Music vs. Theater

Tony Kushner is not and has never been a member of the serialist party.

Tony Kushner’s epic play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures (currently playing at the Public Theater) is a hyper intellectualized allegory disguised as a family drama about a clan of hyper-intellectuals. The action centers around the patriarch, Gus, a lifetime communist who has lived long enough to see his very ideology, the key tenets of his existence, the very fiber of his being fall squarely on the wrong side of history. What does one do when the system you’ve dedicated your life’s work to has been utterly repudiated? For Gus, unwilling to concede his beliefs as flawed, and uninterested in continuing a futile struggle, the answer appears to be an honorable suicide.

At first blush, this is a scenario that few audience members are likely to find applicable to their lives. In this post cold war era, the notion of a staunch communist is a quaint anachronism. For the modern audience, it’s just too easy to dismiss Gus’s ideals as wrongheaded. But what if it wasn’t so clear? What if Gus’s passions weren’t for an idea that was unpopular but not (yet) universally disregarded. Something like… contemporary chamber music? Read the rest of this entry →

Early on in the week, based upon a few tweets from chambermusiciantoday and Sequenza21, I checked out Elodie Lauten’s ‘new’ opera The Death of Don Juan (apparently it originated in the 80s, but this is the first staging and it was radically overhauled). The timing was right, I was going to be in the neighborhood, and at only $15, it seemed worth taking a chance on.

The performance was, in short, underwhelming. It was scrappy and independent with rough edges and some questionable Read the rest of this entry →

The last bit of video from the concert has been posted. Liana, Stephanie, Evan, and Lucas did a great job with the quartet and I’ll be forever grateful to Mark Casey for finding them last year.

The quartet got a great response at the concert and is consistently the piece that people have singled out in subsequent conversations. I’m quite happy with the way it’s turned out and I’m still hoping that it will have a life of its own. So far, though, contemporary chamber music doesn’t seem to be a “If you write it, they will come” sort of endeavor. Still, I’m more confident than ever that this piece does not suck.

Here are the links to the videos (and program notes) for each individual movement.

Movement 1 – On the Rails

Movement 2 – Tango a la Peachy

Movement 3 – Off the Rails

The video excerpts from Alice are finally up. We’ve got the Chamber of Doors, Lullaby, and The Mad Tea Party (complete with me in mouse ears and whiskers.) This is more showtune-y than more recent stuff, but sometimes that’s just how I roll.

After more wrestling with iMovie than I expected (why are video codecs so ridiculously convoluted. What year is this?) I’m starting to post video from last month’s concert on the webs. I’m starting out with the big premiere of poems set to music, or at least the poems that are in the public domain, since the synchronization rights for the others were, shall we say, way out of my price range.

So if you visit the “Listen” page for A Brief History of Love and Poetry you’ll see the videos embedded in there.

In the days to come I’ll be posting the bits from Alice as well as the string quartet.

Cecily BETTER wear those boots tonight.

Those of you who went to my recital last month (and also read the program notes) know that one of the primary inspirations for composing my string quartet came from my friendship with Cecily Ward from the Cypress String Quartet. The Cypress is unique in their commitment to the existing repertoire while providing a steady stream of new commissions for the genre. Their Call and Response program is a perfect embodiment of that ethos. They commission a composer to ‘respond’ to a piece (or pieces) already in the canon, thus creating a new work which has an explicit connection to a tradition. (The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is doing something similar with their “New Brandenburg” project.)

This year’s composer is Jeffery Cotton and the premiere is tonight. I desperately want to go, but my a cappella group is having call backs at my house, so it’s kinda urgent that I’m there. Sigh.

Tonight: 5/5/2011
Cypress String Quartet
Herbst Theater (SF)
8pm (pre concert talk 7:15)

Can I come out yet?

Now that the smoke has cleared after last weekend’s ginormous recital/premiere extravaganza, it’s time to pop out of the foxhole and see what the past five months of preparation has wrought.

It was a big project. Self produce an evening long concert of new music, all written by myself. It seemed like the entrepreneurial thing for a fledgling composer to do.

For those of you that don’t know, self-production is a lot of work. Assembling the artists, coordinating schedules, finding venues… not to mention marketing and publicity, with a few grant applications on the side (all skills that have very little to do with composition). And then there’s the nitty gritty bits like laying out a program, distributing flyers around town, and buying the right amount of crackers for the post concert reception. And, of course, there’s the small matter of getting the music to sound right.

So how did it go?

Read the rest of this entry →