Music vs. Theater

Time to put the game face on. It’s about to get real. I’m goin’ big or goin’ home. (Continue with the conspicuously out of place sports phrases at will.)

Very proud to announce that the string quartet I composed in Paris this past summer as part of the EAMA program “Do A Little Dance” was selected as one of sixteen pieces to compete in the String Quartet Smackdown presented by Golden Hornet Productions on November 3 in Austin, TX.

And what’s a String Quartet Smackdown, you ask? It’s kinda brilliant. Sixteen pieces, each four minutes long, are paired off. The first minute of each piece is performed (by the Tosca Quartet) and the audience votes with their mobile devices to determine which pieces they want to advance. The remaining eight pieces go to the next round, when TWO minutes of the piece are played. Then four pieces get THREE minutes played, and finally two pieces are played in their entirety. The winner gets a valuable cash prize and bragging rights (and hopefully some big ornate trophy thing or maybe even a giant belt).

Looking at the lineup of other pieces, I’m in some pretty formidable company. Ruben Naeff‘s piece was written for the JACK quartet, Simon Fink has done work with eighth blackbird, Steven Snowden will have the home advantage, hailing from Austin himself, but there’s a chance he’ll actually be in Portugal on his Fulbright to work on interactive motion capture systems for large installations, which would even the playing field a bit. But there’s no denying, this is the big leagues. And no matter the outcome, it’s an honor just to share the stage.

If you happen to be in Austin on November 3, please go and support our team. And by ‘our team’ I mean ‘independent new music’.

I’ve been doing a lot of composing so far this year. In addition to an encore for the Hilary Hahn competition (which didn’t result in an honorable mention, but did result in a pretty cool piece for violin and piano), I’ve been chugging away on the solo opera that’s been a good four years in the making. I’ve got a solid chunk of 50 minutes of music (i.e. 50 milliWagners) composed, which is about two thirds of the final piece.

I’m going to perform that 50 minute chunk as part of the Solo Sunday performance series at Stage Werx. If you’re in San Francisco next weekend, please come on by.

I first saw the name Ken Malucelli when I purchased the CASA christmas songbook in 1993 (all arranged by Ken and Deke Sharon). Years later Ken was one of the judges at the Harmony Sweepstakes competition when a subset of The Richter Scales performed a set of original songs I had written. (We closed with a song entitled “I Hate A Cappella” penned just for that event, which incidentally, consists entirely of a cappella groups. We didn’t win.)

I didn’t actually work with Ken until 2004 when I started singing with his holiday caroling outfit, The Merrie Olde Christmas Carolers. That led to a number of interesting side a cappella gigs, including a particularly disastrous Valentines Day serenade that formed the basis for my first solo show, Better Loving Through Chemistry in 2006. Since then we’ve traveled through the far reaches of the western United States together, primarily while presenting Oh Mr Sousa, his musical biography of the March King. I get to play Sousa. (Which is a great excuse for some seriously goofy facial hair!)

Ken is something of an institution in the Bay Area music world, having worked with the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Opera, Chanticleer, the Lamplighters and dozens of other groups. So I was deeply honored when Ken wrote to me to tell me that my own composition recital in April inspired him to write some new work, a setting of W. S. Gilbert verse for small chamber ensemble. What’s more he dedicated these pieces to me, and composed them specifically with my voice in mind.

Saturday evening we’ll be premiering the first song at the National Association of Composers concert in San Francisco. It’s The Yarn of the Nancy Bell, a grisly sea shanty in the vein of Edward Gorey. It is, as is much of Ken’s work, an absolute hoot. We’ll be at the Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street in San Francisco. 8pm.

If you’re in San Francisco tonight and interested in hearing some brand new music, swing by Counterpulse at 7:30 to hear a brief excerpt of the latest from my solo opera Failing That.

The section I’ll be performing was composed in the past few months and shows the early scenes involving a middle school student struggling to survive his physical education class.

The music is truly straddling opera and musical theater with a bit more emphasis on the musical theater tradition than I expected. And the good news is, even after listening to it non stop for a week, I really like it. There are equal parts Sondheim, Stravinsky, and (if you know my tastes, you’ll know how shocking this part is) even Rachmaninoff!

I have to credit Bruce Pachtman for encouraging me to sign up for these workshops at regular intervals. They force me to write new music and also forces the work to get up on stage before an audience. This gives me a chance to see how it works as theater, whether some parts are slow or confusing (or really hard to memorize). The next workshop will be in mid January as part of Bruce’s Solo Sundays series at Stage Werx, and if I can stay focused throughout the holiday season, I may be able to perform the first 50 minutes of the opera in its entirety!

But first things first. I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon memorizing and rehearsing for tonight. Hope to see you there.

Words First at Counterpulse

1310 Mission Street

Wednesday Nov 2, 7:30

Buy tickets

After a full evening of writing music, I am proposing a new unit of time. The Wagner (abbreviation Wg). One Wagner is equal to one thousand minutes, approximately the length of the entire Ring Cycle. Here are some useful conversions:

1 day = 1.4 Wagners

1 year = 511.35 Wagners

1 minute = 1 milliWagner (1 mWg)

This unit will be particularly useful for superficially evaluating the works of other composers:

The entire works of Anton Webern can be contained on about 6 compact discs with a total running time of 36 centiWagners.

Or making us composers feel crappy about our own productivity:

After sitting at the piano for the entire evening, I realized that I was only able to compose about .5 milliWagners of usable music. Furthermore, my maximum rate of composition rarely breaks the 1 mWg/h mark.

Anyone know anyone over at ISO?

I was just on John's left, but they cropped me out.

Having worked at Pixar since 1993, I have quite a number of Steve Jobs stories. Most of those I keep well within the confines of the building or my close friends, but this is one that I think really exemplifies Steve. (Names and email addresses have been changed.)

In the early days of Pixar, Steve seemed fairly hands off. I didn’t see him in person until 1995, after I had been working in this fairly tiny company for two years.

Around that time, a particularly outspoken employee (we’ll call him Richard) sent an email to the entire company (pixar@pixar.com) that was quite critical about some decisions that Steve had made. About 30-45 minutes later, Richard sent a sheepish follow up email to the smaller, more casual Pixar email address (pixarchat@pixar.com) warning us that “Hey everyone, I just found out the hard way that Steve actually reads mail sent to pixar@pixar.com. Thought you should be aware.”

Five minutes later another email goes out to pixarchat, this time from Steve Jobs:

“Hey Richard. I also read pixarchat.”

It’s not the applause. It’s not the artistic satisfaction. And it’s certainly not the payday.

It’s the facial hair.

More importantly, it’s the “get out of shaving that ridiculous beard off despite your wife’s desperate protestations free” card that I get with each show. Honestly, the directors don’t even ask me to grow facial hair. I just try to figure out what I can get away with, grow it, then I walk through the Mission (or Williamsburg, depending on which coast I’m on) and soak in the jealous gazes of the hipsters with their disapproving girlfriends in tow.

So… theater. It’s the key to having both ridiculous facial hair AND a significant other.

And now, for your amusement, a gallery of regrettable facial hair, with no regrets.

John Philip Sousa in "Oh Mr Sousa"

Henry Mosher in "Emmeline"

Carl Magnus in "A Little Night Music"

Uhh...no excuse here. It's just me.

Like Glee. But with better music.

Next Thursday and Saturday (June 9th and 11th) the superb San Francisco Girls Chorus will be performing a remarkable concert of new works including an arrangement of JS Bach’s famous Wachet Auf Cantata 140 for chorus and string quartet by… me.

Cecily Ward from the Cypress String Quartet approached me a couple of months ago with the idea of combining both the chorale movement at the end of the cantata with the popular 4th movement. Rather than simply giving the girls chorus the unison tenor line featured in the 4th movement, (which would have been a waste of talented voices), Cecily wanted to be able to trade themes between the string quartet and the chorus, as an exercise in timbre matching. This would give the chorus an opportunity to sing some lovely sixteenth note runs, but also meant that musical lines that had no text associated with them would need some sort of syllable to sing. Simply singing “aahs” or “ooh” seemed underwhelming, so I was tried to find text in the chorale movement that would fit the melody and sit well on the voice. I’m quite happy with the results, which even managed to land an ecstatic “Hosianna!” or two on some of the extended sixteenth note runs.

The rest of the concert promises to be fascinating, complete with a world premiere from Tania Leon and works from Libby Larsen and Chen Yi. Thursday night is sold out, but Saturday night tickets are still available.

Funny… I remember the Girls Chorus singing with us at the San Francisco Symphony for a few Mahler symphonies back in the 2000s. They haven’t aged one bit!

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

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?

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