Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all! A news blast from Santiago de Chile:
- Stella's Dance from Three Portraits will be performed by the Playground Ensemble of Denver, CO on their 2009 Colorado Composers' Concert. More information as the performance draws nearer, and also available at www.playgroundensemble.org.
- I've been named composer-in-residence with the Loveland High School Wind Ensemble, directed by Matthew Arau and Aaron Volgel. We're currently making plans for a new piece and a premiere next year; as always, check back for details.
Have a fantastic and safe New Year!
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Maria Schneider profile on NewMusicBox
I'm always excited when NMB releases a new profile, but this one deserves special notice. Most of you who know me well know the profound relationship I have with Maria's music, but for the rest of you, suffice to say that her music is really the only music out there that never fails to remind me why I'm doing what I'm doing. Check her out.
Friday, October 10, 2008
News on the March: 10/9/08
A little midnight-oil burning, working on my latest project, Prometheus in the Dead Zone. Here's a little news blast:
- I've recently signed on for a commission with euphonium player and GSM-friend Tyler Benjamin. At this point, off in the future still, but more on that as the story develops.
- Next week composer Michael Daugherty comes to Colorado for a residency at CU, and I'll be interviewing him for Pendulum New Music. Suggestions of questions you'd like to hear him answer are welcome -- video will be posted soon after residency. Let's hear 'em!
- A residency position is still in the works, and still no details. High hopes, though.
- Last month I took third place in the Iron Composer competition at the University of Nebraska Omaha! The other four finalists did some fantastic work, and I felt in great company and really lucky to be a part of the competition. I also was included as a guest artist on DUNG, the trumpet ensemble's, concert during the ArtsAHA! Festival. Audio from that is available, and I may post it soon. I'll definitely post the wonderful recording of my IC entry by Baltimore's own Monument Piano Trio -- check back soon!
Current Projects:
Prometheus in the Dead Zone for clarinet and four percussion
Untitled for string quartet, piano, and jazz soloist
Monday, August 25, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Isaac Hayes, 1942-2008
The great soul man, composer of Shaft and the immortal voice of Chef, has passed. Jim Fusili has a great profile of Mr. Hayes in today's Wall Street Journal, covering his greatest hits and some lesser known artistic projects. Take a moment to read it and remember this pop culture legend, children.
Friday, July 25, 2008
And they say Brahms wasn't jolly...
Being here in Aspen has given me time aplenty to think about advertising and classical music marketing. It's a topic I'll be talking a lot about when I have more writing time, but for right now let's start with a bang...
Really, I think the composer-themed cereal idea is a vastly underexplored one (Meyerbeerios, anyone?)... think of the possibilities.
Serious conversation next week, people.
Really, I think the composer-themed cereal idea is a vastly underexplored one (Meyerbeerios, anyone?)... think of the possibilities.
Serious conversation next week, people.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Allez Cuisine!
Breaking news: I've been named a winner of the University of Nebraska at Omaha's 2008 Iron Composer competition! Along with four other winners, I'll go to Omaha in September for a day-long event in which we'll have six hours to compose and prepare a work using a musical "secret ingredient." More information about the competition and the other finalists can be found here; more information as it comes in. Yeah!
Monday, June 30, 2008
Speak up, you!
I was hoping that we'd be able to get comments into the site-based version of Notes and Words, but we're encountering some delays. No big deal, but as long as I'm flexing my writing chops, I'd love to have some interaction with readers. So, if you're reading, I'm going to (for now) direct you over to my Blogger-based Notes and Words, gregsimonmusic.blogspot.com. Feel free to, and please do, add your two cents on my extremely opinionated writings. I'll keep writing as long as I know someone's reading!
Thursday, June 12, 2008
The Trouble with August, or Comprehending the Incomprehensible
On a recent trip home, I watched with my family the 2007 film August Rush. August Rush is, as Roger Ebert describes it, "a very free modern adaptation of elements from Oliver Twist" involving Evan Taylor, the long lost son of a solo cellist and an Irish rock star. Evan begins a search for his parents, and through a series of trials and tribulations, realizes his prodigious talent as a guitarist and composer, and takes the stage name August Rush. The story culminates in young August conducting the New York Philharmonic in his first symphony, while his parents reunite in the audience and immediately recognize their long lost boy, who has finally found his parents.
At the end of the movie, I was the one person in the room who didn't have an ear-to-ear smile on my face. I absolutely respect the ability of others to get lost in the film's unabashed optimism and sentimentality, but for reasons I couldn't immediately describe, I hated that movie.
On further deliberation, I realized that what turned me off was the sheer number of inconsistencies between August's experience as a musician and my own. I can overlook the extremely implausible good luck he encounters (an 8-year-old with months of musical training is conducting the NY Phil? Wow, can I go next?), because clearly the movie demands acceptance of that aspect on its terms. But what got to me further was writer Nick Castle's portrayal of the little guy's creative process. I couldn't bring myself to identify with August; because while he papers walls with musical sketches minutes after first encountering a piano, I toil for months before feeling good enough about an idea to write it down, and perhaps never feel good about the finished product. I don't know if there's been a composer since Mozart who worked as fast and carefree as August Rush, and if there has been, he probably wasn't very good. Try as I might, I couldn't envision such a character as being close to realistic, and the skepticism hit too close to home for me to enjoy watching it.
Of course, sharing these opinions with others brought several accusations forward: I was being elitist, I was being too intellectual, and perhaps most hurtful, I was jealous. Apparently composers aren't supposed to feel so possessive of the creative process. Of course, I should have expected such a reaction; composers told their public for a good part of the twentieth century that art music wasn't for them. Only recently have we almost universally begun to consider accessibility a valid artistic concern. There's a lingering distrust of complex new music, and we as an artistic community are trying to come down to earth, partially through demystifying the creative process. Even John Corigliano implicates composers as far back as Wagner for coveting incomprehensibility:
God became the composer. If you go to any church, the one thing you know is that you don't understand God. You can't understand God. So, all of a sudden, this virtue of incomprehensibility sprung up. "I am incomprehensible because my message is so much more complex and morally stronger than the message of those people who were just speaking to you that you can understand. Therefore, you shouldn't understand me..." [they created] the egocentric idea of the artist-god and the audience-worshipper—the non-communication that that means—and bathed us in this until finally the audience was alienated by this and left...
And in many ways, I agree. Obviously composers are not gods, and art should express ideas intelligible and enlightening to non-artists. But while I will expect a motivated, curious audience to understand my music, I will never expect them to understand my creative process. The way in which I write music is extremely personal, and I only have a very limited understanding of it, so how could I expect (or want) to enlighten the audience to it? Any possible explanation I could give would misrepresent, even cheapen, the work that composing takes.
But perhaps that demystification is what audiences are looking for. Maybe that's why people loved August; his creative process was totally exposed. We could tell exactly where his music came from, and we could share in the elation he obviously felt during the creative process. We could watch him compose and we could say, "that's exactly how it works." Maybe that's one of the reasons people loved Amadeus and Copying Beethoven, two works (like August Rush) written by non-musicians. And meanwhile, as the new music community tries desperately to make itself relevant, that kind of full disclosure is doing wonders to humanize and endear composers to the audience.
In all honesty, though, I don't feel prepared to deliver on that full disclosure. It would be foolish of me to think I can completely explain how I compose, and it would be presumptuous to speak about that process on behalf of any composer but myself. And even if I could define my musical mode d'emploi for an audience member, my guess is that they would be disappointed to find out how unromantic (read: unlike August's) it really is. Maybe the reason I disliked August Rush so much lies somewhere in there: it's setting an expectation for what composers are like that I can't hope to meet. And if an August Rush fan goes to a concert of new music hoping to meet seven grown-up Evan Taylors, will they leave with anything but a sense of disappointment and betrayal, no matter what the music is like?
Just what should expected of a composer? Should he/she be prepared to divulge every aspect of the very personal compositional process? Is it elitist to take issue with Hollywood's presumptions about it? And is it even more elitist to suggest that, perhaps, there is a mystery inherent in composition that will never be penetrated (not even by the artist)? Possibly the answer is "yes," and I really am jealous of August's success... but I couldn't write as much about that.
At the end of the movie, I was the one person in the room who didn't have an ear-to-ear smile on my face. I absolutely respect the ability of others to get lost in the film's unabashed optimism and sentimentality, but for reasons I couldn't immediately describe, I hated that movie.
On further deliberation, I realized that what turned me off was the sheer number of inconsistencies between August's experience as a musician and my own. I can overlook the extremely implausible good luck he encounters (an 8-year-old with months of musical training is conducting the NY Phil? Wow, can I go next?), because clearly the movie demands acceptance of that aspect on its terms. But what got to me further was writer Nick Castle's portrayal of the little guy's creative process. I couldn't bring myself to identify with August; because while he papers walls with musical sketches minutes after first encountering a piano, I toil for months before feeling good enough about an idea to write it down, and perhaps never feel good about the finished product. I don't know if there's been a composer since Mozart who worked as fast and carefree as August Rush, and if there has been, he probably wasn't very good. Try as I might, I couldn't envision such a character as being close to realistic, and the skepticism hit too close to home for me to enjoy watching it.
Of course, sharing these opinions with others brought several accusations forward: I was being elitist, I was being too intellectual, and perhaps most hurtful, I was jealous. Apparently composers aren't supposed to feel so possessive of the creative process. Of course, I should have expected such a reaction; composers told their public for a good part of the twentieth century that art music wasn't for them. Only recently have we almost universally begun to consider accessibility a valid artistic concern. There's a lingering distrust of complex new music, and we as an artistic community are trying to come down to earth, partially through demystifying the creative process. Even John Corigliano implicates composers as far back as Wagner for coveting incomprehensibility:
God became the composer. If you go to any church, the one thing you know is that you don't understand God. You can't understand God. So, all of a sudden, this virtue of incomprehensibility sprung up. "I am incomprehensible because my message is so much more complex and morally stronger than the message of those people who were just speaking to you that you can understand. Therefore, you shouldn't understand me..." [they created] the egocentric idea of the artist-god and the audience-worshipper—the non-communication that that means—and bathed us in this until finally the audience was alienated by this and left...
And in many ways, I agree. Obviously composers are not gods, and art should express ideas intelligible and enlightening to non-artists. But while I will expect a motivated, curious audience to understand my music, I will never expect them to understand my creative process. The way in which I write music is extremely personal, and I only have a very limited understanding of it, so how could I expect (or want) to enlighten the audience to it? Any possible explanation I could give would misrepresent, even cheapen, the work that composing takes.
But perhaps that demystification is what audiences are looking for. Maybe that's why people loved August; his creative process was totally exposed. We could tell exactly where his music came from, and we could share in the elation he obviously felt during the creative process. We could watch him compose and we could say, "that's exactly how it works." Maybe that's one of the reasons people loved Amadeus and Copying Beethoven, two works (like August Rush) written by non-musicians. And meanwhile, as the new music community tries desperately to make itself relevant, that kind of full disclosure is doing wonders to humanize and endear composers to the audience.
In all honesty, though, I don't feel prepared to deliver on that full disclosure. It would be foolish of me to think I can completely explain how I compose, and it would be presumptuous to speak about that process on behalf of any composer but myself. And even if I could define my musical mode d'emploi for an audience member, my guess is that they would be disappointed to find out how unromantic (read: unlike August's) it really is. Maybe the reason I disliked August Rush so much lies somewhere in there: it's setting an expectation for what composers are like that I can't hope to meet. And if an August Rush fan goes to a concert of new music hoping to meet seven grown-up Evan Taylors, will they leave with anything but a sense of disappointment and betrayal, no matter what the music is like?
Just what should expected of a composer? Should he/she be prepared to divulge every aspect of the very personal compositional process? Is it elitist to take issue with Hollywood's presumptions about it? And is it even more elitist to suggest that, perhaps, there is a mystery inherent in composition that will never be penetrated (not even by the artist)? Possibly the answer is "yes," and I really am jealous of August's success... but I couldn't write as much about that.
Friday, May 23, 2008
News on the March: 5/23/08
- I'm gearing up for my summer employment, beginning in just about a week. I'll be working as the Schedule Coordinator for the renowned Aspen Music Festival, which I couldn't be more excited about. More details as they present themselves.
- Three Portraits for Pierrot Ensemble won the Edward Levy Prize! The prize comes with a $1000 commission for a piece to be performed on the Pendulum New Music Series next year, and a carte blanche to put together my own ensemble to perform it. My dream work is for the Tasman String Quartet (our wonderful resident quartet, imported from New Zealand), piano and jazz soloists. Will it happen that way? Fingers crossed.
- There's been some buzz of a composer-in-residence position, but no further information on that right now. Stay tuned...
Projects
- Prometheus in the Dead Zone for percussion sextet
- Self-Portrait in a Broken Mirror for orchestra
- Revision of Three Portraits and Concert in the Garden
- Three Portraits for Pierrot Ensemble won the Edward Levy Prize! The prize comes with a $1000 commission for a piece to be performed on the Pendulum New Music Series next year, and a carte blanche to put together my own ensemble to perform it. My dream work is for the Tasman String Quartet (our wonderful resident quartet, imported from New Zealand), piano and jazz soloists. Will it happen that way? Fingers crossed.
- There's been some buzz of a composer-in-residence position, but no further information on that right now. Stay tuned...
Projects
- Prometheus in the Dead Zone for percussion sextet
- Self-Portrait in a Broken Mirror for orchestra
- Revision of Three Portraits and Concert in the Garden
Welcome!
Welcome, one and all, to gregsimonmusic.com!
This is the first edition of my web presence, and I'm very excited to bring it to everyone. The role of GSM.com might evolve and develop over time, but at present it serves the most basic purpose of being a source for information about me, my music, and my professional activities.
The blog you're reading right now, Notes and Words, will be a news feed, keeping those interested up to date on what I'm writing, where I'm playing, etc. In addition, like my web heroes Matt Guerreri and Darcy James Argue, I'll use this space to share with you my thoughts on music, the arts and related issues. Some of my writings might be cross-posted over at the CU Pendulum blogspace (cu-pendulum.blogspot.com), others will make this their one and only home. As soon as I can get comments working, please make your voice heard! What good is writing if I don't know that someone's reading?
With that, another big welcome to GSM.com! Let me know if the thermostat's too low.
This is the first edition of my web presence, and I'm very excited to bring it to everyone. The role of GSM.com might evolve and develop over time, but at present it serves the most basic purpose of being a source for information about me, my music, and my professional activities.
The blog you're reading right now, Notes and Words, will be a news feed, keeping those interested up to date on what I'm writing, where I'm playing, etc. In addition, like my web heroes Matt Guerreri and Darcy James Argue, I'll use this space to share with you my thoughts on music, the arts and related issues. Some of my writings might be cross-posted over at the CU Pendulum blogspace (cu-pendulum.blogspot.com), others will make this their one and only home. As soon as I can get comments working, please make your voice heard! What good is writing if I don't know that someone's reading?
With that, another big welcome to GSM.com! Let me know if the thermostat's too low.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)