant Mid-Winter Songs. If you have a minute you should hop on iTunes and take a gander. It's Lauridsen like you've never heard him!

I went to see Jay Brannan sing a gig at Lambert's here in Austin last week and I am so glad I took the time to go. I've loved his stuff ever since he had that hilarious-but-poignant song on the Shortbus soundtrack and somebody took the time to sit me down and make me listen to his debut LP, Goddamned. He does pretty much every part of the business of being a musician himself so he can actually make a living off his music and that's something that, as a composer, I can definitely connect to. The space he played in was completely sold out but incredibly intimate and, consequently, there wasn't a bad seat in the house. Before the show he was walking around chatting with people and drinking tea so I got a chance to thank him for his song, "Death Waltz," because what it's really about is my struggles with writing music...not whatever it is he thought he originally wrote it for.

Anyway, since it was such a small venue I got to see one of my favorite singer/songwriters from only about six feet away. Totally cool.

Thanks, Jay. Hurry along with a new album, will you?

Did everyone get Ra Ra Riot's new album? Holy shit it is so good. "Boy" is probably my favorite song (I'm always impressed when Wes Niles belts out a high B so effortlessly) but "Too Dramatic" (with its little cowbell thing around 2'30") is a close second. I've seen this band twice (in Minnesota and Michigan) but I had to be somewhere on their last stop through Austin. Hurry back!

In further demonstration with just how cool she is, Jocelyn Hagen sent me Rihanna's Loud for my birthday this year. Why have I not been listening to this stuff until now? It satisfies my Need for Phat Beatz really well and I'm excited that I've got four previous albums to wade through at some point. "S&M" kicks total ass and "Cheers (Drink To That)" might be my new favorite Song for Boozin' It Up. Mahalo.

And Ke$ha's new album, Cannibal. Oh, Ke$ha's new album. Damn I love this girl. I've found it's really good music for writing Renaissance counterpoint to. $eriously. "Blow" will knock your brains out and "Crazy Beautiful Life" is actually really heartfelt. When I need to wake up in the morning this album is on repeat.

The Austin Lyric Opera gave an awesome performance of La Traviata last night which, after a great dinner at Taverna, I had the chance to see. I love opera but I have a bone to pick with whoever it is that's choosing these supertitles: can we please...please...pay someone to do better, more compelling translations of these works. I understand there's a whole "fidelity to the text of the original" thing you've got to deal with but, for the love of god, there is no reason to use the word "succour" when you could just say "help." And don't give me the crap argument that we should expect higher standards from an audience because we're talking about an opera audience. I saw Baz Luhrmann's New York production of La bohème a few years ago and that dude made a concerted effort to make the supertitles something that his audience could relate to. I hate the fact that there is this weird, literary veil between the words and the people reading them and there is absolutely no reason that somebody can't just go in and update those things.

Anyway. It was performed at the Long Center on the riverfront here in Austin and, having never been to that hall before, it was damn beautiful.

I love when architects do stuff like this. It's just your regular shoebox design but they put this gorgeous halo around one facade of the building that really adds something to the aesthetics of attending a concert there. And the interior is just as beautiful. This, however, could not be said for the Austin Music Hall. I went there to see Jónsi last week and, as cool as the building looks from the outside...

...it's nothing but your run-of-the-mill, dirty-ass club with plywood bars on the inside. Despite that fact, it was an incredible show. It was almost six months to the day that I saw him in Minneapolis at The Pantages and that live show is still powerful enough to reduce me to a tearful, hot mess (what can I say...I cry easily...it's the one thing I have in common with John Boehner). They had to alter parts of the production to adapt to what I assume is a more restrictive venue than the theater in Minneapolis and so the backdrop that everything was projected onto never dropped to reveal the burnt down wall behind it. Here, compare:

Minneapolis show last April

Austin

Either way it was totally incredible and I fully intend on buying the go live DVD when it comes out next month.

I know this is totally cliche but I really feel like this is one of those albums that has embedded itself into every part of what my conception is of myself. It feels incredibly autobiographical for some reason and the ecstasy in the music is something I've been trying to capture and put into my own. I feel unbelievably grateful that I got to see Jónsi twice during his tour of the US and I cannot wait for either his next album or when Sigur Rós puts another one out.

Mahalo.

I love the autumn music season because it always brings a windfall of new stuff from artists I adore. Guster took their sweet time with this new one but Easy Wonderful was totally worth the wait. I think "Do You Love Me" is probably one of the most optimistic songs I've ever heard (the video is even better) and "Well" digs up all those old Nick Drake LPs and dusts them off for the digital age.

Sufjan's new album, The Age of Adz is absolutely incredible. "Futile Minds" is a throwback to the vibe on the Michigan album but the most mindblowing track on the album is the 25-minute opus, "Impossible Soul." My favorite part is about 10 minutes in when everything falls away into Sufjan's shimmery, auto-tuned voice over a gentle pulse. I am always weepy and introspective after this part and I may have to chop up the file so I don't have to wait 10 minutes every time I want to listen to that one section.

And, last but not least, is the collaboration between Ben Folds and Nick Hornby, Lonely Avenue. The fact that both of these guys can, respectively, write music and lyrics that are so different (compare "Picture Window" with "Levi Johnston's Blues" for starters) is absolutely incredible to me.

A few weeks ago I took a trip out to Seattle to see the premiere of a new piece by The Esoterics. The circumstances of this commission were quite a bit different than pretty much anything I've ever done since, as I mentioned last May, the piece had to be textless and based on a work of art. The resultant piece was "songs about most of my friends" (titled after an Adam Svec lyric) and the entire trip out to the west coast was, thankfully, just as adventurous as the commission itself.

The premiere itself took place at the Olympic Sculpture Park Pavilion on one of the campuses of the Seattle Art Museum. The park has dozens of modern sculptures placed throughout the path and looks right out onto the Puget Sound.

Inside the pavilion is where they gave the concert and my piece featured a projection of Gregory Euclide's amazing piece, floor bloom drop needles, which he graciously allowed me to use. Here's a poorly-taken shot of how it was projected onto the performance space.

And here it is all by itself. I am so grateful that Greg allowed me to use it for this piece and, having spent so much time with this work in particular, it has become one of my favorite things to look at. He is a legitimately famous artist (Will.i.am. commissioned him, for Pete's sake!) who just happened to be working with me when I lived in Minneapolis and the fact that he was willing to entertain my music being associated with his incredible work is a responsibility that I didn't take lightly. Here's the work itself. Thanks, Greg!

That being said, one of the other interesting things about this concert was that The Esoterics commissioned two other composers (Shawn Crouch from Miami and Bernard Hughes from London) to write a similar piece. They both wrote incredible music which was seamlessly synced up with two different video presentations and, along with pieces by Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi and Artistic Director Eric Banks, there were five world premieres on the program. How often does that happen?

Eric also programmed a previously-written work by Shawn, Bernard and myself for the first half of the concert and, since they sang only the second full performance of my Color Madrigals, the decor on the inside of the pavilion seemed appropriate.

I'm wracking my brain to think of a more unique venue that I've had a premiere in and I'm not coming up with anything. There was a silver tree and some giant red monstrosity right outside.

Here's a shot looking at the pavilion from the sculpture park. It's clearly not the usual place where you would find a bunch of new choral music being performed and, for that reason, it epitomizes the ridiculous amount of fun I had.

This is also the first time that I got to sit in the very back of the audience and watch their reactions to the pieces they were hearing. At the point in my green madrigal where the Keats poetry goes, "Ye tight little fairy just fresh from the dairy/Will ye give me some cream if I ask it?" there was a guy two rows ahead of me whose jaw dropped before he immediately reached for his program to see if the supertitles above the choir were correct. Once he read them in his program he laughed for the rest of the piece (which is exactly what I was going for). Then, at the end of "songs about most of my friends" there was another dude actually headbanging to the last few pages (or at least the non-distracting, classical equivalent of headbanging, that is) and, frankly, I think that's the best compliment I've ever gotten. He had a badass handlebar moustache as well.

Musically, it was an absolute blast. Eric and The Esoterics sang a full 30 minutes of my stuff (they performed the 20-minutes of the Color Madrigals on only one pitch given before the first movement!) and the last time I heard that much of my music in one sitting was a few years back when Vox Musica gave an entire concert of my nonsense in 2008. It's so rare to hear that much of your music back-to-back and, although I can't speak for my colleagues, I would imagine that they're as grateful as I am for such a unique opportunity. Speaking of which, here's the Formal Picture that takes place whenever more than one composer is at a concert. That's Shawn, myself, Bernard and Jaako all suited up for the second night of concerts.

Aside from the concert, there was a whole lot more. The great thing about The Esoterics is that they know how to make people have fun and, during the four days we spent in Seattle, they pulled out all the stops for their visiting composers. Case in point: they took Bernard and I on a tour of Seattle's underground. In the mid-19th century the street level was one story lower than it is now and there are entire city blocks "hidden" underneath modern-day Seattle. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about the "ceiling" in this picture is actually the sidewalk for the legit street above it.

The Seattle Underground Tour isn't really much to look at but, if you're a fan of history, it's perfect because they use the various sites as a vehicle to talk about how Seattle came to be (i.e. a shitload of taxes on prostitution, for instance). Bernard summed it up perfectly when he said, "They make a lot out of a little."

If you've ever been to downtown Seattle you'll notice these grids of glass on the sidewalks. Turns out they're actually skylights for the underground level and our tour guide had us yelling "Help!" at the top of our lungs every time someone would walk across.

Various shots of downtown Seattle.

One of the funnier things that happened over the course of the underground tour was that Bernard told us that he had mysteriously never been to a Starbuck's and, because of this, he wanted to go to one in Seattle because it didn't feel like selling out. Consequently, we made a stop off so the Englishman could have a tea.

How many people get to say that the only Starbuck's they've been to is in Seattle? Interestingly enough, coffee tastes less corporate when you're there because you're, like, supporting the local economy.

After the underground tour two members of The Esoterics took Bernard and myself out to Ivar's for some incredible seafood right on the water. I had the salmon with these crazy julienned pears on a bed of mashed potatoes.

And the view right off our table wasn't bad either. I've been a landlubber all my life so I never get sick of this stuff.

In further evidence of how entertaining The Esoterics are, they took all four composers out on one of Seattle's duck tours. During the event you ride around the city in one of these things (which is skippered by someone who has "personality" and a "sense of humor") before plunging into Lake Washington, sailing around for about 20 minutes and heading back.

It was so much fun. They play cheesy music, the captain wears funny-hats-and-wigs-n'-shit, people on the street look down their noses at you and, in my case, you sing "YMCA" along with Captain Oliver DuRhode (his name is a pun) at the top of your lungs as you pull back into the station.

It's just good, campy fun that you'd have to be an idiot not to enjoy. For instance, every time you see a Starbuck's on the tour you're supposed to shout, "Latte!" Here's Captain DuRhode in his mullet/cowboy hat ensemble he threw on when he started spinning Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again":

We drove by the waterfront location where The Real World: Seattle was filmed and, if you were anything like the 1998 version of me, you have seen this building on TV more than a few times. This was the last season of TRW I watched because, after that, the show just became a caricature of itself and it was more about being young, drunk and outrageous than the earlier, more interesting seasons. That being said, that's totally the spot where Stephen slapped Irene! Me-at-17 was glued to the screen as he threw her stuffed animal into those very waters. What a douche.

While tooling around the lake we also sailed past the house from Sleepless in Seattle...a movie I have never seen. But it's famous so here's the abysmal shot I took with my digital zoom.

The duck tour was a massive amount of fun and I prefer the Composer Picture taken at the end of that journey instead of the Formal One that I listed before. These three guys (and our "Eso" cohorts that came along) were a ridiculous amount of fun and the fact that The Esoterics managed to make a mish-mash of four nerdy musicians from Miami, Austin, London and Helsinki have such a good time together is one of my favorite things about being a composer.

(p.s. I win the competition for who has the most pockets. Don't mess with Texas.)

And if that weren't enough, they gave us all gifts once the concert was over. This might look like an engraved paperweight...

Oh but there's a clock inside! Boo-yah!

So this visit to Seattle (which is legit one of my favorite cities in the entire world) was awesome and, in going through the pictures I took, I found two that personify the pervasively fun time that I had. The first was from a coffee shop right on the Puget Sound where, apparently, the morning guy had a kickass first name and someone had doctored a concert poster for A Fine Frenzy to make him feel even cooler:

(On a side note: I'd like to mention here that I have never been so caffeinated in my entire life. I had forgotten how coffee is so much a part of the culture of this city but I suppose the stereotype exists for a good reason. I usually only drink about a cup a day but I routinely had two or more on this trip. It lead to some very jittery afternoons.)

The other picture is one which I took at Eric Banks's place before the Saturday concert and it epitomizes the fact that I love ironic juxtaposition. One of Eric's cats decided to befriend me because of my warm lap and, in the background is Jaakko Mäntyjärvi. I've loved his pieces ever since I heard a choir sing "Pseudo-Yoik" for the first time...and here he was--all the way from Finland--staring at me from across the room while I took a picture of a cat with a cartoonish expression on its face.

Thanks, Esoterics. I owe you one.

Josh

My life has gone a little apeshit recently due to the fact that I have way too many things to do so my ability to write things here has taken a bit of a hit. That being said I've got a bunch of stuff I want to talk about (including a banner premiere in Seattle, the chance I got to see not one but two different moon rocks in one day and some incredible albums that just came out) but, since I've been inexplicably soaking up new pieces for the harpsichord, I'd like to make the following observation:

World-renowned harpsichordist Elisabeth Chojnacka looks like the Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons (but, admittedly, with more teeth).

But this lady can effin' play. Check out how she absolutely slaughters Górecki's Harpsichord Concerto because it makes me completely willing to forgive the outrageous haircut (skip to about 4'35" for the incredible second movement).

On a completely unrelated note, I heard the premiere of Steven Bryant's Concerto for Wind Ensemble by the UT Wind Ensemble tonight and, holy hell, this piece is brilliant. I would say that he proved why he's one of the most commissioned wind ensemble composers working right now but that would mean that he had to prove it. This piece kicked serious ass and I feel like I may have made a mild spectacle of myself in that I was moved into a quasi-headbang at some point ("spectacle" in terms of a stodgy classical audience, that is).

And a special commendation goes to SB for having what amounted to a trio between contrabass, contrabass clarinet and a contrabassoon. It was like being at a KISS concert and feeling the bass because your ribs are vibrating. So, so, so good.

Junkin and the UTWE are putting out a surround-sound album in the Blu-ray format with this piece on it (it had a large compliment of players surrounding the audience) and, although, I don't own a television and rarely watch any DVDs, I may just have to get myself a Blu-ray player to enjoy this piece and the other two on the album: John Mackey's Kingfishers Catch Fire (probably one of my top 10 pieces ever...right up there with Adams's El Niño) and Joel Puckett's The Shadow of Sirius (which they also played tonight). Both of those works also have instrumental compliments surrounding the audience so it should be an incredibly unique album.

Mahalo.

Have you all heard Mumford & Sons new album? I'm a little late on this one (although not as late as I usually am) since it came out last February. Someone recently gave me their album, Sigh No More, and it's been on a loop ever since. There is something incredibly visceral and immediate about Marcus Mumford's lyrics and voice that sound like the search for redemption to me. And I know that's way corny to say but sometimes a songwriter will come along and find a way to just tap into that feeling of grace.

My two favorite songs are "White Blank Page" and "I Gave You All." In the former they do this really cool switch between 6/8 into 3/4 near the end. It's a subtle change but it adds something beautiful before the band sings the last phrase a cappella. Go get it!

This album is good listening for the formatting stage on this new piece for The Singers. I get to drink coffee, listen to whatever music I'm freaking out about at the moment and do nothing creative and, selfishly, this is my favorite part of my process. I'm not sure how other composers work but I feel like I have a few distinct stages:

Conception--This is figuring out what the piece will sound like in the imagination (the big gestures, the pauses, the contemplative points, etc.). I think there are some composers who will write extensively during this phase but I rarely do because the final product bears almost no resemblance to these initial scribbles. I feel like maybe this phase is just me getting used to the idea that I'm about to expend a ridiculous amount of energy on something. It's the deep breath before the plunge (to nerdfully quote a movie that I only marginally like).

Writing--This one is self-explanatory and, although it's easy to wrap your brain around what goes on here, it's easily the most stressful part. If something isn't working or you can't get a good seed to start from there can be all sorts of emotional consternation and, combined with an approaching deadline, you've got a possible Combustible Edison.

On the other hand, this part can be incredibly rewarding if you write something really good. If that's the case I usually go back and play that one sliver of music over and over again because it makes all the other fighting that goes on for some other parts worthwhile.

Stitching--I hate this part. I hate it so bad. There is nothing creative about this part and it's not personally fulfilling until it's all over with. It's just work, plain and simple. The shitty part about this stage is that there are often beautiful bits of music left on the cutting room floor; the proverbial blood, sweat and tears of the process. I forget who it was but someone told me once that, "You're not a real composer until you cut out something that you love." Yep. My pound of musical flesh for this particular piece is a gorgeous alto solo I wrote which didn't make it in. I've got it tucked in my back pocket for another piece, though.

Engraving--Easily my favorite part because the music is locked and I'm not responsible for anything creative. As I said earlier I get to be giddy with caffeine and listen to my favorite musique du moment. Hitting the print button at the end of this part is what I live for and I hope that feeling never gets old.

Off to work. Go getcha some Mumford & Sons.

I have lit'rally no idea why this took me so long to blog about but the Minnesota All-State Choir gave the premiere of Your children (are not your children) last August on the campus of Saint Olaf College (which is coincidentally in the town my parents moved to after I left for college those many years ago). That happens to be one of the two places in the United States where a cappella singing started so the atmosphere was ripe for...I don't know...whatever things are ripe for in this case (it was really hot so I'm thinking maybe it was just ripe for being ripe).

Dr. Angela Broeker (of the University of Saint Thomas) was asked to conduct the All-State Mixed Choir this year and, damn, were they ever good. They took my piece for choir and 8-hands piano(s) and tore the roof off the place in a way that few younger ensembles can. Here they are "toasting" in order to keep hydrated.

Angie used this to create a really cool sense of community and as a way for them to share positive things with each other. Consequently, there were some goofy ones (at one point there was a toast made to the fact that one of the singers had on the same kind of shoes as me) but it really served to bond them together during the short time they worked with each other.

The concert was in Boe Chapel on campus. I think it had been recently remodeled or something but this remodel definitely did not include air conditioning. I don't think I've ever seen so many programs being used as fans before in my life.

All that being said, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the young men and women of the choir for giving such an incredible performance, the 4 pianists for dealing with my...uh...four piano parts, Angie Broeker for taking a risk on a new piece for such a weird instrumentation (to her credit she jumped at it) and the people with the American Choral Directors Association of Minnesota and the Minnesota Music Educators Association for calling on me to write this piece. It was a blast!

In the Department of Other News, I have a bone to pick with Samuel Barber. I'm busy trying to learn his Reincarnations for an upcoming performance and I've hit that place in my practice where I'm just angry every time I have to work up the first movement, "Mary Hynes."

Now, difficult pitches I can handle. But when I've been practicing the same few measures over and over and I keep getting tripped up on lazy/ignorant notation it can get pretty serious fairly quickly. I feel like the Barbs has me shouting curse words at my piano every other minute (I get frustrated with myself easily...it's just my cross to bear as a performer). There are plenty of places in this piece that get my ire up when I practice but this particular passage is pretty high up on the list:

Seriously, speak that out. My score has the tempo indication of "Allegro" (What, there were no metronomes in 1940?) but a recording I've got has this at about quarter note = 136.

Now I'm willing to forgive the absolutely ridiculous notion that eighth notes shouldn't be barred together when listed in a traditional time signature because I choose to blame that on the conventions of publication but what I can't get past is the totally idiotic way he places the text within each bar.

And you might say, "Maybe he was going for emphasis on weak syllables as part of the piece." Then you'd probably bring up a bunch of Poulenc's choral works (which I loooove) as an example. To which my answer would be, "Not according to any of the other music contained in this or the other two movements."

Again, I have no problem with the pitches or the rhythms. Those just take practice and, frankly, it's his personal preference and compositional voice and what-have-you. My problem--and it should be said that I know I'm a bit of a Notation Queen--is the icky way he barred those pitches and rhythms which weakens the performance of the piece. In that interest, I present to you the same musical phrase as I would have written it.

See? Now isn't that better? The motives are even broken up so you can visually see what's going on a bit more. I'm certainly not saying I'm a better composer (because duh) but, seriously, go back and look at Barber's original now. Based on where the beat emphasis is you'd think the guy had never spoken a lick of English before. Or, at the very least, he had no idea how to write for a choir.

From my understanding of where these pieces exist in Barber's oeuvre, it's more likely that this style of notation has more to do with the fact that he was unfamiliar with how to write for the voice at the time (I think he was in his late 20s maybe) and, frankly, it looks almost as if he probably wrote the music first and then overlayed the text on it. That drop of a 9th in the bass is unbelievably difficult to do at that speed with vocal chords that size and the huge switch in laryngeal position that has to be made (how's that for nerdery).

But again, I'm not on about the pitches here. So, now we're back to notation as the cause of my woes. This means that SB is off the hook and G. Schirmer is on deck. My score has a copyright date of 1942 on it (and the marks from more than a few generations of singers as proof) so, hopefully, they've changed it in the last 68 years. I've seen scores from Schirmer for some of this older stuff so I'm not holding my breath but that brings up an interesting question: would it be okay if they released a "new edition" of this piece which has been re-barred? Or would that just be a massive faux pas?

Of course, it should be mentioned that this one particular piece is exactly that: a single work by one composer. There are a ton of other mis-notated works out there (I wrote about two of them back in March) and I wonder sometimes who is teaching young composers that it's okay to do this stuff. How many composition students are being rigorously taught notation along with the other important stuff? And if that's actually being taught then who's to blame for the incredible choral work in question being written down like this?

What's the history of notation in this country's musical tradition? There's got to be a book about that, right? If not, maybe I should write it or, at the very least, come up with a curriculum for composition students that includes material on this. That wouldn't be, like, the musical equivalent of going to a Star Trek convention dressed as a Klingon, would it?

There. That's my soapbox over and done with.

So has everyone rushed out and gotten the new Steve Reich album? It's got Eighth Blackbird's performance of his Double Sextet on it and, since he won the Pulitzer for that way back in April of 2009 (read a great blog entry Nico Muhly wrote about the time lapse here), we can finally hear what all the fuss was about. The album also includes his really-good-but-not-my-cup-of-tea piece 2x5 performed impeccably by Bang On A Can.

Sufjan Stevens, after what feels like a terribly long four years, is finally putting out some new music (I'm not counting his symphonic poem about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway). He just released the All Delighted People EP and I've been unable to turn it off for the past few days. I'm unsure as to why he's calling it an "EP" (it clocks in at almost 60 minutes) but, seriously, who cares? It's incredible stuff.

When I listen to his music it often feels like a sacred experience to me. Take the track, "For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti" from his Michigan album, for instance. He repeats the phrase "I'd do anything for you" until it feels like a mantra or a kyrie. I feel the same way about the title track from the album in question here which, in its initial incarnation, he expands into a symphonic poem almost 12 minutes long.

That being said, my hands-down favorite track is "The Owl and The Tanager." It's one of those songs in which you feel as if you're overhearing a whispered confession and are given something beautiful because of it.

He'll be putting out a full-length LP in October. Can't wait.

So for the past few weeks I've been working on a new piece for The Singers. Between the other composers-in-residence and I, it was my "turn" to write a piece for the December concert series and, in terms of choral music in the Midwest, this usually means it will be a Christmas-themed affair. I've been making the joke for a while now that it's my least favorite time of the year to get commissioned to write something because, inevitably, it's expected that you write something that's either about the Nativity or, if you want to get around writing something "sacred", you can choose poetry on the subject of snow.

I've gone the precipitation route before on two pieces ("winter" and "Snow by Morning") and wrote another non-Jesus piece to a text by Charles Dickens (from, you guessed it, A Christmas Carol). These seemed to work out okay...but you can only ignore the problem that audiences expect to hear a Christian-themed work at these concerts for so long. I'm not a particularly religious person and, for some reason, it always feels a little disrespectful when I try to portray someone else's sense of spirituality through my music and I've shunned writing these things because of this.

The other way I've found to "get around" my problem with using explicitly religious texts is to take a pre-existing tune and fiddle with it a bit. In the choral world these things are often called "arrangements" although, to toot my own horn a bit, mine are quite a bit more involved to be grouped in there with all those Hal Leonard pieces that just take Top 40 things and write extra voice parts for them. These are what we usually consider to be "arrangements." I tend to take more of the route that Stravinsky did with all that Pergolesi stuff in Pulcinella.

On a side note, I got into a discussion about this with Drew Collins a few years ago and he holds the contention that something with that level of difficulty should be called a "fantasia" because it's so much more than just some simple arrangement. I remember him being pretty damn adamant about this but, frankly, that could have been the good beer we always seem to drink whenever we talk about choral nerdery.

But, to be honest, I'm of the mind that he has a legit point. Take Vaughn Williams's's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, for instance. That glorious monstrosity is most definitely not an arrangement, right?

That brings me back to my "arrangementasias" on pre-existing tunes. I wrote one a year for the first two seasons I was Composer-In-Residence with The Singers; "Go, Tell It on the Mountain" and "Gabriel's Message," respectively.

This year I went in a similar route but, in the spirit of challenging myself with something beyond verses and refrains, I decided to do a "deconstruction" of the "Rejoice, greatly!" aria from Handel's Messiah. That piece has a deep connection with the Christmas season and the fact that there is way more musical material than text will stretch my ability to interpret it.

I've got a bit of a connection with this piece (like many, many people do) as the place I went to get my undergraduate degree, Luther College, was mildly famous for putting on a massive production of said oratorio every year (there was also a dust-up about naked soccer as well as Dave Matthews recording a live album there). The Symphony Orchestra accompanied the proceedings, there were cutthroat auditions for the solos amongst the vocal performance majors, any student could sing in the massed choir regardless of experience and alumni were invited back to perform along side them. It ended up resulting in a choir of about 1,000 howling away in the bleachers of the Field House (the only venue on campus that could hold that many musicians and audience members) in a huge spectacle helmed by Weston Noble that really had to be experienced to be believed.

In 2001 I sang in the final choir that was this big and, a year later, was the bass section leader for the much smaller 100-member, auditioned choir that put on the oratorio with the much smaller Chamber Orchestra. I sang that piece for four straight years just for the hell of it (c'mon...it's a blast!) so when I went looking for material to work with for this new piece it was kind of natural for me to stop at Messiah and investigate the possibilities.

I recently blew a bunch of money on iTunes so I could hear some different performances of it and I've currently got 10 versions and 44 straight minutes of this one aria. And let me tell you, Dear Reader (hi, Dad!), they span the effin' gamut of variation.

The shortest (4'04") is by the Scholars Baroque Ensemble and the longest (5'26") is with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Both of these versions, coincidentally, are the ones where no soloist is listed for some reason.
The majority are in the notated key of B-flat major but, predictably, the ones by conductors that are all up in some period performance practice (Christopher Hogwood and John Eliot Gardiner, for example) are in what we would consider A major instead.
Then--and here's where I need some help from my musicologist friends--there are some wildly different variations with regards to simple and compound time. The only version I've ever laid eyes on is in simple time where the runs are made up of 16th notes but there are more than a few in my new cache that are in compound triplets for the duration. I'm aware that Handel made a kajillion different versions (read: arrangements!) of Messiah as a whole but it's amazing to me to think that he would've changed the music in such a seemingly profound way.

Anyways...as I've said before my version will be sort of a "deconstruction" of the aria (or at least that's what I'm calling it...think Pulcinella). It helps that the Artistic Director of The Singers, Matthew Culloton, is making me stay rigidly in the a cappella vein of things...even after I begged him to let me add a piano. This has forced me to be pretty creative with how I'm treating the solo parts and, to be honest, it was a good move on his part because I was all professing that I wanted to be challenged.

The text is from the Bible and, as you'd expect from a Handel aria, there isn't much:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee. He is the righteous Savior...And he shall speak peace unto the heathen.

I've decided to call the piece "Daughter Ecstatic" because a) it's seems to me that, at least on the poetic level, it's some sort of command from an angel or something to a girl/daughter (I'm assuming it's probably Mary, right?) and b) that's the feeling that I think Handel was after what with the brisk tempo and vocal runs: some sort of religious ecstasy.

Hopefully I'll get another chance to talk about how this piece is coming together a bit more because I've been having a ridiculously good time writing it. For some reason, I've chosen to compose in the practice rooms six floors up at the highest point of the music building (but that's just my weird need for ceremony in order to write).

Of the 10 versions I have of the aria Kathleen Battle's is probably my favorite (the ornaments at the end of the B section are break-your-heart beautiful). You can listen to the performance in question here but, for now, here she is with my girls Queen Latifah and Alicia Keys performing what I can only assume is the "Suscepit Israel" trio from the Bach Magnificat.

...is that, sometimes, something slips by before you can get your hands on it. Case in point: the unbelievably heartbreaking beauty of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's voice. I first heard it in the recording of John Adams's El Niño. The eleventh movement, "The Christmas Star," is one of the most emotional things I've ever heard and, when I looked into further recordings, I found out that she died of cancer in 2006. So, so sad.

Here she is giving an extraordinary performance as Irene from Handel's Theodora. I'm sorry I came to this so late. What a loss.

There's a chain of lakes that run right through the heart of Minneapolis and one of the cooler things that the city government did was to keep the lion's share of the lakefront property for municipal use. This leads to some pretty awesome running trails and a bunch of really fun, outdoors-y stuff to do right in the heart of the city. Here's an aerial shot I borrowed that shows what I mean.

From north to south you've got Cedar Lake, Lake of the Isles, Lake Calhoun and lake Harriet.

I used to live about a block from where Isles and Calhoun meet so I got to know both of them pretty well. Calhoun is sort of the preferred hangout for families, boaters and beautiful people who walk a round with little to nothing on because it has a ton of beaches. I enjoy running around this thing (it's a bit more than 3 miles, I think) when I'm in the mood to look at said beautiful people but, other than that, it's a pretty boring run due to the ovular nature of the trail.

My hands-down favorite body of water in the Cities is Lake of the Isles. It used to be right in my backyard (only 2 blocks away from my apartment in Uptown!) and is a lot more peaceful than the kinetic, densely populated Calhoun is. The two islands in the middle are nature preserves which you're not allowed to land on if you're boating around in the city's paddle boats or kayaks and there's a flock of geese that nest almost right on the trail (I've been chased by one before). It's got more of an aristocratic feeling due to the mansions lining the parkway that surrounds the lake but it's quite a bit more scenic than Calhoun.

That's all of my reminiscences for now. I would imagine that they're not particularly good reading and, frankly, I put this and the cat thing here more so I wouldn't forget than FYI.

Off to write a new piece for The Singers (and deal with the heat here in Austin). This time around it's a "deconstruction" of an aria from Handel's Messiah (specifically, it's the soprano movement, "Rejoice, greatly!") for their December concert. It's unlike any other "arrangement" I've ever tried to write and, frankly, the fact that I'm unsure of how it's going to turn out is part of why I proposed writing it in the first place. I saw an interview with Stephen Sondheim once where he said that all artists should be a little scared of their next project and I kind of dig that idea.

If you don't have The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey on your Netflix queue you need to get it on there...like...yesterday. I'm probably late to the game on this one but I just watched it and it's spellbinding; Spencer Wells is seriously amazing. I feel like trying to translate some of his intent and concepts into music. They are overflowing with the positivity and the notion of service.

(p.s. If I were to try to tell you what this movie is about I would probably come across as more of a nitwit than I usually do so, for now, jump over to Wikipedia and find out for yourself. You will have no choice but to watch and be completely intrigued by it.)

I finally finished the piece for The Esoterics and, boy howdy, I don't remember something being that difficult in a long time. Trying to make a choir fit into the instrumental idiom was a bitch of a problem to solve but, in the end, I'm massively happy with what came out. I even managed to write in a jaunty little waltz right in the middle that I fell in love with. How the hell did that happen? The only problem was that I think I almost gave myself an ulcer from the amount of coffee I was drinking while I was writing.

Although, since Seattle just got voted the most caffeinated city in America by The Daily Beast (the Twin Cities got 14th) and that's where this particular ensemble is based, perhaps it was just life imitating art. Either way, The Esoterics will give a fantastic performance of my new piece, songs about most of my friends, next October and, should you be in the neighborhood, you should stop by.

On the domestic front, I'm just about through packing up my place in Uptown Minneapolis so I can move to Austin. One thing I will miss is this little cat who was always in the first floor window before I left for work. Here's a camera phone picture I snapped of this thing at something like 6:40am.

I don't know what its name was but the consistency with which it was there seeing me off was impressive:

"Meow-meow-meow I'll miss you too meow-meow-meow."

And then, just for good marks, here's a picture of the Twins' beautiful new stadium, Target Field. A friend threw free tickets at me recently so I enjoyed an $8 beer, a surprisingly good veggie burger and a victory by the home team. Boo-yah!

What is it with cats? I drove down to my parents' house in bucolic Northfield, Minnesota to get some time away from the frenetic atmosphere of Uptown and their cat, Jack, will not leave me alone. I'm trying to get this piece for The Esoterics done and this guy is taking up half the piano bench.

I like to spread out a lot when I have staff paper to work with but there's a cat-sized spot on the bench where I'm sitting that I can't put my sheets of manuscript. Here's a photo of him from my phone:

I should say that Jack showed up after my tenure under the Shank roof and, frankly, we've never really gotten along all that well (he bit the hell out of me a few years back)...but he's calmed down a whole lot in the last few years and, for some reason, he seems to like music.

My old cat, Max, used to do stuff similar to this. He was never a lap cat of any sort unless I was writing at my desk.

Just surfing the net? Nope. On the couch.

Working on correspondence? Sorry. Sleeping in the rafters somewhere.

However, if I was intently engraving music with headphones on and coffee in hand he was in my lap purring. It was the weirdest thing.

Rest in peace, little buddy. Your investment into my creative process will be missed.

I recently took a trip out to the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington state for a few days. My younger sister, Caitlin, just graduated from Western Washington University in nearby Bellingham, so the Shank clan gathered on Orcas Island for a few days of R & R.

There aren't many opportunities to experience the nautical culture here in Minnesota (although we do have more than our fair share of lakes) so any time I get to ride in a boat that is used for transportation as opposed to recreation it's a unique experience. The Washington State Ferries are one of the largest fleets of their kind in the world and have been fully incorporated into the state's highway system. How cool is that?

The majority of the boats have names from the local Native American tribes in honor of the fact that their canoes were the first to cross the Puget Sound.

The villages at the edge of the water remind me of the little towns on the fjords I saw in Norway way back in 200

3 (travel reference!).

Once you spend a little time sailing amongst all the islands it's not hard to imagine why people like to live here because, frankly, it's pretty chill. Morten Lauridsen has a cabin on Waldron Island and, from what I understand, the residents there have worked hard to keep any sort of intrusive presence away from it. As such, there isn't a ferry that goes there and no municipal power or water either.

One of the more interesting things about Orcas Island itself is the topography. Here's a Google shot (that's the aforementioned Waldron Island in the upper left there).

It's shaped kind of like a saddle bag and, on the eastern half of the island is Mt. Constitution. It's the tallest point in the San Juan Islands (2,409 feet to be exact...thanks Wikipedia) and offers some incredible views from the summit.

We took some time to hike around the trails as well. They were built by FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression.

There's a national historic park on nearby San Juan Island that commemorates something called The Pig War. My dad and I took a day trip there and apparently there was a dispute or something between the US and the UK over that particular island because there was some confusion over whose it was. Read the Wikipedia article on it if you like and you'll be impressed with its unimpressiveness. Why it's called a "war" I'll never know. No shots fired. Maybe we could call it The Pig Crisis or something like that. The Pig Misunderstanding? I mean, far be it from me to play down any sort of military escalation...it just seems strange is all.

Either way there are some interesting things to see when you're in the park. The British Camp on the north side of the island is in a real beautiful spot. It's also the only place in the United States where the Union Jack still flies.

About a mile away (and up a big damn hill) is the cemetery where British soldiers buried their dead during their 12 years on San Juan Island. This particular tombstone says:

Sacred to The Memory of William Taylor, Aged 34 Years
Who was accidentally shot by his Brother, January 26, 1868
This tablet is erected by his Sorrowing Brother

Yikes. That's a huge bummer.

The American camp on the south side of the island is incredibly spartan and bare compared to the British encampment. No rolling hills. No formal gardens. Just a prairie with some white picket fences and the few rem

aining structures.

Thanks for the memories, San Juan Islands. I will now tie myself to my desk and finish this piece for The Esoterics. Summer is fun but, at a certain point, I'm just ignoring my responsibilities. Mahalo.

blog

I'M A COMPOSER FROM MINNESOTA'S TWIN CITIES CURRENTLY LIVING IN AUSTIN, TEXAS.

OCCASIONALLY I MIGHT HAVE SOMETHING INTERESTING TO SAY.

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san juan islands