Music vs. Theater

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 →

In preparation for tonight’s big concert I’ve posted the program notes for the eponymous song cycle, A Brief History of Love and Poetry in the Listen section of the blog. With any luck, the audio from tonight’s performance will soon be posted there as well (at least for the poems that don’t cost over $1000 to purchase mechanical licenses).

In the meantime I’m going over my mental checklist to make sure everything’s all set for tonight. Cookies are baked, wine purchased, programs folded, clothing picked out. Oh yes, at some point there’s the music.

Hope to see many of you at the Community Music Center tonight…

Happy monkey is happy (and NOT a hypocrite)

Fantastic news here in Music vs Theater world! The San Francisco chapter of the American Composer’s Forum has seen fit to award me a Subito grant to help produce this weekend’s premiere of my song cycle (and other works)!

This is a huge deal, not only will it make it much more likely that we’ll be able to cover all the expenses (as well as pay the musicians closer to what they deserve), but with any luck, it will pave the way for future grants.

But, looking for the grey cloud behind this silver lining in this particular horse’s mouth, it looks like it’s time for me to revisit my post whining about how hard it is for new-ish composers to get arts grants. After all, can I still maintain that arts funding does more harm than good in the face of this new award?

Unfortunately, I kinda think so. Read the rest of this entry →

What a fantastic idea this is.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4]

They need to have the input audio be a solo piano piece to see what happens. First some Mozart, then some Debussy. Now THAT would be cool.

I’m curious how much the transformation considers the audio spectrum of the output device. What if this was instead driving a sampler? You’d expect a different midi result depending on the samples chosen.

Generating the audio acoustically is a big part of the neat factor though. It reminds me of the coolest thing I ever saw a SIGGRAPH, the Wooden Mirror. It’s literally a low resolution monochromatic display device of wooden pixels. Each square pixel has a servo attached and it would tilt up or down to reflect the right about of light.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZysu9QcceM

Pretty cool stuff.

What IS happening with Hilary and Nick?

Felicia Day just posted this amazingly egregious bit of product placement, which, apparently, is pretty commonplace these days.

This could easily be applied to classical music with just a bit of media synergy. Imagine a couple finishing a candle lit dinner, staring into each other’s eyes:

“Thanks for the dinner. The chicken was delicious.”

“It’s the least I could do after you saved my family’s fortune. You’ve become so much more to me than just another corporate lawyer.”

“Well. It’s all I can do. I didn’t want to see another mom and pop surgery facility put out of business by the big medical corporations. And you’re much more to me than just another beautiful brain surgeon. Say… what’s this music playing?”

“It’s Hilary Hahn’s new recording of the Higdon and Tchaikovsky concertos with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Jennifer Higdon won the Pulitzer Prize for this piece. It’s available on iTunes and Amazon.”

“It’s so… intense.  Passionate. I didn’t think classical music could make me feel like this.”

“The San Francisco Chronicle called the concerto a knockout.”

“That makes two knockouts in the room…”

Music swells. Close up on suggestive looks. Fade to black…

Hmm. This could work. I’ll just contact my local TV soap and see if they can work in some plot point where two young lovers decide to go to a concert of Brian M Rosen’s new music for their first date on the premise that they’re both studying Emily Dickenson in their literature class. I’m sure I’d see a huge spike in women over the age of 50 with less than a high school education interested in my music. And I am a little weak in that demographic.

My fellow singing waiter Mark Hernandez notified me (and all his other Facebook friends) of this cutting “dark bio” from regional opera performer Robert Orth:

Robert Orth’s “Dark Biograpy”

While it’s tongue in cheek (and damn funny) it offers an honest glance into the not-so-glamorous life of most working musicians that’s much more common than the still-not-as-glamorous-as-you-might-think lives of the brand name soloists in the classical music world. Consider the countless hours of practice and numbers of auditions Mr Orth had to endure to get to even this level, then realize how many fail to even get this far, and you can see why any father worth his salt would encourage alternative means of getting by.

But we do it anyway. Because, for the most part, it’s a lot of fun. And if we’re really lucky we get to participate in something amazing, perhaps even enduring. And sometimes, even if it’s neither amazing nor enduring, even if it’s getting paid to sing the same Puccini aria you’ve sung dozens of times before, while wearing a name tag and polyester apron and pretending to be a waiter at an annual reward dinner for the regional association of  morticians, the enthusiastic cheers of the crowd, genuinely appreciative of  the talents and skills you’re sharing, will make it all worthwhile.

Tryouts for the SCA? No! It's Schick Machine!

Part sculpture, part monodrama, part concerto for virtuoso percussionist, Schick Machine is a genre defying performance piece that combines its disparate elements into a surprisingly delightful 80 minutes. This collaboration of composer Paul Dresher, percussionist Steven Schick, instrument builder Daniel Schmidt and writer Rinde Eckert may not be life altering theater, but it is a heck of a lot of fun.

Entering the space, one is confronted by an array of large contraptions with a sole tinkerer, Schick, wearing an apron out of a 19th century laboratory, fussing with a batch of blueprints. Soon this rustling and crinkling of paper seems to take a life of its own. Surely it’s deliberate, a transition into a world of noise and sound. The fun of the show comes from discovering how each of these strange machines, with the assistance of audio looping technology, works to produce a unique sonic landscape. Music comes from less imposing devices as well. Schick teases polyrhythmic miniatures out of wood blocks, metal hoops, modified organ stops, and an entire pantry of kitchen implements.

The evening is oh-so-slightly held together by a few short snippets of narration that identify this inventor as an isolated genius who has forfeit human relations in an obsessive effort to create this machine that will “reconcile the past with the future” (isolated geniuses are something of a recurring theme in Eckert’s work). If these bits of spoken text were the crux of the piece, they may well be criticized as lacking substance, but to my ear, Read the rest of this entry →

This link is just too good to stay hidden in the comment section of my last post. My friend Natalie has great advice for young artists hoping for a career in the capricious lotto game of artistic endeavors. Her points are specific, useful, insightful, and should be required reading for those folks who, in fact, can’t imagine themselves doing anything else than pursuing their muse. Share widely.

http://birthofaplaywright.blogspot.com/2010/04/day-87-lessons-no-one-could-teach-me.html

There comes a time in one’s life (usually around junior year of high school) when you have to answer the question, “What do you want to do with your life?” More often, this question comes in the form of “What colleges are you looking into?” and “Have you picked a major yet?”. But the underlying issue remains “Now that you’re 16, what activity do you plan on pursuing for the next 50 years?”

For me the answer was obvious. I had been studying music intensely since second grade. I had been performing in musicals since third grade (including a professional regional production). My listening habits, which had started with Bernstein and Sondheim in elementary school, had progressed through Gershwin, Stravinsky, and Bartok in high school. Simple. I was going to be a composer of orchestral and musical theater works.

That is, until my piano teacher talked some sense into me.

Read the rest of this entry →

I’m excited to announce that on April 23rd several of my new pieces will be premiered in San Francisco in an evening length concert dedicated to my work as a composer. A Brief History of Love and Poetry is a song cycle I composed late last year for baritone and mezzo soprano. It’s a setting of five love poems spanning a 150 year period, each expressing a different aspect of human relationships. Cary Ann Rosko and Robert Stafford will be singing with Keisuke Nakagoshi on piano.

In addition to the song cycle, there will be the first public performance of my string quartet, excerpts of my upcoming opera Failing That, and excerpts from the opera adaptation of Alice in Wonderland I wrote for Cinnabar Theater. A casual reception with snacks and drinks will follow.

For more information, please visit this page:

A Brief History of Love and Poetry