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I’m a songwriter (?)

Just a quick post from a little hotel room in downtown Washington, DC to share that I am here this weekend for TEDxMidAtlantic: Unbreakable.

Photo stolen from Janet Noh

Since last year I have been taking a much-needed break from the writing of concert music and have turned my attention toward the writing of… songs. So far, the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop has been my primary source of credibility in that regard, but recently I was also given the opportunity to write a song with which to close the final TEDxMidAtlantic session on Saturday evening (this is a TEDx that particularly enjoys musical performances). I have rather unimaginatively titled it after the conference theme, “Unbreakable.” Joining me are vocalists Carla Canales and Janet Noh, as well as some members of the local DC Youth Orchestra Program. Many thanks to TEDxMidAtlantic, The Canales Project, and El Sistema for making this happen.

Under Construction

Hello!  I have begun to migrate from my old site to this one, in an effort to create something more authentic, whatever that means. I have known for a while now that the one-word identity of ‘composer’ (and worse, the two-word identity of ‘serious composer’) wasn’t quite doing it for me, but was unsure of how to break away from it. So lately I’ve been performing more, writing songs (including my own lyrics), and of course, my work with Carla Canales and the Canales Project keeps me busy most days. So this will be an experiment, a work-in-progress, an ongoing document of my musical adventures—and who knows what else?—here in New York and beyond. I humbly thank you for tagging along.

World Premieres with the Manila and Detroit Symphony Orchestras

Two days before Thanksgiving I put the double bar on Celestine (aptly subtitled”Prelude for Orchestra”), which will open the Manila Symphony Orchestra’s holiday program on December 9 and 10 at two venues in Metro Manila. When I received this commission last April, I had barely gotten started on Feuertrunken and knew I would have little time and energy to write a second orchestral score by the end of the year; but I’m glad I accepted. As it happens I first wrote the music to Celestine (I can’t remember why I chose the title, other than that I liked the sound of the word) November last year, for oboe and piano, which I performed in Houston with my friend Celina Hawkins. It is light-hearted and entirely hummable, meant only to charm and amuse; I knew I couldn’t turn down an opportunity to orchestrate it and expand it a little to give the orchestra more breathing room. One of the common complaints against new music is the lack of hummable tunes: of course this ultimately has nothing to do with whether a piece of music is good, but every now and then I do like to give in.

Unfortunately I will not be in the Philippines, as December 9 and 10 also happen to be the dates in which I will be in Detroit for the world premiere of Feuertrunken (Fire-Drunk), which, unlike Celestine, is neither charming nor hummable. For his final season with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Maestro Slatkin has chosen to commission works not from the great composers of his generation, but from their students; I am especially proud in this case to be a former student of Christopher Rouse, who is one of my musical heroes, and from whose bag of tricks I continually steal…. If you are not in Detroit, I do hope you can catch the live webcast on Sunday, December 10 at 3:00 PM.

Here is the program note I submitted to the publicity folks:

Feuertrunken is a loud meditation (if one can meditate loudly) on joy. In the months that I spent composing the piece, between March–June 2017, I found little cause for celebration in the many goings-on both locally and abroad; perhaps this was the reason I thought the subject of joy had so much urgency.

During this time I also found myself absorbed in the Divine Comedy, especially the Purgatorio: Dante’s vision of purgatory is a giant mountain partitioned into seven terraces, each devoted to purification from one of the deadly sins. Dante ascends the mountain terrace by terrace, until at last he finds a great wall of fire between him and paradise. An angel of God encourages him to make the plunge into his final trial. Though my piece as a whole is not programmatic (meaning musical events generally do not correspond to anything in Dante’s story), there is a brief interlude in which I imagine Dante in devoted silence before he submits to the fire.

The title, meaning “fire-drunk” or “drunk with fire,” is of course from Friedrich Schiller’s famous “Ode to Joy:” “We enter, drunk with fire, Heavenly One, your sanctuary.” I thought some reference to Beethoven was the obvious route; instead I chose Mahler, whose music I think conveys joy so adeptly. Feuertrunken quotes the opening of Mahler’s first Symphony before veering off into various, intertwined episodes of supplication, blasphemy, and finally, praise.

Summer Notes

There are so many stories to tell from the time between my last post and now, among them:

1) performing Air a bunch of times all over the Juilliard building with my friend ThatViolaKid, including on his solo recital and graduation jury, both of which were nerve-wracking but made me feel somewhat like a legitimate composer;


2) the world premiere at Lincoln Center of Spoliarium, which I maintain for a few different reasons is my worst piece in recent memory, and which I expect will never see the light of day again, though I am quite fond of the ending where a lone bass drum utterly destroys the entire ensemble (to quote the New York Times, “the piece pretty much explodes at the end”);

3) writing an entire piece in one night and playing it myself the next day—don’t ask; and,

4) graduating from Juilliard.

But Peter Dinklage was right: you sort of get a bit derailed after graduation, though in my case I have always been more or less constantly derailed in many aspects of my life anyway, so not much else is new. In fact, my newfound freedom from the many distractions of the academe has left my brain clear enough these past eight weeks to allow me to put the double bar on two pieces so far—one for violin, another for choir—despite my history of long, unproductive summers and the New York heat making it impossible some days to do anything. Do I see a third double bar in the near distance? To be sure, things are moving slowly, but expect that I will have exciting things to announce and more uses for this space in due time.