I’m excited to announce some big news: nienteForte Contemporary Music is merging with Versipel New Music. I’ve been appointed the new Executive Director of Versipel New Music and will still act as an interim Co-Artistic Director for nienteForte. Founding Director of Versipel New Music Kari Besharse will be stepping more fully into her role as Artistic Director, focusing on the Versipel Collective.

The joint effort to make this merger happen has been a few years in the making thanks to the efforts of me and Kari along with Versipel New Music’s Assistant Director Phil Scheussler and nienteForte’s Outreach and Operations Director Stephen Montalvo. The merger represents a recognition that combining our individual efforts into a singular unified entity will better serve our shared mission to celebrate and amplify new music in our region.

I’m grateful to be given this opportunity and have three primary objectives as the new Executive Director of this merged organization: focus, unify, and grow.

1. Focus

One of the strongest motivators for this merger is a desire to bring into sharp focus the roles that Versipel New Music and nienteForte play as New Orleans-based new music entities. nienteForte has established its brand as a new music residency series featuring concerts, masterclasses, and student-reading workshops from world-renowned new music performers and ensembles from across the globe. Versipel New Music has established its brand as a New Orleans-based collective of performers and composers dedicated to concert performances that showcase the best in new music today. We’re steering the events we curated as separate organizations towards these more precise brand definitions under the new unified organization, allowing both the Versipel Collective concerts and the nienteForte residencies to hone in on their strengths and offer more support so we can continue to curate new music in the ways that our community has come to expect.

2. Unify

Collaboration has been a core tenet between Versipel New Music and nienteForte even before we started discussions of merging. This comes from a philosophy we all share that the community we serve is made stronger when we work together. As the new Executive Director, I’m establishing a stronger framework designed to elevate and unify our operations as a single organization. This framework is multifaceted with various pillars that range from big picture goals of better defining our mission and vision to detailed goals of streamlining how we operate including scheduling, communications, and fundraising strategies. Additionally, the Versipel New Music brand will be used to advocate for and support projects from any of the talented individuals within the organization, granting them agency and independence within our roof. Establishing and guiding these pillars will be instrumental in reducing the barriers that interfere with our ability to spend time doing what we want to the most: making new music together.

3. Grow

The cultural vibrancy of New Orleans makes it a natural hub for new music, and Versipel New Music and nienteForte have done a lot to cultivate and foster that local community. But passion for new music in our region is not exclusive to New Orleans. Across the state of Louisiana, there is a network of individuals and organizations that share our love for new music. In the same spirit of collaboration that has driven this merger, we are launching outreach initiatives to create new connections and partnerships throughout the state, welcoming both established and emerging talent into our new music community. The first of these is Batture Contemporary, a Louisiana-focused new music festival that will have its inaugural debut this coming September. This call-for-scores festival will harness and cultivate a larger new music community by bringing composers from across the state to New Orleans to hear their work performed by the Versipel Collective. This, along with other initiatives that we will be rolling out gradually over time, will provide increased access to concert, residency, and festival opportunities, paving the way for a stronger and brighter new music identity not only in New Orleans but across Louisiana.

The Path Forward

The integration of Versipel New Music and nienteForte together opens up new doors and opportunities to fulfill our program goals while retaining the individual autonomies that have made these programs persevere for over a decade. My ultimate directive as the Executive Director is to leverage the strengths of these existing programs while simultaneously establishing new ways for us to engage with our community, cementing a stronger and larger foundation of sustainability and stability. nienteForte will continue bringing world-class new music performers and ensembles to the region for concerts, masterclasses, student readings, and workshops. The Versipel Collective will continue pushing the boundaries of its New Orleans concert programming and will also be an integral part of a new pilot program to engage with composition programs outside of New Orleans. Batture Contemporary will showcase the strongest in new music across our region. I’m excited to turn the page and guide and influence this new chapter in our organization’s history.

Diversity Still Matters

As I move into this new role, I feel it is important to make a statement on behalf of Versipel New Music regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion. Despite the potential negative impact on federal and state grant funding we may receive due to changes in philosophy and policy around diversity initiatives across the country, we will not be silenced in what we feel is our moral imperative to amplify creative voices from a wide spectrum of communities including those that have been systemically marginalized. Diversity in the arts is a strength, not a handicap, and Versipel New Music stands firm in our commitment to provide a platform for these diverse voices to be heard and given their well-earned spotlight.

Thank you.

Versipel New Music and nienteForte were both independently created to find and bring together individuals that are passionate about new music. Now, over a decade later, the strength and perseverance of both organizations are a direct result of the belief and support of the new music community that has embraced us. As we navigate this exciting new chapter of our unified venture, I wanted to say thank you. While there are still many challenges ahead of us, I am confident that with the continued support of our dedicated community of composers, performers, staff, donors, and fans, Versipel New Music will become a defining new music force in New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and the Gulf South.

Happy new music making,

Mendel Lee

Executive Director

Versipel New Music

This was supposed to be relatively simple – I did a search for some New Orleans companies for custom shirts and stickers (I’m making an effort to support local businesses) and found a handful. I decided to start with shirts and explored prices and options for Faux Pas, a company I already had some familiarity with as we used them in the past when I was still working for Tulane Bands. I went to their website and used their mockup to place the nF logo on a blank polo to see what it would look like, and there I discovered a problem.

Recently I’ve shifted my overall brand philosophy to have “short” vs “long” versions of my various brands, and my short brands are designed to be enclosed by circles for almost all social media standards. I’ve come to appreciate the overall simplicity of short logos over long ones and prefer to use them in all sorts of marketing except when i want full banners.

I shifted my own personal “Mendel Lee” brand to its current logo years after I created the one for nF. For my own logo, I decided that the circle aspect of the logo needed further emphasizing which manifested itself as a simple thin white circle.

Granted, on some of my sub brands (Mendel Drums, Mendel Plays), I don’t have a border like this, but there’s reasons for that that are tangential to this post.

The wisdom of creating that real border was made even more clear because of my attempts to put the current nF logo with no real border on a shirt using Faux Pas’s online tools.

Basically, the black part of the logo is supposed to be considered background, and on social media and in print materials it can easily be seen as such, but on a shirt that is itself a background color, the black looks like it’s a part of the brand. No other logo’ed shirt in my memory imprints a background on top of the background of the shirt. It comes off as amateur. The alternative of eliminating the black and having it be just the nF with nothing else looks too bare.

The simple solution is to create a circle that borders the logo and have the background be transparent, similar to how my “M” brand is, but there’s a part of me that is now leaning towards creating something that is circular in shape but stylized, not dissimilar to how tapspace‘s logo, the published of my timpani solo, is stylized. A part of me balks at the idea of the complexity that that will introduce in what I feel is a simple and clean logo – especially because that then creates more complications around how that circular shape is then used in conjunction with the long banner logo – but a stronger part of me feels like it’s a good step towards further elevating the brand, something that has been slowly happening over time.

The addition of that complexity then raises an important question: what color should that shape be?

The true color scheme of the nF logo both in its short and long-form is complicated. The part that is of highest importance is the red F. The color of the “n” (and the “niente -orte” in the long logo) has been white or black as, again, a neutral part of the brand to make the red F stick out more. This is something I leaned on in particular when I was making seasonal print booklets and used that “red capital at a later point in the text” as a centralized theme.

I knew that using a pure red was a bold choice for the branding – red is rarely used for logos for both practical and philosophical reasons, but I deliberately went against the conventional wisdom because I really wanted the F to be a true exclamation point for the brand. That’s also why I wanted the everything else to be a neutral color, to make that exclamation point really stand out, and to not overwhelm the whole brand with all red.

So this creates a clear predicament around adding other design elements to the brand. If I create a stylized circular shape that is red, it could dilute the red of the F in ways that I don’t want – it could even make the white or black “n” in the short logo stand out more. On the flip side, a color associated with a stylized circular shape makes that a part of the brand, so making that black or white shifts it out of the neutral space in a way less amateur but still not too dissimilar to putting the logo on a shirt with a printed black background color.

So where does this leave me?

Two choices:

1: Stylize the circular shape but in a way that is not dominant. Something thin and emphasized towards the right could work, and then the remainder of the logo can still be black or white. If I do it the right way, I might even be able to make it work with the long logo too, although that would be challenging.

2: Introduce for the first time ever a second “true” color to the brand. Something that can act as a more neutral element that still makes the red F stand out, and one that can withstand either a dark or light background.

All of this, in addition to having to redesign the logo from scratch in Affinity Designer since I don’t have access to Adobe CC anymore *and* I don’t have access to the original font I used for the red F anymore because I no longer use Sibelius – has turned this whole “it should be easy to print shirts and stickers” into something much more complicated. We’ll see how it all plays out, but I think that what it could end up doing is making me scrap the t-shirt/polo shirt for now and instead just do a limited number of stickers – I can do a redesign of the logo and everything with it as more marketing/publicity for nF’s landmark 15th anniversary. I may even hire or consult with a graphic designer to help me fine-tune my ideas like I’m some sort of real company or something.

We’ll see.

I’m not ready to talk about what I’ve landed on for parts 3 and 4, but I do want to talk about the initial idea that I landed on for part 2 – bee swarms. Bee sounds, particularly in swarms, have a lot of personality to them and can be translated in a myriad different ways into a sonic art. I found a dozen or so public domain sounds of bees that I really liked and started listening to them over and over again trying to determine how I could shape the aural narrative of the work.

I was struggling to pick a direction that I really liked, so I decided to do some basic research on bees for inspiration. I knew most of the basics and some fringe knowledge about things like colony collapse disorder and that the population of bees are declining, but it wasn’t until I dug into it more that my eyes were opened to the true facts and myths about bees. Once I dug deep enough, I realized that I had no choice but to scrap the bee swarm idea from Through the Sonic Glass completely.

The reason? Including bee sounds in a work whose central thesis is dangerous/hostile environments spreads misinformation and perpetuates a myth that damages our global ecosystem. Not only are most bees not a threat to humanity (with the exception of Africanized honey bees), they are essential for pollenating the world’s crops and unnecessary eradication of them due to apiphobia (fear of bees) has potentially irreversible consequences on our food supply.

I wrestled to find ways to justify its inclusion because the sonic environment is so fascinating. I tried to argue with myself that since Fast-Paced World was taking a dangerous sonic environment and recontextualizing it into something more peaceful and serene, I could weave a similar narrative with bees and make it more educational and promotional. The problem is that without what would be an extremely long essay of a program note, its inclusion could easily be misinterpreted, especially with surrounding movements whose premise starts with Actual Dangerous environments rather than perceived ones.

On the one hand, it saddens me because I started to get really immersed in that sonic world, but on the other hand, I consider this as a tabling rather than a trashing. It doesn’t belong in Sonic Glass, but it could belong in a different work, one that could not only avoid spreading a false narrative but perhaps make an active effort to abolish it and dispel the myth. We’ll see what happens in the future, but for now? Back to the drawing board.

Specifically, it’s going to be performed as a part of New Music on the Bayou 2022, and it was selected for a new music YouTube page that I can’t talk about yet. It’s also been a key component of the narrative around grant applications and residencies that I’ve been submitting over the past few weeks, and I can also finally put it up for sale in my store.

More importantly, the work represents a significant mental pivot in my head about my creative voice, marking the beginning of my journey in abandoning self-inflicted barriers and coming to a much stronger sense of self-acceptance and validation of what my voice has to offer. To better understand that, we need to start with how the piece came about in the first place.

In the mid-late spring of 2019, I invited the Portland Percussion Group to perform as a part of nienteForte‘s tenth season. I committed myself to writing a new work for them to world premiere for their concert in the spring of 2020, figuring that I could compose over the early summer before prep for Tulane’s fall season would be in full swing.

I came up with a core concept for the work – four players with individual unpitched percussion instruments that would also be reciting text from warning labels and disclaimers. I was excited to explore it, particularly with the ambitions I had for the piece, going in with a mentality of challenging myself – I was conceptually writing something unlike anything I had ever done before, and I wanted to nail it – innovating new techniques and ideas that were outside of my normal comfort zone that could make a splash in the repertoire.

I dug into the creative process starting with a bunch of research. I got answers about whether those words were subject to copyright. I found lots of interesting warning labels that I thought would be good source material. I took the best ones and mapped them into rhythmic speaking cadences, and started playing around with motives and how I wanted the performer to switch between speaking and playing the words.

Once I had to actually construct the music and turn it into a piece, I found myself paralyzed. I’d write ten measures and then stop. The next day I would hate what I did or not know where to go. I’d table it and try again in a different session, stare at what I had done and get nowhere.

I came to realize that I had trapped myself in a creative corner. I had this full list of mental requirements that I told myself would stamp the work as a “legitimate composition”, and anything that I committed to on the page wasn’t good enough. The more I tried to hone it and pin it down, the more it eluded me, and the pressure that I put on myself to make the piece be “legitimate” started hindering my desire to work on it at all.

This went on for months. The end of summer hit, and I told myself I would find time to do it during the fall season. The fall season came and went, and I told myself I was going to devote winter break to figure it out. Suddenly it was one week before I promised them I would get them parts, and I had less than one minute of music on the page.

The previous year, I had promised a different ensemble a new piece that I ended up dropping for almost exactly the same reason, trying to challenge myself to write in a way that was completely foreign to me. I didn’t want that to happen again, go for two years without a new piece of music to show for it. I needed to double-bar something. I remember very clearly sitting with my laptop on a Thursday, looking at these random scraps, and saying to myself, “Screw this. I’m starting over. I’m going to write something that I know how to write.”

The Spaces Between was the result. Nine minutes of music that I wrote in the span of about two and a half days.

When I turned the parts in to the ensemble, I considered it a throwaway piece. The voice in my head was telling me, “You wrote it too quickly. It was too easy for you. It clearly has no real value.” I figured that the concert would come, the piece would never again have to see the light of day, and I could work on the piece that I had originally intended and plan it for a future concert.

Then I got a text from Chris Whyte, one of the musicians and a good friend. “We love this piece,” he said. “We’re going to make it a regular part of our repertoire.” I remember my first reaction to the text was dismissal and denial. I was friends with most of the group, they were just being nice to me. Then, months after they premiered it, Chris reached out and told me that they had selected it to use for a music video recording session, one of four works out of many more that they decided they wanted to commit to a professional video shoot.

In an artist seminar I participated in in the middle of this journey, one of the other participants shared a story about Monet who was at a bar or a restaurant and ended up doodling a fairly intricate sketch on a napkin. The waiter came over and saw it and said, “wow, that was fast, it only took you two minutes,” and Monet’s response was, “Two minutes plus twenty years.”

That story (along with other parts of that artist seminar) and Chris’s tangible reinforcement of their love of The Spaces Between solidified a mental shift that had started germinating that year concerning my creative legitimacy and the kind of work that I wanted to create. There’s a fundamental concept that I preach to all of my students and have applied to my personal life: “There are always people that will love you no matter what you do, and there are always people that will hate you no matter what you do. So you might as well be as true to yourself as possible because the people that gravitate towards you will be those that love you for who you are rather than those who will love you for someone you’re pretending to be.”

While I’ve applied this to my personal life, I realized that I wasn’t applying it to my creative voice. I’ve loved minimalism and spaciousness exploration in music ever since I was a teenager. I’ve always had ideas running around my head that explored my own version of that, but I rarely committed to bringing them to the foreground, telling myself that I had to wait to start doing that work until I “proved myself more as a composer”.

I don’t know why it took me so long to realize how dumb that was – that I was stifling my creative voice to jump through some imaginary hoops of imaginary standards. Once I did realize that, I felt liberated. I realize more fully now that there are performers and ensembles out there that will be interested in what my creative voice has to say, but in order for them to realize what that is, I need to stand up and let that voice be heard. And while remnants of imposter syndrome still make me nervous and anxious about it, more of me recognizes my future potential, and it leaves me feeling invigorated.

So as I reflect one year later on The Spaces Between and the symbolic pivot it represents in my own self-worth as a creative, I’m setting my sights on completely abandoning and shedding those self-inflicted roadblocks and barriers and letting my true creative voice shine brightly. I still intend to learn, explore, and challenge myself, but with a clearer focus and understanding that so long as I stay true to myself, all of my work is valuable because I myself am valuable.

I’m stoked about it. I hope you are too.

Purchase The Spaces Between in my store!

In the summer of 2008, I was working a corporate gig focused on data insights, a job that I surprisingly really enjoyed. Part of that had to do with my developing love of data and how data can tell meaningful stories. Another part of that had to do with my team, a small but mighty group of talented and smart people with a fantastic boss that nurtured our success and kept us as insulated as he could from the declining health of the company’s corporate culture and morale. I became great friends with that team in a way that I never expected.

Then, out of the blue, my former roommate and colleague sent a blast email to his friend network saying, “Hey, there’s a full-time drumline position opening up with the Tulane University Marching Band.” One application, two phone interviews, and one live interview later, I found myself driving across the country to start a new life as a full-time athletic band educator in New Orleans.

As I look back on my career with Tulane Bands first as a percussion instructor and then as an assistant band director, I characterize it as a jagged upward line. I’ve had my struggles, and I’ve been far from perfect, making mistakes both small and large. It’s in my nature to do my best to not shy away from my failures, to focus on them as a means to continually improve and not be complacent in my role, to ensure that I am doing my best to truly serve my students and the community that I feel responsible for.

That said, if I step back and look at what I’ve done more broadly, I recognize that I’ve left a lasting positive legacy with Tulane Bands and I am beyond grateful that I have had the vehicle to do so for over ten years. While it’s true that I’ve been able to personally take advantage of some amazing opportunities as a composer, arranger, performer, and educator at Tulane and in New Orleans (I’ve been paid to be on TV, to travel both nationally and internationally, and I can tell some great stories including one about how one of our color guard members hit Scott Bakula with a flag and one about how one of my students bonked one of the New Kids on the Block on the head with his sousaphone), none of that compares to the knowledge that I’ve touched the lives of some truly amazing human beings that have been a part of Tulane Bands, and that they have touched mine.

The overall trajectory of the organization is still accelerating. Seeds are being planted for its short-term and long-term future that I am very excited about. But as those new chapters start being written, I’ve come to the heartbreaking realization that it is finally time for me to step down as Assistant Director and hand the megaphone to a fresh voice.

I say ‘finally’ because this has been in the works for a few years, a gradual mental shift of “if I were to leave this job” to “when I leave this job”. My initial plan for this shift was to leave at the end of the 2019/20 academic year, but when COVID-19 caused an abrupt end to Tulane’s spring semester and all of the students left campus suddenly without me being able to give a proper goodbye, I was left with a feeling that I couldn’t truly close my Tulane Bands chapter, so I decided to stay on to help spearhead the adjustments needed to run the organization through COVID shutdown and help keep the organization as stable as I could. As we approach the end of this academic year and the beginning of next year poised to bring operations back to relative normal, I feel like I have the means to achieve the closure that I could not have in 2020 and can now leave my position with Tulane Bands properly.

My primary motivation for leaving has depth and nuance but is at its core very simple: if I stay in the job much longer, my emotional and mental health will decline to such a degree that my will to serve the organization will drift below my acceptable professional standard. For years I’ve tried to amplify what I love about the job as motivational fuel to overcome the roadblocks that have contributed to my decline. Primarily this had to do with dedicating myself to the student experience and their success, not only in how I taught or arranged, but also in my connection to them and my advocacy to truly listen and fight for their needs and wants. I have not always hit this mark, I’ve sometimes been way off target, but I’ve had enough success and grown from both my successes and failures that it has driven me to continually push for what I felt was right despite the external roadblocks that I’ve had to push against.

Years of pushing and fighting those roadblocks has taken its emotional toll on me and this has resulted in the unfortunate reality that while what I love about this job is a very long list compared to what I dislike, what I dislike has become so dominant that it has tainted everything that I love about it. That dominant negativity has eroded my overall conviction and what has manifested in its place has been a slow but steady growth of my own self-inflicted roadblocks that has already made the organization suffer in ways that I view as warning signs.

When there is so much about the job to love, and I’m still struggling to be my best self, the message could not be clearer. Tulane Bands deserves me at my best. When I am no longer capable of that, how can I justify staying?

It is so tough to step down. I love teaching the students and getting to know all of their individual personalities. Tulane is a wonderful university to work for, and I respect its overall mission and approach to education and its dedication to its community of students, staff, and employees, particularly when COVID-19 hit. Tulane Athletics under AD Troy Dannen has established a relationship between athletics and bands/spirit that is unlike any I have ever been a part of, a world-class standard for how an athletic program should partner with spirit and the Tulane community at large. I’ve worked with and collaborated with some amazing people who have respected what I have to offer while also teaching me so much, keeping me on my toes, and pushing me in ways I needed to be pushed.

Tulane Bands has also been such a central force to my cultural life and identity. I’ve been recognized by strangers in the city as a director of Tulane Bands. My creative and musical vision has had a national and international audience, and my ability to run and produce events has earned the respect of some high profile people and organizations. I’ve made lifelong friends with so many people, from peers, colleagues, and students both current and former.

As tough and as sad as it is, I know that stepping down is the right decision for both the organization and for me. In one sense I view it as an act of love for Tulane Bands. I know I’ve done a great job and could even continue to do a decent job, but the organization simply deserves better than my present self, an energy that is different and fresher than what I have to offer.

In another sense, and honestly more importantly, i view it as an act of self love. I think about what has led to this gradual but steady decline in my mentality, and it makes me frustrated, exhausted, and resigned. I need a change, a fresh perspective and injection to my career and life path, and while my new trajectory is uncertain and my future could be written a few different ways, now is the right time for me to devote myself to pivot and plant fresh seeds and flourish in ways that are completely my own, whatever ways those might be.

And flourish I will, and there is no doubt I have Tulane Bands to thank for it.

So I end this long chapter of my life with mixed feelings. I’m beyond excited to explore my new trajectory, to move forward with a new sense of purpose and focus. I mourn the loss of a job and a life that has defined a majority of my professional career that I am proud of and has given me so much, but I take comfort in knowing that stepping down is not the same thing as walking away or saying goodbye. Tulane Bands and I will always be a part of each other in some form. I hope that it looks back at my time with it with as much fondness and love that I look back towards it.

The Original Logo

The very first Tulane University Marching Band logo was developed prior to my hiring in 2008. This functioned pretty well within the brand philosophy of Tulane University and our association with it at the time – the TU shield is very strong and is also prominently displayed on the front of our marching band uniform. The fleur-de-lis that separated the top and bottom half of the words established New Orleans as its flavor.

That said, even when I was first hired I felt like the logo didn’t stand out as a TUMB brand. I also didn’t like that the full text was in a circular logo that did not scale well – as a social media thumbnail, the text on say, a mobile phone, could be so small that you had to strain if you wanted to read it, and the TU shield was so dominant that it made our thumbnail virtually indistinguishable from the broader Tulane University thumbnail.

So after a couple of years in the program, I started asking myself, “How would I change this?”

The 2013(ish) brand shift

While changing the brand was in my head early on, it wasn’t until the 2012-2013 school year that I started to actually experiment and open up Creative Cloud with a fresh vision for the brand. As I started development, a few conceptual components coalesced as its foundation.

1. Stylizing the TUMB

The TUMB acronym was well-established both internally and with the community, so I wanted that to dominate the brand presence more than the fully spelled out “Tulane University Marching Band”. I also wanted to move away from using a circular shape for the full brand logo – while circular was good for social media thumbnails, it wasn’t great for banners or headers. I imagined that the visual icon/element that I was building into this could eventually stand on its own once it was well enough established with the brand text.

When conceptualizing how I would style the text, I wanted to establish a stronger link to Tulane Athletics. At the time, their primary brand revolved around a stylized slanted T, something that we had incorporated into our pregame drill sets – we made a “straight T” that linked to the Tulane University T and then moved to the “slanted T” that mimicked the Athletics T as the end of our performance of the Tulane Fight Song.

So I decided to use that slanted T as the basis for the TUMB text design. While there were certain aspects of that slanted T that were a direct mimic – the slant angle, the double-color border – I made a few deliberate differences to make it feel like an homage rather than a straight copy:

1. Although the official TU logo and the Athletics T used serifs, I decided to go non-serif. This was because the TUMB’s pregame drill set lacked serifs for ease of readability based on the number of members we had at the time, so I wanted our text to reflect that. I also felt that the serif was too formal for the overall image of the TUMB I was trying to project.
2. Color choices. The Tulane Green was considered by my boss to be an important part of our brand identity, so I decided to lean in on that and make the fill of the text green. The border of light/Newcomb blue and off white were a part of Tulane’s official brand colors at the time (while pure white was not), which I thought worked well – the muted white accentuated the Tulane green better than pure white.

(As an aside, a very subtle thing I did with the final version was shift the “UMB” two pixels to the left from the default spacing from the T, necessitating creating two separate text blocks for the “T” and the “UMB”. I felt like the default spacing made the negative space between the T and the U too far apart in comparison to the space between the other letters.)

2. The Visual Image/Images(?)

The other primary conceptual element revolved around answering the question, “How do I create an image/symbol that people can immediately associate with the TUMB?”

A single color silhouette of a marching band member in uniform was one of the first things that popped into my head, but unlike what ended up happening, my original concept was not to associate the brand with the trumpet player as the sole silhouette. Instead, I wanted a more advanced concept of brand identity – to allow the silhouette itself to be flexible and changeable every one or two years, unifying it as the TUMB brand more by having it always include four elements:

1. The official Tulane dark blue as the silhouette color
2. The silhouette always being clearly a TUMB member playing an instrument, dancing with poms, or spinning a flag
3. Always having the TU shield be present in the silhouette
4. Always have the silhouette be placed in the same spot relative to the TUMB text

I pitched this to the staff at the time, taking prominent action shots of various TUMB instrumentalists and turning them into silhouettes – a trumpet player, a bass drummer, a flute player, a color guard member. My boss in particular was highly resistant to the introduction of this new brand in the first place and was even more unconvinced about the silhouette being ‘flexible’, so in an effort to compromise and to try to push the brand forward at all, I said, “let’s table that piece of it – for the time being, we can use the trumpet figure and we can revisit whether we use other images to replace it in a couple of years.” Eventually, my boss reluctantly agreed to move forward and so the new brand was established and launched. In the first two years of its implementation, I tried a few times to revisit the idea of swapping out the silhouette for a different one over time, but I eventually gave that up when it became clear that I wasn’t going to win that fight.

Despite losing that part of the battle and despite the shift being a little shaky to start and more gradual than I would have liked, the new brand eventually became an invested part of the TUMB identity for the staff, its members, and its community, and a strong and dominant brand force that I had intended it to be from the very beginning.

Naturally, once it reached that point, I was already thinking about a change.

Rebranding for the TUMB Centennial

Sometime in 2018/19, I was itching to redo the brand logo that I had created, and decided that using the band’s centennial in 2020/21 would be a good vehicle for that change.

Part of the desire for the rebranding came from external factors:

• Tulane Athletics shifted their brand away from the slanted-T to its current Riptide logo.
• Brands at the more professional level were shifting to be softer, particularly when it came to text fonts and styles.
• Tulane University reinvented its brand philosophy to include more modern color schemes and nuanced brand concepts, particularly around the TU shield and what they called the “TU shield abstractions“, a flexible use of the TU shield outline that could be customized for varying purposes. I gained access to those assets, as well as Tulane’s official fonts (whereas the font i used for the old TUMB logo’s text was something that was bundled with Adobe PS/Illustrator’s default font set, a font I chose because I felt it was the closest mimic of the Tulane Athletics T in style).
• The Tulane Bands staff wanted to shift away from considering the “TUMB” as the overarching brand for the entirety of our organization. since the brand didn’t quite fit as the parent for the Concert Band, Soundwave, or other parts of us that weren’t exactly “marching band” related.

However, more of my desire to change the brand was motivated by my heightened understanding of brand even outside of these external factors. While I’ve always had an instinct for branding concepts, my execution particularly when it comes to logos has been mostly self-taught, and there were things about the visual logo part of the brand that the less-experienced-me from 2012/13 created that the more-experienced me realized were glaring errors.

Some of those errors were easy and subtle to fix – the green glow around the silhouette was at times eliminated entirely, particularly for certain printing processes, use of monochrome versions of the brand, or embroidery that couldn’t translate that glow in a meaningful way. The TU shield was used incorrectly according to Tulane’s brand guidelines (because I put it on a slant and distorted it to mimic how it would be viewed on an actual uniform), so we took that out of some of our designs.

But what became clearest to me over those years was that the trumpet figure itself was both philosophically and practically too complicated.

When i created the original silhouette, I simply took the original trumpet photo, trimmed it to encompass the player only, then applied a solid fill overlay.

Practically, the plume in particular with all of its detail was hard to replicate in embroidery situations or when the resolution of the end result was limited. I was already bothered by the fact that we had some versions of the icon that had the glow vs didn’t, had the shield vs didn’t, but the complexity of the physical shape not translating to certain printing situations meant that even the physical look of the icon had variants which always rubbed me the wrong way even if it was only barely perceptible to the human eye.

Introspection about this and more direct observations of brands both successful and unsuccessful over a period of many years led me to better articulate the philosophical understanding of why the brand I created was not as strong as it could have been:

Brand logos are symbols, icons, and successful ones are clean in their symbolism. No successful brand icon is photorealistic.

While the 2012/13 TUMB brand was done pretty much completely on my own, the office dynamic had since shifted to be more collaborative in general, so the staff came together to talk about the new branding in meetings and email exchanges. When we all sat down to initially discuss my rebranding ideas in conjunction with theirs, I advocated strongly that we eliminate the trumpet figure and start completely from scratch. I wanted to create something more abstract that could encapsulate our program, leverage clearer shapes and lines that could be synergized with the Tulane color palette. This was met with strong resistance – my boss in particular had grown to love the icon and associated it very closely with the TUMB brand (which in one sense was incredibly gratifying), and Andrew, the other Assistant Director was leaning in that direction as well.

After a few back and forths about it, I decided to try to find a middle ground. “If we’re going to keep the trumpet figure,” I said, “let me at least try to clean it up and fix what’s broken about it.”

So I fired up Illustrator and did just that.

Phase 1: Everything but the plume

The first iteration of this was to ignore the plume issue because I wasn’t sure how to tackle it yet and simply take the bumps and creases around the bottom half of the body and in the negative space between the two arms and smooth them out whilst keeping the same overall shape. I also opted to simplify the trumpet and take out the valve pipe detail.

While that last decision was subject to debate, even smoothing out the bottom half got positive response from the rest of the staff who now had a clearer idea of what I was trying to accomplish. From there, I went full speed ahead and started fine-tuning the curves, balancing the left and right sides, and a myriad of other micro-changes to how all of those vector curves were built while simultaneously exploring bigger picture modifications with the plume detail. This turned into a series of back and forth stages where I would mock up three or four different revisions of the current design, send them to the rest of the staff (which now included our newly hired Program Coordinator) for feedback, discuss the changes, and then mock up new versions based on the feedback.

The process ended up being incredibly fun and engaging as a group playground/project, one of the more enjoyable full-staff collaborations I’ve had with this job. I played around with a few different elements:

• protruding hat brim – in the original image, the brim of the hat was present as a three-dimensional protrusion. I wanted to switch the approach of the image to be more like a symbolic straight profile, so I modified the shape of the hat brim to reflect that. It went through several different iterations/shapes – between curves vs rectangles vs triangles. At one point, Andrew suggested taking the brim out altogether. When I tried that, i didn’t initially like it because I felt like the loss of that detail and separation between head and hat was important.
• trace hat brim – one way that I tried to compensate for this was to create a break in the head and hat with a trace line. I had originally thought about this as being white before changing my mind to conceive of it as transparent. This was met with mixed reactions – including my own. I didn’t open up that rabbit hole necessarily because I felt like it was right, but I wanted to put it out there as something radical that could still help retain the separation I was looking for if we eliminated the brim entirely.
• nose – the other way I tried to compensate for the elimination of the brim was to add a nose protrusion. The protrusion was meant to be subtle, a true ‘edge of nose’ that was not overly noticeable unless you focused on it, but would clearly be missed if it wasn’t there.

As the drafts and processes moved forward, however, I became more and more convinced by Andrew’s suggestion that having a straight line with no nose/brim was simpler and cleaner and that the detail didn’t confuse or muddy up the clarity of what was actually happening. In the end, the straight line with no brim, nose, or trace hat brim ended up being the consensus for all of the staff, a conclusion that I didn’t expect when I first started, but I was ultimately very happy with.

Phase 2: The Plume

At the same time, I was tackling the plume, and I decided to approach it similarly – take out most or all of the detail to make it cleaner. I went as far as making it into a clean oval with no feather detail. While all of us eventually came around to the straight line for the face, that same pure cleanliness for the plume faced stronger and more persistent disagreement. While reducing and simplifying the plume detail was fine, eliminating them entirely eliminated the one organic and unique character that the other staff didn’t want to abandon. While I didn’t completely agree with this, enough of the direction of the image was going my way and my feeling about this was not so strong that I consented. I played around with where that feather detail was located on the plume, sometimes influenced by earlier stages of the brim/nose, before arriving at its final location and overall shape.

The final piece that we discussed and drafted centered around how much division there was between the head/hat and the plume itself. In the original, the head/brim/plume all bled into each other particularly as a three-dimensional profile, and with the new cleaner look and with the loss of the brim, my boss made a suggestion to sharpen and indent a curve that more clearly separated the hat and the plume. I drafted a few versions of this separation, some very extreme, which I liked, but Andrew really didn’t like. In the end, I landed in the middle, giving the curve some definition and separation, but not so much as to make it completely independent from the top of the hat.

Finalizing the brand logo with other brand elements

The final brand took that trumpet figure and wrapped it around the Tulane shield abstract and stylized text – a design that was lifted directly from our custom “100th anniversary” logo we developed the previous year. I knew that I wanted to include Tulane’s new shield abstraction assets as a part of the design, and it was also a no brainer to use “Tulane Bands” as the text to fully embrace the change in our program’s conception to make the “TUMB” an entity within the parent organization of Tulane Bands.

Accompanying this was an alternative “header” that could be used to label sub-ensembles or emphasize certain highlights in print or online. We had talked about unifying this header to be the primary driving force for all of our sub-ensembles, but we eventually steered away from that concept because we wanted some of the sub ensembles to be able to retain their own sense of identity despite being a part of the arching Tulane Bands umbrella, not unlike, for example, Kellogg’s cereal. The Kellogg’s K is printed somewhere on all of their cereal boxes, but the sub-brands of the cereals themselves are all unique and don’t necessarily have direct ties to the K’s brand design. In this new context, Tulane Bands is the Kellogg’s where Soundwave, the Green Wave Brass Band, Shockwave, KKY, the Color Guard, and now the TUMB is the Frosted Flakes/Frosted Mini-Wheats/Cracklin’ Oat Bran/Honey Smacks. They all deserve their own independence under the Tulane Bands primary brand.

Final Thoughts

There’s still work to be done with the branding – I want to redo the Green Wave Brass Band logo from its current design as it suffers from some lack-of-cleanliness issues that plagued the original trumpet figure (since I designed it around the same time). I also am starting to think more about how we approach the potential reintroduction of a TUMB logo – something that doesn’t feel right at the moment because I think that would hinder the pace and understanding of our rebrand since the trumpet figure migrated from the TUMB brand to the Tulane Bands brand.

That said, I’m pretty proud of the work that I’ve done to create and harness the brand of this organization – not just this change, but even the older brand change and the band’s conception of our brand identity over the years. I’ve made my mistakes, and I still have a lot to learn, but I also trust in my intuition and my introspection when it comes to brand establishment at this sort of scale, something that I’ve tried to do not just with my job with Tulane Bands but also with nienteForte and myself. I have no doubt that over time as brand concepts and my comprehension of them continue to evolve, I’ll want to shake things up and reinvent my branding somewhere again, although I imagine that it will come not from my work with the Tulane Bands brand over some of my other projects in the immediate future. My own personal brand logo hasn’t changed now in almost a decade and a half and while a part of me is still in love with it, another part of me is ready to take a step back and blow it all up.

This article was lightly edited after initial posting.

Seems obvious, right? But somehow I still don’t do it often enough. For example:

Late last week, the nienteForte staff had a meeting with a group involved in a Top Secret Project that we’re putting together for our Season 11 opener next October. I’m one of the composers that’s going to be writing on that project, and as we explored some of the parameters around it, I found myself soaking in all of the information as initial groundwork, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to actually do with it.

Then, last night, I went to a concert featuring New York contemporary guitarist Giacomo Baldelli, and as I was sitting listening to the fourth piece on the program, the structure for the piece that I wanted to write for the project just hit me. How I wanted to use the space, the performers, the kind of material that I was going to use – it ran into me and hit me like a brick, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

A long time ago during my undergraduate studies, I wrote a flute trio called Shades of Three. That piece was based around each flute having a spotlight moment around a single musical form. While those spotlight moments are similar, they have small differences in them that the other flutes support before the climax where all three flutes then spotlight together in harmony.

The piece I’m going to write for this project feels like a spiritual sibling to Shades of Three. It’s tentatively titled Forces of Fours, and it expands on the idea of “spotlight” by layering multiple kinds of spotlights throughout the work – the creative form and material dictated by me as the composer, the creative mix of strict vs improvised material dictated by the choices made by the individual performers, and the instruments themselves which deserve their own spotlight.

We’ll see what comes of it as I start writing it – I’m not in a space to put serious work into it yet as I still have to finish the piece that I’m writing for the Portland Percussion Group, but no doubt that as that piece progresses and as I get more steeped into this current season’s concerts with nienteForte and with Versipel in particular, my creative momentum will continue to move forward.

Pretty exciting year ahead.

I recently uploaded a video that betas this concept. It’s me playing through a Beat Saber song, showcasing three different difficulties: Hard chart on the left, the Expert chart on the middle, and the Expert+ chart on the right.

The problem I’m encountering has to do with audio isolation. The concept that I have for the project is that when someone faces a particular wall, I want the listener to hear only the audio for the wall that they’re facing with all other audio muted. That’s not generally how 360/ambisonic audio is treated – it’s easy enough to make whatever direction you’re facing the strongest audio in a 360 mix, but you still hear all of the other audio from the direction that it’s coming from and there doesn’t seem to be a built in process to change the levels that you hear depending which way you face.

For the Beat Saber video above, this isn’t a huge deal since the audio is for all intents and purposes the same on all three sides, but if I were to create a video where, say, I wanted to highlight my favorite three tracks in Beat Saber in a single video, it would be an aural mess.

Not sure what the solution for this is, but I’ll continue to do research. In the meantime, these Beat Saber vids work out pretty well, so I’ll be uploading more of those periodically in the immediate future.