Last Wednesday, April 13, was the culmination of one of the coolest experiences of my musical career.  The Lakeside Middle-school String Orchestra performed my composition Lakeside Rhapsody. A few months prior the orchestra director and my friend Erica Johansen commissioned me to write a piece for and work with the kids of the orchestra.  It was a great experience.  First we all met and the kids asked me questions about my influences and what I do.  Then, they brainstormed different ideas for me to use in the composition.  We got: write a 5 voice fugue (I got in a grand exposition!), distribute main melodic materials between the different instruments (violin, viola, violoncello, double bass, piano), use an odd meter, and include some indie rock/pop elements and sounds.  Well, that was quite an inspirational happening.  I immediately set to writing on the piece and finished the bulk of the work in about 2 weeks, managing to put all those elements in there.

The orchestra had a couple of months to work on it.  I sat-in on a couple of rehearsals and we got to work on and talk about the piece. A valuable and rare opportunity for both composer and musician.  It was wonderful.

The performance was great.  The kids really dug in and played the music with purpose.  Afterwards they presented me with this card they made and signed:

Here is Lakeside Rhapsody performed by the Lakeside Middleschool Orchestra:

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I am very grateful for and honored by this experience.  Many thanks to Erica, all the young musicians, and the Lakeside School.

Being an artist is a lot of work more than anything else.  It seems that you’re either is working on stuff or planning stuff to working on later.  You never get to punch out.  Art monk, masochist, workaholic…  The work is finding a way to communicate/create in order to ease the pain of living (to paraphrase and add a little to Ginsberg).

It’s Like That (Jan. 6 2011)

Recorded live at Egan’s Ballard Jam House 3/29/11.  My good friend Cody Rahn was in town and we decided to do a gig together. We are joined by Nate Omdal-bass and Beth Fleenor-clarinet.  These guys did an amazing job sight-reading this tune and making sound good on the fly.  Artists always working…

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It’s Like That (PDF)

Hey Folks!  Took a little time between posts, but grant season was upon us and there were many things going on… Anyhow, the other day I had the great pleasure of playing a duo gig with Evan Flory-Barnes, bass player extraordinaire, composer of elegant music, and a genuine pillar of the Seattle  music and art community.  Let me say, I have been trying to figure out a way to play with this cat for a while and  he just happens to call for the gig!  Serendipity baby!  So, we played at the newly re-incarnated Vito’s on First Hill.  Good piano, great staff, awesome food, and a very formidable bourbon selection.  I took this as an opportunity to have Evan play on A Tune A Day piece.  I selected a piece called Interim.  I wrote this piece while I was killing time between 2 appointments.  It pretty much represents what I think anybody does when they are killing time:  have a little idea and improvise.  Maybe you know you will get a coffee, but  who will you meet, what will you see, what thoughts will come and go?  This piece is like that.  An idea or 2 to get you going then let whatever happen happen.  It’s a passing observation of thought, an ongoing conversation, the Interim.  Evan is great to play with.  Besides just being a great player, he has a way of making it easier for you to play and of making you sound better.

Interim (Feb. 26, 2011)

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Interim (PDF)

Well folks, today marks a milestone.  I have written 50 tunes so far in my 2011 A Tune A Day project.  Got a handful of good ones I must say.  Some others are fit to be cannibalized for other compositions (kinda like having a major spare parts collection for your car restoration project). Some are lessons in what not to do.  It has been tough, I must say.  Some days you just don’t have the energy or the motivation or seemingly the inspiration.  I say seemingly because at first I felt I could be exhausting my inspiration. Wearing it down, or burning it out.  But as I do this, I am beginning to realize that I can use any little bit around me to be inspiration.  A chime outside, the rhythm of the laundry room downstairs, the light of the day, a small knick-knack on the piano… But lot’s of the time it is just gritty work. But out of that grit, there always seems to be at least some little gem that shines through.  Daily practice of this discipline is also showing me how to be disciplined in some other aspects of my life as well.  Something that is greatly appreciated.

There is another little milestone that goes with this video.  I wanted to something special for the 50th day so I decided to write, record, and upload this very day’s tune no matter how it tuned out!  For those of you following along at home, I usually post a tune from a week or 2 prior, after selection and some practice.

Snowpocalypse 2011 (Feb. 23, 2011)

Fitting tune for the gorgeous day out there today.  Written on the last day of January.  Really not much to say about this tune except that it feels good to feel good and be able to write about it.

My Sunny Day (Jan. 31, 2011)

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My Sunny Day (PDF)

Here is a solo clarinet piece titled Meditation I.  Performed by Beth Fleenor.  When written out, the piece has no time signature and no bar lines.  It is up to the performer to interpret the tempo of the phrases and the relative rhythms.

Meditation I (Jan. 16, 2011)

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Meditation I (PDF)

Here is audio of a new tune from my Tune A Day project.  What can I say, I love chorales.  I waited until my piano was tuned to record this piece.  Glad I did.  In undertaking this endeavor of writing a tune everyday I am learning a few things.  One that it is important not to judge your composition as one is writing it.  This alone wastes so much time in the process.  Commit to the idea and then figure out if you like it later.  Same as when you are improvising.  Another thing I am learning is that it is okay for your piece to sound like something else.  When we are children we learn to speak by imitating our parents.  Same as when we learn to speak in the musical sense.  At first we will imitate those musicians we admire, but eventually we develop our own way of speaking, of communicating, of making music.

A Moment’s Peace (Jan. 7, 2011)

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I think every artist goes through periods of writer’s block. The last 6-7 months yielded no fruit for me in the composition department.  It was really frustrating.  The harder I tried to write, the less I could.  Eventually I came to terms with the situation and let it go. The weeks without that bromidic sword hanging over me were great – carefree almost.  A deadline for composition came up.  I needed to write new music for a Seattle Pianist Collective Halloween show.  Summer moved to fall. No music. September was waning. No music. I booked rehearsals with violinist Paris Hurley.  Still no music.  October.  Still no music.  5 days to rehearsals (10 days to the concert). BAM!  An idea came and off I went. Finished it in time for the concert.  Not only that but all of a sudden writing was easy again and I got ideas for other pieces.  Situations like this have happened to me before and I finally am putting my finger on what’s going on.  For me, breaking through writer’s block is a coupling of two things.  Honestly letting go of the usually productive (albeit nagging and somewhat neurotic) impetus to produce, produce, produce, and a real deadline.  As with anything that requires training and discipline, sometimes the best thing for it is leaving it alone for a while. Reset. Clear any clouds that have formed with so much RAM activity.  Let new ideas settle into one’s being.  Give your brain and your soul a rest. Deadline, well sometimes that is simply the best inspiration.  Next time this happens, I think I will be properly armed to handle it.  Here are the two pieces for the Seattle Pianist Collective’s Halloween Concert 2010. I am playing piano on both:

Sketches of Hamlin

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Prelude No. 1 for Violin and Piano (Paris Hurley-violin)

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“Just as appetite comes from eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning”- Igor Stravinsky

Freely improvised music can be a touchy subject.  People have very strong opinions about it and how it should be performed and heard.  I have been thinking about this a lot in the past year, kicking around the idea of starting a free ensemble and have been doing some research.  Shows and sessions, talks with practitioners and audience, and lots of listening. I am coming to the conclusion that communication is what makes successful free music.  Communication over chops, over vocabulary, instrumentation, whatever.  If it does communicate to me I have a hard time listening to it. Of course this is subjective, but I think true communication comes across objectively.  There have been 3 ensembles that have really shown me this.  They are very different in style, vocabulary, and approach:

• Bling: Denney Goodhew(piano and percussion) and Beth Fleenor(clarinet).  An improvised chamber and new music duo with strong melodic and harmonic content and an unfolding style of improvising form. Plus some of the most beautiful tone I have ever heard.
• Butch Morris’ Conduction: various medium and large ensembles conducted by Butch Morris (seriously check out the link, my words cannot do this artist justice).  Butch has distilled down the essentials of what make a composition and created a lexicon of hand signals that he uses to direct ensemble in live performance.  The notes and rhythms are left to the players, while Butch determines the form, textures, dynamics, and development.
• Lee Konitz New Quartet: The legendary Lee Konitz (alto sax) leads this free jazz quartet.  They play freely improvised music based on jazz standards.  The idea is collective improvisation with no preconceived notions, no pre-determined or traditional instrumental roles, and grounded in form that is allowed to shift and develop. Plus Lee is quite charming and funny from the stage (note to the avant-garde: it’s okay to smile and engage your audience.  They might actually listen to you.)

As I said, very different styles, vocabularies and motivations.  All three communicate very effectively and it is for the same 3 reasons: Suspension of ego, deep listening between ensemble members, and controlled volume.  One leads into the next very nicely as well

Suspension of ego:  putting aside one’s ego and the need to feed it for the greater purpose at hand.  Sounds easy right?  I think it takes a lot of discipline. We all have been to those free sessions that inevitably become a wall of noise because everyone thinks what they are saying is the most important thing at that moment.  It is frustrating.  Suspending the ego enables you to do what is called for by the music, to play actual ideas and not just noodle, and will ultimately free you to not judge what you play as you play it.  This judgment is another killer of freedom in music. In Butch Morris’s Conductions, the players suspend their ego’s to follow direction from the leader. Equally as important.  Suspension of ego leads right into the next reason for successful free music.

Deep listening:  step away from the ego and you can hear what your band mates are telling you through the music.  Focusing on listening to them is far more important than playing yourself.  This is hard.  Honestly I have only truly experienced this once (don’t worry, I am working on this).  We were playing an Ornette Coleman tune called Congeniality.  I remember I sat out for most of the tune. Initially it was because I felt I didn’t know what to play.  Then, I started really listening to what was going on around me.  It was amazing.  Towards the end of the tune I think I placed a couple of chords down.  But they were well executed and the right thing for the moment.  My best playing came from not playing and listening.  Watching the three ensembles you can see how hard they are listening to each other.  Even when the texture is full and everyone is playing, there are no superfluous notes or gestures.  Beauty.  One of the keys to deep listening:

Controlled volume: Denney Goodhew can play the piano quieter then anyone I have heard that is not a pro classical pianist.  Conductions:  20 some people playing and one could almost speak in a normal voice over the loudest parts.  Lee Konitz: the band is a traditional jazz quartet playing completely acoustically.  Again, the volume stayed controlled and never got loud.  When you play at lower, controlled volume, every nuance becomes amplified.  Nothing gets drowned out.  It is easier to pick out any given line or idea even in a full texture. The wide world of tone can be explored. These might be obvious but why is it that so many free bands and sessions end up get loud to the point that you can tell no one can actually hear anyone else.  It is just wanking. It becomes heavy-handed and subtlety is lost.  The loud volume actually traps you into a very limited box of things you can do.  And often times this leads to playing practiced patterns and devices or just making unorganized noise.  Also, high volume does not equal intensity and energy.  These groups have proved to me that you can play with palpably burning intensity while maintaining a controlled volume.

Please check out these artists.  I have had the pleasure of seeing/hearing all three live and it was a humbling and enlightening experience.  Communication is the key in music and in life.

So on my flight to Chicago to visit my Dad, the plane I was on made an emergency landing in Rock Springs, Wyoming because a coffee pot in the galley caught fire. It was tense to say the least.  As we were diving, I was not afraid of dying so much as I kept thinking of all the stuff I have not done in my life yet.  Taking my wife to Ukraine, writing a set of string quartets, crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, living in Paris, writing a symphony, learning the bagpipes, writing a novel, reading War and Peace in Russian…  We landed, everything was fine, and all I really had to endure as a result was 48 hours of sleeplessness.   But it made me think…

Eventually I made it to Chicago.  A place were I have spent a good portion of every summer as a kid, under the auspices of my paternal grandparents.  I took a run around Riis Park and the neighborhood.  What was once an Italian neighborhood is now a barrio.  Abruzzi’s Pizza is gone.  The bowling alley where I would play Double Dragon is boarded up.  The old neighbors have moved or died. It made me a bit sad. Pobre Miguel.

Then I started to notice the things that have not changed. Things that were a part of  my childhood.  Bikes parked wheels up as their riders hand-line for bluegill, perch, and bullhead in the lagoon. Goading red devil crawdads into epic battles under the huge blue sky adorned with a lattice work of cirrus clouds.  A  boy trying to steal a kiss from a girl under the shade of an elm tree.  The ice cream man pushing his 2 wheeled cart; – weathered face holding a melancholy behind his smile.  The alley where I learned to ride a bike.

Today:  Dad’s backyard. Dog days of summer. Reading Hemingway under the shade of the grapevine my grandfather planted some 40 years ago.  The terse, beautiful sentences mixing with cold beer. Reaching up from time to time to pluck a grape. Rolling it between my fingers.  Biting into the sweetness under the skin, savoring the slight sourness in the center of a real honest to God grape. Going to the auto shop my father works out of.  Watching a man weld and cut sections of copper piping.  Sweat beading, falling off the end of his nose, mixing with the metal slag collecting on the shop floor.  An Irishman, a Puerto Rican, a Greek, and us 2 Slavs having cold Canadian whiskey at the end of the work day. These will be my memories as old man thinking about the young man he once was. The memories of childhood dimmed by age and  replaced with the small and large adventures that adulthood have brought.

In this I have learned what is important.  One gets caught up in one’s work and the self-imposed, self-importance of being an artist.  Responsibilities, deadlines, meetings, concerts, practice, output, output, output;- these things in and of themselves are not so important.  We like to pretend they are. They are nothing without anything behind them. What is important is that grape. What is important is the person sleeping next to you as you lie awake listening to her breathe, hand reaching out to lightly trace the contour of her reposed body. What is important is having whiskey with your father. What is important is making those crawdads fight. What is important is your friend’s laughter. What is important is that stolen kiss. What is important is to appreciate the experiences and people you are given.  Focus on these things and the art will come.  It will be fueled and have real substance and genuine emotion.  And you will old and you will be comforted. Rico Miguel. Tu es un hombre mas rico y mas afortunado.