I wrote in an earlier blog entry about my desire to explore atypical ways of using the role of text in music, and that’s going to be the central narrative thread of the piece for Byrne:Kozar:Duo. As the idea of that piece starts to take shape, I’m coming to a conclusion that while I want to separate the vocal performer from being a dominant force in the music because text does that by default, that doesn’t mean that I want the text to be unimportant – if anything, the opposite is true, that I want the associative separation of the text from the performer to elevate the importance of the text and its meaning by allowing the trumpet to take more of an equal part in text discovery.

When approached in that light, the actual composition of the piece feels like it will not itself break new ground in its form – the text is telling a story, and the music is meant to support that story. But the atypical contextual framework of how that story is told will hopefully imprint it with my distinct character in a manner not dissimilar to how the film Memento might be telling a story like any other movie but tells it in a way that no other film before or after has been able to do.

So the evolution of the piece’s creation will likely come directly from the narrative – in that, even my initial conceptual idea of “in the first third it will be fragmented, in the second third it will be combined, and in the last third it will bring comprehension” has changed to be less disciplined in its performer roles and in its structure, particularly if the text is a long one (my current top choice for text use is Jabberwocky).

The piece I’m planning on writing for the Portland Percussion Group is highly contrasting to this approach – the text content isn’t significant in itself other than to establish the type of content it represents. It’s not telling a story, it’s a series of unrelated phrases that are categorized by a singular theme – legal disclaimers and warnings. So the creative evolution of the piece is more dictated by how I choose to organize both the music and the text. The overall tone of the piece is also going to be lighter, more comedic, and that has its own set of challenges because the text has a gimmicky nature – which is fine, but it can’t *just* be gimmicky, it needs to change and evolve into something more than its surface gimmickyness.

We’ll see how things develop as I start writing both of the works – it will be interesting to see if working on these pieces side by side will at all influence each other.

First off, I found it fascinating to get different people’s reactions to it during its premiere performances, primarily which parts of the piece that they liked the most. It was spread pretty evenly across all three movements and all for different reasons, and I think that makes the piece a success because different parts can appeal to a wide variety of people.

At this point for me personally, I find that I dislike the second movement the most. Part of that comes from some of the technical difficulties in error-free execution – the primary reason I want to potentially use Antescofo in the first place – but another part is that the metronomic nature of the movement means that it’s structurally the most rigid and inflexible, limiting the performer’s ability to add their own personal musical expression and leaving little margin for mistakes in execution. In the first and last movement, the electronics are the vehicle for the performer being the forefront, whereas in the second movement, the performer ends up being a vehicle of the electronics as a forefront. That feels counter to why the piece is in an interactive form in the first place – if i wanted it to be like that, I would have just created a tape accompaniment for the performer to play to. I’m not sure what to do about that given the nature of the material, but it’s something I’m thinking about as a consideration for use of that mechanic for future works.

The amount of work I put into the Max programming was a significant time chunk, although I would say that the time invested was well worth it – I learned a lot about MSP, a side of Max that I had never really used before, and all of the patches I created that went into this project can be more easily reused and adapted for future works as opposed to having to start from scratch. Even so, it’s worth remembering that creating a work that involves interactive electronics with the kind of attention to detail that I require as a fairly detail-oriented musician and a programmer doubles or more than doubles the amount of time and energy that I would put into any other kind of composition.

That might seem like something that would discourage me, but it actually does quite the opposite. The work I did on this project and the passion I had and still have for its final outcome has helped me realize that I think I have a lot of unique things to say in the interactive electronic medium that could have a lot of legs for my compositional career. I’m hoping that after tweaking the Max programming to make it as error free as possible, I can get this performed in Oregon and Pennsylvania with my alma mater universities, but I also have ambitions to publish this work and have it potentially played by other trumpet performers. If that happens, that could encourage me to devote more energy to the interactive electronic space as well as open up future opportunities and commissions for those that might come across this work and find it valuable.

Where I go from here immediately will take shape in the next few years. I’m close to closing a commission to write a wind ensemble piece for the spring of 2020 here at Tulane, which will be the first time I’ll have written for a large concert ensemble since beauty…beholder back in 2012. I’m also close to closing a commission deal to write a percussion duet for the 2018-2019 school year. That will likely be purely acoustic, as I already have a few conceptual ideas that are best fit in the purely acoustic space.

After that, I have the framework for a piece that I was originally going to be make as a standalone digital audio piece that I’m now inclined to make a work for solo cello and interactive electronics, specifically for my colleague Elise who plays with me as a part of Versipel New Music. I originally wanted to do that next year, but given the scale of the wind ensemble piece, i’m now thinking that I’ll have to put that off until the fall of 2020 or the spring of 2021. I’ve also been having some initial talks with a dancer/choreographer to maybe do some collaborative work with her and interactive video. That has no timeline, but given that I would have to spend time learning how to use Jitter, I imagine that that would have to be 2021 or later.

The other thing that I’m thinking about is taking the concepts that I’ve put into Minkowski and turning it into a series of pieces – using similar interactive and creative concepts and some of the same Max work for other instruments in the same way as Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece series or Berlioz’s Sequenza series. It would be a lot of fun to write a Minkowski for percussion and another one for clarinet. We’ll see what happens as I let this piece germinate and start to market it. If people want to play it and it’s received well, then it will definitely happen.

Some of the Max programming mechanics that I’ve done for this work have been put into my Kaizen YouTube series, and I’ll be posting up at least one more video that talks about it in the near future. For now, below is the most recent that talks about my custom interactive cue engine.

The percussion quartet that i’m writing has transformed a great deal from its original concept as Cascadia – i could probably still call it that and create loose associations with that Cascadia concept, but it feels like fitting the square peg into the circle hole.  So i’m trying to shift my conception about the piece, find a way to capture what i’m trying to say with a proper title.

The piece is very specific in its intent – it’s a lot about space, timbre, and texture, and a pseudo-but-not-really-gradual-minimalist transformation and evolution of material both within a single part and across all of the players.  Rhythmically the first section has a very metronomic characteristic – clear beats, clear divisions, clockwork.  The second section contrasts this in being much more polyrhythmic with the intent of being chaotic.  The third section is going to mesh those two together somehow (in a way i haven’t quite figured out yet).

Yesterday when i was trying to think about titles, I started to think about the piece in three possible ways.  The first idea was that the early notes in the first section each represented a different photo capture of raindrops all from the same storm.  Time-Lapse Rain was the original ‘stupid’ thought that was supposed to lead to a version of that that didn’t sound stupid, and i failed to come up with anything.  I was strongly averse to simplifying the concept to “rain” or “storm” ideas because that feels amazingly cliché.  I started to try to think about the piece as being about the building of clouds, but that also felt too cliché.

The second idea was something like Ritual Dance.  I had a picture in my head of Balinese shadow puppet theater and African tribal sort of things.  I’m still toying with that idea, but it’s problematic because it creates a particular sort of association of order that i don’t want associated with the second section of the piece.  I don’t want someone to try to make sense of the second section in that way – it’s meant to be chaotic and unsettling, and having an implication that the whole piece is a dance will give that section an idea to latch on to that doesn’t fit – another circle peg in the square hole.

The idea that feels strongest to me is that of a rock slide – a cliff or a mountain that goes through a subtle seismic tremor that causes pebbles to fall that unexpectedly turns into a full on destructive rock slide.  But Rock Slide or Pebbles feels wrong because it’s too concrete – the piece has a high level of abstraction to it – that’s why there’s so much flexibility in its titling.  To assign it a title and a concept that has a strict physical idea such as a bunch of falling rocks takes away from that abstraction and some of the potential depth of the piece.

But there might be ways to use that concept but find a more abstract way to address it.  I’m going to think about it for a while today and hopefully come up with something i like so i can be done with the whole thing.  I need the title to help inform the piece, not roadblock it.

First, a few words about the ensemble.  There’s a lot of parallels between the Xavier ensemble and the ones i help to run at Tulane.  Most of the kids in the group are not music majors – they wanted to continue playing their instrument because they enjoy playing and want an outlet for it, and Xavier’s ensemble and basketball pep band fill that void (Xavier University doesn’t have a football team, so there’s no marching band).  The subtle differences between the groups fall into apples-and-oranges categories such as “shelter level” (students who go to Tulane far more embrace the New Orleans culture than the students who go to the Jesuit-based Xavier), but otherwise, i could look out at the student body and say to myself things like, “yeah, that’s the Xavier version of X”, X being one of my Tulane kids such as Connor or MJ or Tori.

I had the opportunity to interact with them in four contexts – a rehearsal, a basketball game, the dress rehearsal, and the concert.  During the first rehearsal, i was incredibly nervous as i usually am in front of a new large crowd of people who have an impression of me before meeting me, which translated to me babbling like a madman and talking incredibly fast.  I can’t tell you much about what i said during the first part of that rehearsal, but according to Matt, the students dug what i had to say, so i guess i did all right.  The ensemble impressed me – Matt has done great things with the group during his tenure there and that showed not only in how the kids executed the piece but also how they approached the rehearsal and noticeably improved when i gave them guidance on sections.

That evening I played with the pep band during the basketball game (i alternated between tenors, cymbals, and cowbell (there’s a neat story there, but never mind)).  I’m glad that I went because i felt like i could act much more like myself and relate to the students as Simply Me as opposed to this ‘guest composer celebrity” thing that had made me nervous in the first place at rehearsal.  I can count the number of times i’ve been to a live basketball game on one hand (without sign language) and so was surprised at some of the traditions that seem to be standard for basketball games across the country.  It was fun being very deer-in-headlights about Xavier basketball traditions and being guided enthusiastically by the pep band members about what was going on.  I learned a lot of cheers and other oddities, such as the throwing of newspaper confetti for the first home basket, or the “high-five-as-many-people-as-you-can-around-you-when-they-score-a-three-pointer.”  I lost my voice that day from yelling and cheering so much.

The dress rehearsal and concert was on Friday.  In addition to my piece, the ensemble played “Blue Shades”, as well as a Holst march conducted by one of the students, and a neat piece called “Dusk” conducted by one of the other students.  Additionally, a sax quartet played a few short tunes, and a percussion quartet played Omphallo by Nigel Westlake.  Again, during the dress rehearsal, i got the opportunity to address some big picture musical things and was rewarded by hearing noticeable results when they rehearsed it again, as well as get some giggly responses from a couple of the professional musicians who supplement the ensemble that had no idea that a mobile phone was going to go off during the piece’s climax.  I also had the opportunity during that time to meet one of Matt’s colleagues, a composer and former department chair who couldn’t make it to the concert that evening who was incredibly nice and had a lot of great things to say about the piece and the piece’s message.

Matt and I had talked about saying a few words to the audience before my piece was played.  I was unsure of what i could say without giving the game away, but I did say something to the effect of “the program notes cover most of it, and really what i want this piece to do is to spark a conversation.”  I also gave a very heartfelt thanks and gratitude to Matt and to the ensemble for premiering the work.  Then i sat back down next to Erica and told her she would have to help prevent me from giggling leading up to the climax.

The rest of the concert leading up to my piece was a little rough around the edges.  Nothing terribly noticeable unless you were looking for it, but having been to a rehearsal and dress rehearsal, i knew what the ensemble was capable of and therefore knew that they didn’t quite execute the other pieces to their fullest potential.  I wasn’t too worried when it came to my piece – i knew they would do a great job and would represent the piece well enough even if it had its own sort of rough edges about it.

And boy did the group surprise me.  There were times when i was listening to them perform that i wanted to laugh out loud because of how awesome they were performing.

I remember the feeling of it.  After one very minor rhythmic ambiguity that happened in the beginning, the ensemble kept on nailing it from moment to moment.  The energy was intense – all of the subtle things that makes music Music instead of just notes on the page, i felt them going after it, not even simply because of their musicianship but because of their desire.  They went after it as if they owned it and it was the most precious thing to them, and it was a pretty incredible experience to be swept in and to be a part of.  I remember after the piece finished but before the audience started applauding, i murmured out loud to myself, “they did so awesome.  they did so well.”  When i went up to the stage, before i turned to the audience and to Matt to give bows and thanks, I said to the ensemble directly with what i’m sure was a goofy grin on my face  – “you guys rocked, you guys did awesome,” and i got a lot of smiles and giggles, and it was another moment of great connection, one of the reasons i’m in this profession of music and teaching – there’s something very special about those moments where you truly connect with an ensemble and its individuals.  Those kids had a very positive impact on me, and I’d like to think that i similarly had a positive impact on them.

The impact of the piece is something i’ll save for the second blog entry, but I will say I made enough of a positive impression on the professionals that were a part of the ensemble that they approached me for a commission.  I’ll go into detail about that later as well, but I will say how great that felt – it felt like i had just passed another important stepping stone in my compositional career for a professional quartet to ask me to write a piece for them. It was very gratifying and very humbling at the same time, and something that I know i will forever be thankful to Matt for, because he more than anyone else opened the door.  It was also not one of my greater professional moments necessarily because when they asked me, “how much would you charge?” i think i said, “oh gosh, i don’t know,” but i recovered and told them i would get back to them when i had more time to think about it.

As for the rest of Cincinnati, it was a mixture of relaxation and activity.  Mat and Erica were fairly busy with their own stuff so i had a bunch of down time on my own, but I did have a day where Erica and I hung out and tried a new restaurant, walked from Ohio to Kentucky using the Purple People Bridge, and found an arcade that had three DDR machines, so we played some DDR.  Thursday night was Anny’s birthday, a friend of theirs who i’ve met a few times now, so we went to her place and had a birthday dinner with a couple of her friends, and on Saturday we had a group dinner with Anny, Blake (who i met at Erica’s wedding), and another guy named Steven where i was in charge of making red lentil soup which turned out pretty well when taken into consideration that i had never cooked anything like that before.

The trip felt short – when it came time to leave on Sunday i kept on thinking that i wanted to have one more day, mainly with the kids to give them proper gratitude for their acceptance of me, their acceptance of the piece, and how they performed it.  Hopefully i’ll retain some of the connections i got there – not just professionally, but personally, because as always, everything that i do is motivated by people, the development of acquaintances, friends, and stories – all of which trickles down and hopefully brings more smiles to more lives.

Something like that, anyway.

I was poking around the internet for other ideas and came across the wikipedia entry for Cascadia.  I generally ignore news and politics and therefore i had no knowledge whatsoever that this was going on, and i find it absolutely fascinating on many different levels, so after skimming the entry i decided to walk to the grocery store and see if any ideas could take shape, and some initial concepts started coming into my head, so i think this is it – a piece titled Cascadia about the concept of Cascadia.

I need to do some more reading and research about the whole movement, but the initial concept i have running in my head is that there are four major melodic themes in the piece – one for Oregon, one for Washington, one for British Columbia, and one for Northern California – and each of those themes have their own space and their own merit that then come all together at the end, get played simultaneously in a representation of those entities combining to form Cascadia.

But there’s a particular depth to the concept that i want to explore on two different levels – the first is that when the four themes combine, i want the music to be simultaneously harmonious and non-harmonious.  The easiest way to achieve that would be to have it be bitonal in nature, something very Ives-ian, and also something i’ve explored in a few of my chamber works before – there’s a lot of great tension and release that can be brought from how two distinct keys interlock with each other.

The second is to explore the concept that even an individual theme needs to have some sort of tension or clash because the politics of all of those regions are very divided depending on what area you’re talking about – e.g. politics of Portland is vastly different from the politics of Bend.  One of the criticisms about the concept of Cascadia has to do with that, that the idealists want to believe that this represents a smaller focused political unity which ignores just how divided the politics are.

So the individual themes may have their own story to tell, and then i need to bring them together in a way that’s supposed to sound unified and nonunified at the same time.  Easy, right?  Never mind that i still haven’t decided exactly what instrumentation i want to use for the piece nor if i want to include electronics.

But at least it’s a start.  The plan is to find some articles about Cascadia, read about it and absorb it, and then let it sit for about a week or two in my head.  Then i’ll probably start sketching out some ideas on paper and figuring out what the instrument/electronics map is going to be.

Here goes.

The theme for the concert is essentially the Pacific Northwest – the concert is going to spotlight composers that have connection to the Pacific Northwest, and the group has asked me to write a piece that has a Pacific Northwest theme, the common examples being things like rain and mountains. As i’ve started trying to come up with ideas for the piece, I find myself steering away from those two examples specifically because I feel that those are very easy targets – first, it’s easy to associate the PNW with rain and mountains and i wouldn’t be surprised if half of the repertoire on the concert has one of those two things as a theme. Second, there are a lot of pieces in general that use rain and/or mountains as thematic content, and aside from my potential use of interactive technology with Max or Live with the highly-anticipated-but-yet-to-be-released Leap Motion, I don’t feel like I’d be creating anything that hasn’t been done a million times already.

So I’m putting some thought into more atypical PNW theme to use for the piece. One idea that popped into my head was to use the theme of “grunge music” since that’s associated with Seattle, but I ultimately rejected that because i thought it would be too difficult to pull off with a percussion quartet in addition to its lack of relevance in pop music these days. We’ll see what sort of ideas pop into my head in the next week or so.

I have some mixed feelings about how the music turned out for a few reasons. First, the piece is a strange hybrid of me and not me. The principal concept of the piece required me to write musical material that was supposed to sound like someone else. Originally the piece was going to be pretty much a very simple and slow chorale, non-minimalist, as its primary musical material to help set up for the Shock Moment at the end of the piece (involving the ringing of a mobile phone in the audience at the end of the piece’s climax). The idea i had in my head was to make it like the slow-moving parts of The Unanswered Question or for it to have the same sort of personality as Adagio for Strings. Don’t get me wrong, i love that music, but it’s not the sort of thing that I generally associate with my own musical voice, at least not exactly. But once i started writing it, it started to take a mind of its own and some very characteristic Mendel things crept into the piece, particularly rhythmically, and the result is something that definitely sounds like me, but also not me, and i don’t have a good sense right now whether or not the strength of the material is therefore diluted because of that split personality.

Secondly, the music suffers a little from the product of being the first large ensemble piece that i’ve composed (rather than arranged) in about nine or so years. It took much longer than it should have to get this piece going to the point where as recent as a couple of weeks ago i was starting to get worried that i wouldn’t finish the piece by the deadline. The piece thus feels a little bit rushed and is in need of tweaking that i don’t have time to do right now. Hopefully i’ll get a chance to revise it next summer or fall.

But while the execution of the compositional aspects of the piece may be a little below my standard, the motivation behind the piece and its thesis is very important to me, enough that I’m thinking of scripting and storyboarding a video project to talk about it not just in the context of the piece but its wider application to the classical music community as a whole.

In any case, while we were talking about it, Kate put forth the suggestion that I take a trip sometime this spring to give a presentation about it in her Music and Ethics class. My spring is fairly busy, but i think it would be good on my resumé and be a great experience to help flesh out the thesis of the piece and aid in its musical revision and accompanying video presentation that i want to put together. Plus there’s the added bonus of seeing her and her husband again in Hawaii, as it’s been a few years since i’ve seen them and more since i’ve been to Hawaii.

I’d probably get an honorarium from UH to pay for travel – although it wouldn’t be much, it’s better than nothing. The tricky part is scheduling – i have my nienteForte concert on April 22nd and the Tulane Spring Concert Band concert is on the 24th. UH’s last day of classes is the following Wednesday which Kate was going to use for final review, and since she was envisioning it being a two-day class seminar-like thing, that would mean i would have to do it on Friday/Monday which could be super tight if my parents are still in town, plus I don’t know what tickets would be like during that time since that’s prime Jazz Fest time. On the other hand, earlier could be a bit tricky since i’ll have dress rehearsals and last minute prep for the upcoming concerts.

I’m sure i can make it work – i just need to have some foresight in planning, not just because of those conerts but also because at that time i’ll probably be deep in the throes of creative brainstorming for Hermiston’s marching band show in addition to whatever Galaxy Interactive might throw at me, and on top of that i may also be trying to work on a commission for the Portland Percussion Group for PASIC that would be due in July/August if that negotiation works out.

and oh yeah, i might be writing a piece for the Portland Percussion Group for their application to PASIC in 2013. More news on that soon.

1. my wind ensemble piece entitled beauty…beholder is almost done. I feel a lot better about it than i did about a week ago because things in the end finally started to click into place. It’s not my best work mainly because i’m out of practice writing original stuff for large groups – the last large ensemble piece i wrote was somewhere around ten years ago, and between 2004-2009 i wasn’t writing any music at all. I’m happy enough with the piece generally, it’ll just need some revision if i ever get it performed again. Hopefully it’s well received, i’m a bit tickled with the shock moment towards the end of the piece. John Cage would be proud.

2. This spring i’m going to try to start writing a percussion quartet for the Portland Percussion Group. Originally i was going to have it be all thematic about my family, but these days i tend to do better writing music based on a musical concept that i then translate to a real one as opposed to starting with a real concept that i then translate to a musical one. I think that will change as i start writing more music again and get reacquainted with how my voice translates to solid ideas.

3. Also this spring i’m planning on putting the pieces together for my musical internet installation project. Basically what i’m planning on doing is buying some muscle wire and playing with it in the hopes that i can attach it to some guitar strings and have a mechanism for heating/cooling the muscle wire and a mechanism for playing the strings that is controlled and activated by both random and controlled actions from the internet. This is very early experimental stages so i can figure out what’s possible.

4. Aside from my nienteForte concert happening this spring, Mark and i had a conversation earlier about trying to pitch playing a percussion duet for the percussion ensemble concert run by Doug Walsh, and we’re already talking about trying to write a duet for the nienteForte concert in 2014. I already have a guest ensemble tentatively lined up for that, and i want to write a piece for *that* group too, which i’ll probably start in early summer right after Jazz Fest.

5. Also in mid-spring i’m going to start thinking about marching band arranging again for Hermiston. Paul was very happy with what i did this past season, so i don’t doubt that i’ll be able to write for the group again.

6. I’m planning on putting together a new music seminar class sometime in the spring semester, a volunteer thing since i can’t officially register a course with the university at this point. I just want to get people excited about some of the music that got me excited in college as well as going out there and finding other music, newer stuff that i don’t know to keep my own creative brain fresh and current.

7. Also this spring i imagine that i’ll be in some final talks with Galaxy Interactive to figure out exactly how my contract is going to work for TerraLife, a project that they anticipate will start occupying a lot of my energy this summer.

8. Sometime a year ago, Tyler and i talked about trying to put together some sort of DDR reunion this coming summer. Originally it was going to be another sight-read tournament, but the context for that sort of thing has died out as far as we’re both concerned, so more and more i’m thinking about making it into some big Johann Sebastian Joust competition or something.

I know i’m missing something, but that’s okay. Brain will continue firing off on all of this probably until next fall. Then i can relax.

In general something that’s come to light from this past fall is that I shouldn’t try to tackle a lot of creative projects in the fall. Thankfully i had the foresight to turn down an opportunity to write a piece for Kim Walker’s fianceé who wanted the piece by around christmas. I said no mainly because i knew that the wind ensemble piece was going to take a major chunk of my time, but the thing that i didn’t anticipate was how busy the fall season was – partially brought on by my rather sudden medical issues, but also because the marching band season was much busier than i anticipated it would be and i didn’t have a whole lot of energy to devote to independent projects.

Granted, it’s not like my spring and summer isn’t occupied a great deal as well, but the method behind that busy is much more in line with creative and original efforts as opposed to the fall semester teaching and administering a marching band organization. Clearly a lot depends on exactly how the football schedule falls out, but i’m starting to come to the conclusion that my creative calendar should be much more dense in the spring and summer than in the fall.

We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, much needed website updates coming soon, time to try to send my Timpani piece off to another publisher for consideration of publishing, and keep the ball rolling.

1. Download all of the national anthem MP3s as is available on The Navy Band website.
2. Have one of my friends create a script to rename all of the files (because the files were all named the country of the national anthem) into a random 1 to 5 digit number.
3. Put all of the mp3s into a playlist on my iPhone, listen to them whenever i get a chance on shuffle. Make notes on interesting things by file number via a note in Evernote.

I opted to rename the anthems to random numbers and have someone else do the randomizing because i wanted to be able to listen to and evaluate the music without bias as to where the music originates from or what it represents. Clearly there were a few national anthems that i recognized (US, UK, Canada, France, for example), but for the most part I have no idea what i’m actually listening to.

After having spent probably a few hours listening to the playlist (i’m not sure if i’ve actually gotten through all of the anthems since i’ve had to start the shuffle over at times) and mostly passively (as background as opposed to paying attention), i think i’ve come to the conclusion that my original idea of having all of the national anthems get their spotlight isn’t going to work. Although the piece is going to have a medley sort of feel to it by default, i still want it to be feel more compositional than cut-and-paste-medley.

So what i’m working out in my brain now is making it a little more “Ivesian” for lack of a better made up word – i want to mash anthems together, but in a complementary way as opposed to a clashy way. I may also take some anthem themes and stretch them out rhythmically to provide some sort of slow moving bass line or something, and maybe do some other “masking” to give some of the anthems a unique sort of feel, but without losing the integrity of the anthem itself (so i’m not planning on playing any of them backwards or doing set inversions or silly things like that).

I still have several days of constant listening before i’m going to take some serious notes, and then a few days of listening after that to see if i can start to get a feel for the shape of the piece. That’s really the key – how to take the key material in my head and give the piece a big picture shape and form – once i have that, all of the details can be filled in pretty easily and/or get morphed. If after all of that i can’t get a feel of the big picture shape, i’ll probably go back to the drawing board.

The first idea i had was to steal one of my favorite sections of an old orchestra piece i did for an orchestra composition class in my grad school days because it’s a pretty great section and find a way to expand on it. That’s still the backup plan. But the second and now primary idea that i’m going with is a piece that i’ve been thinking about for the past four or five years now, which is a “anthems of the world” kind of piece, as in i want to incorporate all of the known current national anthems of the world into a huge fused hybrid that’s meant to arrive at some sense of global unity.

The potential backfiring of doing a piece like that is that it’s a pretty big undertaking. If this website is comprehensive as it seems, there are 212 national anthems that exist, and to find a way to journey across all 212 in an eight to ten minute piece that’s due by January 1st when i haven’t written a large ensemble piece in almost a decade seems like i could be biting off more than i can chew. i don’t want to suddenly have to cancel my Christmas vacation plans because, say, i still don’t know how to incorporate the Senegal national anthem into the piece and i don’t want to exclude them because then they could take me hostage or something.

It all boils down to timing. After my two long weeks of band camp are over, i basically have four months to write the piece. Is that enough time? Probably. Is it enough time on top of my full time job, the WSOP satellite event in early December and potentially writing a winter show for Hermiston that would be due around the same time? Maybe.

The one compositional stumbling block that i’ve already been trying to address in my head is how to end the piece. Is there an anthem that can serve as the Big Ending, one anthem that can serve as a climax over any other? As a citizen of the United States i could use that as an obvious answer, but this piece is meant to transcend any personal sense of patriotism i may have; the idea is that no nation is more important than any other, we are all one globe and one world. In that sense, creating an ending climax that resembles *any* of the 212 anthems is problematic, so chances are the music will have to be original and maybe derivative.

The other compositional challenge is how to fuse the anthems together in a way that can ensure that all of the anthems have some time in the spotlight. It’s easy enough to use some of the anthems as background material and i’d probably rely heavily upon that to give the piece depth, but to have an anthem *only* exist in the background is also counter to the philosophy of the piece.

Probably what the plan will be is to stick all of the anthems into a playlist and listen to them ad nauseum for the two weeks following band camp. Next would be to spend a day in a very quiet room or at a park or go on a walk or something and let the ideas buzz of their own accord around in my head, and then spend the next day with staff paper, a pencil with a very big eraser, and a computer, and see what manages to come out. If what comes out seems promising, i move forward with the piece. If what comes out seems strained and difficult and stupid, i start over.