Neely's Blog

John Cage's Opinions

2011-06-21T07:14:00.001-04:00

The following paragraphs were written for the SILENCE discussion group, an on-line, ongoing conversion about many aspects of John Cage’s music and writings. I am an infrequent reader and contributor, but I couldn’t resist jumping in on the recent discussion about Cage’s opinions about Beethoven, Mozart, jazz, politics, etc. Many people have participated in the discussion, which began as riffs on an article by Marjorie Perloff entitled “Constructed Anarchy” and a post called “Cage’s Prejudices.” (This latter might better be entitled “Cage’s Opinions,” since that’s what it’s really about. People use the word “prejudice” very loosely these days.) I thought I would post this here and see what response I might get from a very different readership.

“This is a very brief response to the fascinating thread developing about the Perloff article, anarchy, etc., etc. I have many thoughts and memories of all of these things, but I am practicing under deadline and have to get back to it. I will just say a couple of things.

“Artists' tastes say a lot about them, above and beyond the obvious, and even Cage's apparently glib statements about his likes and dislikes are at least provocative, sometimes very important.

“About Beethoven: I first encountered John's dislike of Beethoven as a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1966. He visited Charles Hamm's class in American music, and most of what he said was about Beethoven. He compared Beethoven and Delacroix and talked about emerging radical individualism in the nineteenth century and how it was not going to solve the problems of the world in the middle of the twentieth century. He admitted that a pianist friend of his had played for him the late Beethoven bagatelles and he found them ‘quite lively.’ Notice that he stopped short of saying he liked them, but in the context he was clearly enjoying his memory of the pieces, if not the pieces themselves. After the better part of an hour of Cage bashing Beethoven, he was challenged by another graduate student, an excellent clarinettist named Doug DiBianco (quite skilled in performing new music I might add, and no Philistine). Doug practically exploded in rage and frustration. I quote: ‘But Beethoven was a great composer, and you're not.’ To quote John's response: ‘Yes, but he wanted to be.’

“Sorry to oversimplify such a rich and remarkable hour, but this thread is inspiring me to recollect and try to make sense of the many opinions I heard from John Cage over the years.

“His praise of Mozart, at least in my presence, was always a byproduct of his comparison of Mozart and Bach. John didn't like Bach much (though my impression was he liked Bach more than Beethoven). The reason was that scales in Bach (by which Cage meant extensive motion in the same direction) were always the same, i.e. diatonic. In Mozart, however, there are many more kinds of ‘scales.’ Not just diatonic, but chromatic, and arpeggios too, which are rare in Bach but common in Mozart. While this is of course an oversimplification of what goes on in the work of a couple of great composers, because the source of the oversimplification is a third great composer, it's worth looking into. It turns out John is more or less correct. And if your real purpose in all of this is to write a great masterpiece, in this case HPSCHD, oversimplifications are quite adequate to the task.

“In my presence John always spoke of Satie in reverential terms. He said of ‘Vexations,’ for example, that it was a great religious work, ‘as great as any of the Passions.’ (Another quote. John's choice of words was always vivid, and many of his sentences are burned indelibly into my brain.)

“Already I have written about twice as much here as I really have time to write this evening. I must say, however, that the readers of SILENCE (the discussion group, not the book) should be aware, if you are not already, that Cage is hardly the only major composer to dislike Beethoven. Except for a handful of pieces, Chopin disliked Beethoven intensely, and vastly preferred Mozart. (Mozart and Bach seem to have been the greatest composers, in Chopin's mind.) Chopin thought Beethoven noisy, crude and ‘expressive’ to a fault, not far from what Cage thought, it seems to me. Debussy had a similar dislike for Beethoven, for similar reasons. The only piece by Beethoven that Debussy really liked seems to have been the Ninth Symphony.

“I enjoy telling my students that there are three major composers who disliked Beethoven: Chopin, Debussy and Cage. I am collecting composers who dislike Beethoven, and I can add to the list my good friend Carver Blanchard. Carver thinks Beethoven is the most overrated composer who ever lived. I, by contrast, think Beethoven is the greatest composer who ever lived. You can imagine our discussions on this point.

“BTW, My claim that Beethoven is the ‘greatest composer’ is intended in the same spirit as Anthony Thommasini's list of ‘ten greatest’ composers. Not to be taken too seriously, but if one has to make a list, and one has to order it in magnitude of ‘greatness,’ Beethoven is #1 on my list, as he's #3 on Tommasini's. I also think that Cage, Chopin and Debussy (and Satie and Mozart for that matter) are ‘great,’ wherever they may appear on one's Top Ten list. Whatever ‘greatness’ may consist of. Now it's REALLY time to practice Duckworth...”

Ives recordings begin

2011-06-14T06:06:00.001-04:00

Happy Flag Day! Last Friday Elizabeth Saunders, David Barron and I began recording Ives songs. We will do studio recordings of the entire Ives Vocal Marathon. Details about this unique project can be found on the IVM website:

www.ivesvocalmarathon.com

I am having trouble updating the IVM blog, so I will blog briefly about these recording sessions on this site until blogging can begin again at the other site.

We are working at Systems Two Recording Studios in Brooklyn, which has one of the three or so best pianos I have ever played in my life. We were scheduled for six hours, and we used all the time. However, everyone was pretty tired by the end, so in the future I’m going to schedule five-hour chunks. We planned to get twenty-five songs in the can. Instead, we got twenty-one. Still, not bad for a day’s work—about 10% of the total. These performances will eventually be available on-line, and of course I will keep readers of this blog posted about our progress.

Beth recorded the following songs:

To Edith

Two Little Flowers

Evidence

The Children’s Hour

The Light That Is Felt

Berceuse

Allegro

Night of Frost in May

Afterglow

David recorded:

Walking

The Cage

Because of You

Thoreau

Slow March

The Side Show

Abide With Me

Tarrant Moss

Marie (the first version, in German)

Minnelied

Ich grolle nicht

In Flanders Fields

There was a bit of time left over, so I recorded four brief improvisations. I have listened to the complete sessions, and the product is very good. We resume recording at the end of the month—two weeks to practice!

What I have been doing: A frivolous blog

2011-06-09T07:32:00.000-04:00

I have been trying to catch up on some work at Wesleyan (yes, I know it’s summer and I should be doing other things) and some things around the house. But what has obsessed me is the libretto for my new oratorio on the subject of Aristides de Sousa Mendes. (If you don’t know who he was, google him—an extremely important person and an unsung hero of the mid-twentieth century.) Secondarily I have been obsessed with the title of this libretto. Both of these topics are subjects for next week.

At the same time I have been practicing, preparing to record twenty-five Ives songs tomorrow with Elizabeth Saunders and David Barron. This is the first day of recording (six hours! just over four songs an hour!) and I’ll know more about how this is going to work after we do it. Pretty intense. Ditto the libretto.

Well, the first draft of the libretto is finished and duplicated for the board of the Sousa Mendes Foundation. The die is cast for the recording session, though I will certainly practice later today. So I feel the need for an intellectual change of pace, and frivolous blogging is just what the doctor ordered.

First, my restless mind turns to my idea of a series of piano concerti modeled on Rhapsody in Blue. My first thoughts are of titles. (This is surely a backlash from the agony of finding a title for the oratorio.) It crossed my mind that colors would be good, excepting blue of course. Rhapsody in Taupe, for example. No sooner had I articulated the thought than I had rejected it. Such titles have no merit and there are too many colors associated with pieces of music already. (With the stunning exception of Rhapsody in Blue, of course.) But unbidden, titles containing fruits presented themselves. I offer the list as comic relief, but in the complete conviction that something will come of it.

Peach Rhapsody

Pineapple Rhapsody

Guava Rhapsody

Mango Rhapsody

Grapefruit Rhapsody

Fig Rhapsody

Persimmon Rhapsody

Cherry Rhapsody

Apple Rhapsody

Banana Rhapsody

Lime Rhapsody

Nectarine Rhapsody

Watermelon Rhapsody

Ugly Fruit Rhapsody

Cantaloupe Rhapsody

Grape Rhapsody

Strawberry Rhapsody

Star Fruit Rhapsody

Honeydew Rhapsody

Blackberry Rhapsody

Ideas for concerti

2011-05-31T11:25:00.000-04:00

My friend David Barron, who is also the baritone who sang the Ives Vocal Marathon with me, lives in Brooklyn. I have made two trips recently to his spacious apartment where he lives with his wife Susan Barron, the visual artist. We are rehearsing the Ives songs that David sang on the IVM, in preparation for recording sessions, scheduled to begin on Friday 10 June. We also take advantage of the time to eat excellent Chinese or Thai food, catch up on the news, and occasionally take in a special event.

Yesterday was one of these. One of David and Susan’s young friends plays clarinet in a very good concert band, made up of Brooklyn teenagers. They played a concert in Green-Wood Cemetery, a very special Memorial Day event, featuring the music of Green-Wood’s “permanent residents.” On this occasion there were pieces by Fred Ebb, Leonard Bernstein and Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

But these works are not what I wish to mention in today’s blog. Rather, I’d like to mention a famous concerto by a famous Brooklynite, the Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin. The performance was perfectly good, better than that from time to time, and David and I were both struck (for the umpteenth time) by what a masterpiece R in B is. But two things made the occasion really memorable.

First of all, the concert took place behind the great gate to the cemetery, where the famous Brooklyn parrots have what is surely their finest nesting place. For a wonderful photo essay on the Green-Wood Cemetery parrots, see:

http://www.brooklynparrots.com/2006/03/greenwood-cemetery-parrots.html

These parrots, like most birds, like music, and enjoy singing along. But yesterday they were not interested in the band music, or even the piano solo (a performance of the Gottschalk “Pasquinade”). They were interested in R in B, particularly the piano solo sections where the right hand is high and tinkley. After a somewhat tentative start, the parrots chimed in most effectively every time a high, tinkley piano solo passage occurred. Sometimes they sang with delicatesse, sometimes with great gusto, but always as if they belonged in the music (which they most assuredly did) and as if they owned the place (which they do, for all intents and purposes).

All of this reminded me rather forcibly of a compositional problem that has been occupying my mind (or part of it, off and on) for about twenty years. That is, how to write a concerto, or series of concerti, that speaks to the concerns of today and uses today’s musical vocabulary, but is not virtuosic. Needed: concerti of moderate difficulty, for an orchestra of moderate size, not overpowering but with some interesting interplay between the soloist and the ensemble. I had long been thinking of how to make such a piece, using the Mozart concerti as a model, and even discussed the problem with composer-conductor John Kennedy (who assures me that his horn concert is just such a piece—I’ve got to check it out.)

But I realized yesterday afternoon that the perfect model for such a composition already exists, and it really works. Rhapsody in Blue! Through-composed, of moderate length, the soloist and the orchestra don’t get in each other’s way, the proportions are exquisite, etc. So I’m all set. As soon as I finish my other compositional projects (!!) I can turn my attention to a series of Rhapsodies for piano and chamber orchestra. More on this project as it develops. The basic idea is to analyze the R and B and use its structure as a model for new works—with parrots, of course. I have to make room for the parrots, where the piano part is high and tinkley.

The Ricciotti Ensemble, PART TWO

2011-05-23T08:40:00.003-04:00

On Sunday 15 May the combined Ricciotti Ensemble(s) from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, with the current Ricciotti interspersed, played in the Openbare Verlichting in the Westergasterrein. I have described the space in an earlier blog. In addition to Gijs Kramers and myself, there were four other conductors: Wim Witteman, Leonard Van Goudoever, Leon Berendse, and Bas Wiegers. The program was announced as follows:

Jurriaan Andriessen: De gepikte vogel (quadraphonic version)

Wim Van Binsbergen: Cordon bleu (Ricciotti ’70)

Willem Van Manen: Divertimento (R ’80)

Leonard Van Goudoever: Vers (R ’90, with Marga Grooff, soloist)

Konrad Koselleck: Daddy’s nightmare and the birthday of his son (R ’00)

Neely Bruce: Grand Polka de bataille (version for four orchestras)

PAUSE: all Ricciottis combine to make a gigantic 180-piece group

Willem Breuker: Onleesbaar III

Ricciotti/Van Wassenaer: Concertino II (the tune)

Wim Witteman: Just for you

Richard Wagner: Meistersinger overture

Chiel Meijering: No night no day

Chiel Meijering: Budhead (world premiere)

Van Dyke Parks: The Four Mills Brothers (with eight interpolated soloists)

In forty-one years certain traditions have established themselves in the Ricciotti, and this concert brought several of these to the fore. With this orchestra the first rule of programming is spontaneity, and the corollary to that is “Never trust the printed program.” The first half opened with their trademark composition, almost their theme song, De gepikte vogel of Jurriaan Andriessen (Louis’s less-famous older brother, alas deceased). “Gepikte” can be seen on YouTube in at least three versions by the Ricciotti. (I wonder if any other orchestra has played the piece.) There is a certain amount of flexibility in this composition, and it can be stretched in various ways. Sunday night it came to a resting point and Orchestra One (Ricciotti ’70) began to play Cordon bleu. Of course anyone who knew “Gepikte” (and many in the audience did, being die-hard Ricciotti fans) expected it to be completed, but when? Each of the orchestras did its thing, and I conducted the Grand Polka, which went off without a hitch (almost—there still was that strange silent measure that was not supposed to be there).

I should mention the singing of Marga Groff. Marga was the manager of the Ricciotti when I was most involved with them, in the late 1980s and through the American tour of 1991. She is a remarkable performer, over the top in some ways, but always captivating. The solo part in Vers was written for her. Leonard Van Goudoever is better known as a conductor than a composer I think, but the pieces of his I have heard are uniformly excellent. A violinist himself, he writes very well for strings, which are featured in this piece. The text ends with “In my heart a bizarre tango is playing,” which Dutch syntax allows to end with “a bizarre tango.” Marga has a remarkable dynamic range, and the piece ends with the orchestra singing to accompany her. A fragment of a violin solo and the piece is over. There are several pieces in the Ricciotti repertory that require the orchestra, or part of it, to sing. This is one of the best. I heard it many times twenty years ago, and I’m happy to report that it holds up very well.

So far this was a concert that followed standard expectations, more or less. Of course there are four orchestras in four different locations in the hall, and six conductors, and the first piece on the program wasn’t finished yet, but perhaps these are details. The pieces were performed in the order listed, and even if Orchestra Three, from the ‘90s, was singing a good deal of the time, they mostly played their instruments. (By the way, I attended a good chunk of the rehearsal of Vers, and a lot of attention was paid to the singing part of it. That paid off in spades. No hesitation, no bad intonation, just a Ricciotti singing a bizarre tango…)

The second half was a different matter. This is a blog, not a book, so I will just summarize the irregularities. First of all, as the evening progressed, more and more instrumentalists arrived, opened their cases, took out their instruments, went to the appropriate section and began to play. (This would have probably happened in the first half too, if the four orchestras had not been arranged quadraphonically.) Second, there was an extra piece by Ricciotti/Van Wassenaer (see my blog of 17 May for the lowdown on this composer and his music) performed by a handful of string players who were in the very first concert. This item does not appear on the program. Also, a video of rare, fuzzy footage of the Ricciotti in Moscow and lots of other places showed up unexpectedly. The overture to Meistersinger with over a hundred strings, at least a half-dozen saxophones, a tuba player (he only appeared in this one piece), extra drums but no timpani, and God knows what other irregularities, had to be heard to be believed. It was wonderful, but certainly not for purists.

Sidebar comment: I asked Gijs if this was the only Wagner the Ricciotti had played. He said it was not. He had arranged for them an eight-and-a-half minute Readers Digest version of The Ring, based on his earlier Ring reduction for the Amstel Quartet.

Continuing with the list of irregularities: the two Chiel Meijering pieces were not played back-to-back. Eight different soloists (singers, speaking actors, a hammered dulcimer player) strutted their stuff briefly, in between the characteristic opening of “The Four Mills Brothers” by Van Dyke Parks (another Ricciotti staple, for decades), used as a ritornello. Just when you ask yourself how many soloists there are, and if the piece will ever end, a quick and dirty transition gets us into the inevitable, but only dimly remembered, missing conclusion of De gipkte vogel.

There are theatrical aspects of this piece that have become ritualized. I don’t know if Jurriaan Andriessen put these elements in the score, but every performance of the piece I have witnessed contains them. At one point the violins and violas begin to move out of place and into the audience, playing by memory. At another point all available clarinets (in this performance six or seven, I couldn’t tell for sure) move to an unexpected place and begin to play a particularly aggressive solo line, in unison. (This was really effective in this performance, with all of the clarinets suddenly blaring forth from the gallery, spread out from one end to the other.) The piece doesn’t really end. It just dies. The members of the orchestra collapse on the floor. They jump up almost immediately, of course, to tumultuous applause, resounding bravos, cheers, etc.

Suffice it to say that this concert undermined virtually every convention of the symphonic concert. (I have not even mentioned the way they dress. Go to YouTube and see for yourself.) The 1960s were a time when composers devoted a great deal of attention to music as theatre. The Ricciotti Ensemble, child of the early 1970s, has taken this particular aesthetic concern and made it a way of life.

I must reluctantly close this series of ruminations about the world’s greatest orchestra, at least for the time being. Just one final note. The concert was brilliant, entertaining and altogether wonderful from beginning to end (even if the second half was a tad too long). But I have to say that the single most beautiful performance of the evening was the Concertino II by Ricciotti/Van Wassenauer, conducted by Leonard. It was expressive, in tune, and altogether satisfying. On top of all the theatre, all the dazzling imagination, the wonderful new and unusual pieces—these guys can really play.

A note about formatting

2011-05-21T07:20:00.002-04:00

Readers of this blog may notice inconsistencies in the formatting, especially the indentation of paragraphs, but also matters of typography. I hope to resolve these issues (especially the indentation glitches, which drive me nuts) but so far I have not been able to do this on my own. Eventually all of this will be straightened out, I’m sure. In the meantime, I will continue to write and publish. (It's a blog, after all.)

News flash about FLORA

2011-05-21T06:52:00.007-04:00

The series of blogs about my latest piece for the Ricciotti Ensemble is interrupted to bring you some important news about my new eighteenth-century opera, Flora. Yesterday (Friday 20 May) the piece was featured on NPR's "World of Opera." Tyler Duncan (a.k.a. Tom Friendly) alerted me to the broadcast, which has caused a bit of a stir on Facebook and also in my Email inbox. Check it out:

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/20/136469565/flora-an-18th-century-british-invasion

There is a nice written piece about the work, and a link to the "hit single" (Tom Friendly's ballad at the country fair, which Tyler sings very, very well, with the able assistance of Zachary Stains, Philip Cokorinos and the Westminster chorus). There is also a link to a virtually complete performance, audio only. I have a DVD of one of the dress rehearsals, but the posted NPR link is something much better. No visuals, alas, but all of the dialogue is crystal-clear and the balance between singers and instruments is excellent, over all (though occasionally I would prefer more orchestra sound). The editors did not include the final dance music (too much floor noise, I'm sure), and there is a bit of trimming here and there to eliminate an awkward spot, tighten laughter or applause, etc. But this just makes the piece flow better, in the absence of any visual stimulus.

One great thing about this version is that all of the naughty dialogue comes through. A real plus.

Let me know what you think. Can you follow the story? Do you understand the double entendre? Is the Somerset dialect comprehensible? (Make that “Zomerzet.”)

If you wonder what “new eighteenth century opera” might mean, watch for future blogs about this, my most recent work for the musical stage. Flora, by the way, is really a ballad opera turned into an opera (more or less), and its full title is Flora: An Opera. The title of the 1728 original is Flora, or, Hob in the Well. These are all matters for further discussion at another time.

Ricciotti Review DELAY

2011-05-18T07:59:00.000-04:00

The discussion of the Ricciotti concert on 15 May is turning into a feature review. I should be able to finish it tomorrow. Check back then. Sorry for the inconvenience!

The Ricciotti Ensemble, PART ONE

2011-05-17T08:51:00.002-04:00

I first became acquainted with the Ricciotti Ensemble in 1987. Henry Brant introduced us. They are a Dutch youth orchestra who play in the street. Literally. The bus drives up, the forty-something members of the Ricciotti get out, they take music stands from large wooden cases, set them up, take three-ring binders of parts from other cases, the cellists sit on the cases, they tune as quickly as possible (more or less), the conductor gives a downbeat and they are off and running.

The first performance of the group was intended to be the last. The group was formed to play a single concert of the music the Dutch nobleman Unico Willem von Wassenaur, who composed six concerti in the early eighteenth century that were engraved by Carlo Ricciotti (an Italian violinst) and for many years misattributed to Giovanni Pergolesi. Igor Stravinsky, believing the Pergolesi attribution, used the Wassenaur concerti as a good chunk of the material for Pulcinella. This little musicological puzzle-knot began to unravel in the 1960s, and in 1970 a group of Dutch teenaged string players was asked to play a single concert of Wassenaur’s music, in a new edition based on the original eighteenth century publication. Instead of introducing “a group of teenaged string players” the announcer blurted out “Ladies and gentlemen, the RICCIOTTI ENSEMBLE.” The group enjoyed playing together, and the name stuck. Forty-one years later, and under their fifth director, they are still going strong. They don’t play Wassenaur much any more, and they rarely appear on a stage.

The Ricciotti have played on the street, in public squares, in old-folks homes, in prisons, schools, and even major venues in major cities. They have traveled to many countries, including Russia, Bosnia, Spain, the Dutch Caribbean, and the United States. (Phyllis and I organized the US tour in 1991—the only one to date. That needs to change.) The goal of the orchestra is to bring symphonic music to people who would not otherwise experience it. An excellent summary of their history and their aesthetic can be found on their extensive website. Begin at:

http://www.ricciotti.nl/index.php?id=77

I sometimes describe the Ricciotti as “the world’s greatest orchestra.” I got this phrase from one of the founding members, the Dutch violinist Jan Erik van Regteren Altena (Mondriaan Quartet, Schoenberg Ensemble, etc.). Other orchestras are bigger, and may play better in tune, but the Ricciotti has an aesthetic audacity that is unique. And if aesthetic audacity is your criterion, then it is absolutely the world’s greatest orchestra. It is artistic populism writ large, and it is an extraordinary success. It has been a training ground for many of the finest musicians in the Netherlands. It has spawned a remarkable repertory of new short pieces for orchestra (long orchestra pieces are SO yesterday) and unique arrangements. It insists on having two alto saxophones in the group, on a regular basis. And its repertory systematically breaks down the artificial categories that so debase and poison our musical discourse.

The Ricciotti repertory, in a nutshell, consists of short classical pieces that fit, or can be adapted for their instrumentation; arrangements of popular music; and avant garde works written especially for them. Over the years hundreds of new pieces and arrangements have been generated for them. My first piece for the Ricciotti was Atmo-Rag. (My idea of a rag by Brahms—which morphs into a rag by Ives—oh hell, it’s really a rag by Neely Bruce.) Not only did they ask me to write it—they asked me to guest-conduct. I went all over the Netherlands with them (another story for another time) and heard the piece something like twenty times. I would tweak it in the evening and hand out fresh edits and even an occasional change-of-note before the next performance. I learned more about how to write for orchestra from the Ricciotti Ensemble than from any text I had read, or from any of my teachers (and they were excellent). Truly, there is no substitute for experience. I learned about some really sneaky impossible trills on the oboe, I learned a lot about register, and I started my long, unsuccessful journey toward writing effectively for string instruments. (Though I have to say I’m getting better at it. How DID Corelli do that? And he made it sound so easy…)

Atmo-Rag was followed by the Santa Ynez Waltz (by the mid-1990s the Ricciotti had played it over 150 times), “One, two, ready, go!” and in 1997 the Grand Polka de bataille. The four-orchestra version of this piece is really a new work, I have to say. So that makes five pieces for the world’s greatest orchestra. I’ll write a sixth one whenever they want it—some ideas are already running around in my head.

So now I have introduced this unique and fabulous organization. Tomorrow a brief blog about what they actually did last Sunday night in the Westergasterrein.

Grand Polka de bataille: Four-orchestra version, PART THREE

2011-05-16T02:07:00.000-04:00

During the day yesterday the four Ricciotti orchestras rehearsed their grand ensembles (the four historical Ricciottis plus the current one, intermingled) in the morning and played concerts all over Amsterdam in the afternoon. I decided to walk from the Hoogte Kadijk to the Westergasfabrik for the dinner and rehearsal of my piece in the evening. I expected it to take me 40 minutes, but it took almost an hour. No matter. It was a walk through some nice sights and I always need the exercise. I arrived at 6:15. Dinner was to be at 6:30, followed by rehearsal.

The concert began at 8:30. The four orchestras arrived in four different busses. Of course everyone had to eat. There were only two pieces to rehearse: mine and a quadraphonic version of De Gepikte Vogel of the late Jurriaan Andriessen (older brother of Louis). Since the Andriessen is perhaps the most-performed piece in the Riccotti repertory, and the majority of the players know it by memory, that part of the rehearsal was over in a flash.

Two of the orchestras were on the floor level, in the corners, to my left and my right. The other two were in the corners of a three-sided balcony directly above. Two layer cakes of orchestras, more or less side by side. The directionality of the composition would be vivid, I was certain. Since the first orchestra (Ricciotti players from the beginning, in the 1970s) had not played the piece, I rehearsed them very briefly. It’s just as well, because there were twice as many players in Orchestra One as there had been the day before, including Jan Erik van Regteren Altena, first violinist of the Mondriaan Quartet (his brother Edouard, the Mondriaan cellist, was playing in Orchestra Two) and many other excellent Dutch musicians. All of the percussion joined Orchestra One (as Gijs Kramers and I had agreed before); during the setup I ran through the non-percussion stuff. It was clear from the start that they could handle everything, and in five minutes that part of the work was done. I did a few spots with all of the orchestras, just to make sure the groups were comfortable and understood the basic idea of the piece, most notably that there are no rests. One measure of rest showed up shortly before the grand finale (when all four polka tunes are heard simultaneously).

We just had time to run the piece. The members of Orchestra Three began to count aloud, which was quite entertaining. The phantom measure of rest showed up again. When the time came for the actually performance, the phantom rest was still there. I think there is a mistake in the piece, although I don’t really know how that is possible. (Composers should always proofread their work…)

The Grand Polka de bataille is a wonderful musical joke, if I do say so myself. The audience loved hearing it, the players loved playing it. The conductor loved conducting it too, although after a while whoever conducts this piece has to forget about cueing and simply wave his/her arms.

There are some more things to be said about this piece, and this concert, but not today. My ride to Schiphol Airport is leaving in thirty minutes!

Grand Polka de bataille: Four-orchestra version, PART TWO

2011-05-15T04:34:00.004-04:00

In the first orchestral versions of the Grand Polka de bataille, the original groups were mapped onto a more conventional group of instruments as follows. The string trio became the strings, except the double basses. The saxophone quartet morphed into brass, plus the two saxophones in the Ricciotti. The piano/organ parts turned into an avalanche of woodwind sounds, very difficult to play and not very gratifying. The percussion parts stayed with the percussion, plus the double basses to reinforce the timpani solo. (The Ricciotti Ensemble has no timpani, but they do have a set of roto-toms—a funky substitute for sure, but OK under the circumstances.)

Each of these groups has a distinctive sound. But four Ricciotti orchestras have the same instrumentation: woodwinds in pairs, two alto saxes, two horns, one trumpet, one trombone, one percussionist, a string section of moderate size. How to get each of them to sound unique? Fortunately for my purposes, one of the Ricciottis, composed of alumni from the 1970s, was not complete. Only one of each woodwind (no pairs), no trumpet, no trombone. I was allowed to move all the percussion to that orchestra. So that made for a distinctive sound by default. I decided to emphasize the strings in one orchestra, the brass in another (with a nice trumpet solo), and all the winds and saxophone in the final one. (Florid parts for the saxes and the high register of the bassoons makes for a special sound, that’s for sure.)

With a plan in mind, I could began to recompose in earnest. As I finished each orchestra, I sent the FINALE file to Rudi van Hest, who extracted the parts and printed them out. I promised the piece would be complete by May 3, and three of the four orchestral chunks were finished by that time. The fourth orchestra was dispatched to Amsterdam in cyberspace on the 5th.

Yesterday was the first rehearsal. I was able to guest-conduct two of the four orchestras, rehearsing them for ten or fifteen minutes. I was able to observe a third orchestra, and answered questions for the conductor and players as they came up. It was not possible to work with the fourth one, so we’ll hope for the best later today.

After the rehearsal I went with the four orchestras to a great dinner (four stews: vegan, beef, fish, shrimp; two salads: tomato, potato; couscous, potatoes, bread) for 150 people. At about 10:15 p.m. the current Ricciotti burst upon the scene, to play their thirteenth concert of the day. (Gasp!) Another entry in the Guinness Book of World Records—the largest number of concerts in one day, played by the same orchestra in separate venues.

Tonight at 6:30 we put the Grand Polka together. At 8:30 we play it for the public. I’ll report in full tomorrow.

Grand Polka de bataille: Four-orchestra version, PART ONE

2011-05-14T03:59:00.003-04:00

Having announced that this blog will resume, it’s about time I actually resumed it! There being no time like the present, I decided I would write brief descriptions of the music I’ve been writing in the last six months. I’ll start with the most recent one.

I write this from Amsterdam, where I am visiting my friends Charles van Tassel and Cécile Roovers and getting ready for a performance of the latest version of my Grand Polka de bataille. This is a work that exists in three earlier versions. It was originally composed in 1996 for a concert that Keith Moore organized at Wesleyan. Keith was a masters student in composition at the time, and he had the inspiration for a concert that consisted entirely of polkas, featuring the Circus Polka of Stravinsky. He had at his disposal a unique combination of groups and instruments: a string trio (two violins and cello), a saxophone quartet, three grand pianos, a small but quite boisterous pipe organ, and three percussionists.

Imagine a battle of the bands, but they are all polka bands, with oddball constituents. The string trio starts with a tune of 32 bars in D major. Then the saxophone quartet plays another tune in another key. The three pianos and organ play a third tune, ostensibly in a third key but more like a total flurry of dissonant sixteenth notes. The fourth polka tune is for percussion alone, highlighted by a virtuoso timpani solo and a not-so-virtuoso one for snare drum. The initial statements of the tunes are followed by trading eights in the same order, then a scramble of four-bar phrases for 32 bars, a scramble of two-bar phrases, a scramble of one-bar fragments and a scramble of one-beat fragments. The scrambles were generated by a simple chance technique—using a shuffled deck of cards, the suit I turned up (clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades) determined which fragment from which tune was plugged into the appropriate slot in the 32-bar framework. The result—the structure of the polka tune (the macro-level) remains totally predictable, but after the mid-point of the piece what is going to happen next (the micro-level) is completely unpredictable, and becomes disorienting in the extreme.

Shortly after the premiere of this admittedly eccentric but extremely entertaining work I was asked to do an orchestral version. The Wesleyan Orchestra, under the direction of Mel Strauss, did the piece first. Then I modified it slightly for the Ricciotti Ensemble, a group with a somewhat different instrumentation (two alto saxophones, just one trumpet, just one trombone, fewer percussion instruments.) The Wesleyan Orchestra has only played the piece once, but the Ricciotti has played it often (including a performance for Dutch troops serving in Bosnia, another story for another time).

On 4 April, out of the blue, I received the following Email from Gijs Kramers, the current conductor of the Ricciotti Ensemble:

Hi Neely,

At present, I am the conductor and artistic director of the Ricciotti Ensemble, for which you wrote a few very nice pieces in the past!

In May we will be celebrating our jubilee (41 years, and we always celebrate a year late...) In the weekend of the 14/15th we will get together with a lot of people from the old days. On Sunday we will perform throughout Holland with 4 orchestras from 4 different decades and in the evening we will join forces and do a show with the whole lot.

I would very much like to play the Grand polka de bataille then, as this is one of the most fun pieces in our repertoire, but it would obviously be amazing if it were possible to make a version of this for 4 orchestras rather than 4 groups.

Do you have a version like that as well? Or is it something you could possibly make for us? Or would it otherwise be possible (if you have it digitally) to send us the score so we can do it ourselves?

Thanks a lot, hope to hear from you, with best wishes, Gijs Kramers,

It took me about a nanosecond to agree to make a version of the piece for four orchestras, but how to actually make this happen, five weeks before the performance? A very interesting compositional problem—more on this subject tomorrow.

A recital in memory of Carl Viggiani

2011-04-03T07:03:00.002-04:00

Last night I played a long-awaited recital in memory of Carl Viggiani. All Chopin and Bruce. I’m posting the program notes here, preceded by a list of the pieces. I’ll have more to say about the event in future posts. It was a watershed, but I’m not sure what it means. The audience was enormously enthusiastic, and I was pleased in many ways. However, I woke up this morning thinking about little else than all the wrong notes I played, how I had a tendency to over-play the fine August Förster piano, that I don’t really have the focus I need to play a piece like the B minor sonata, etc., etc. This was not the kind of feedback I was getting, of course—some of the compliments were truly remarkable, and I am profoundly grateful that my playing is meaningful to so many of my friends and colleagues. I’ll sort all of this out in my mind, and get back to you. For the moment, here are the paragraphs I wrote for the program.

I had a real sense of the presence of Carl in the Wesleyan Chapel, and of course Phyllis. More about that in the future as well…

A recital in memory of

CARL VIGGIANI

Neely Bruce, pianist

Saturday 2 April 2011 at 7:00 p.m.

Wesleyan Memorial Chapel

An introductory improvisation, in the style of Chopin

Trois nouvelles études, avec préludes (Chopin)

Prélude in F minor, Op. 28, No. 18

Etude in F minor [playing three against four]

Prélude in Ab major, “A mon ami Pierre Wolff”

Etude in Ab major [playing two against three]

Prélude in C# minor, Op. 45

Etude in Db major [legato and staccato in the same hand]

Nocturne in Db major, Op. 27, No. 2 (Chopin)

Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48, No. 1 (Chopin)

Fugue in A minor (Chopin)

A Fugue for Carl Viggiani (premiere; by Neely Bruce)

Nocturne No. 1 (Bruce)

Nocturne No. 9 (Bruce)

Sonata in B minor, Op. 58 (Chopin)

Carl and Jane Viggiani were two of the first people I met when I came to Wesleyan. We always enjoyed each other’s company, and my wife Phyllis and I would see them in various social circumstances over the years. Carl and I would cross paths on campus occasionally and grouse about university politics.

All this was to change after Carl’s retirement. In the mid-1990s I began to relearn the piano repertory of my youth, concentrating on the music of Chopin. By 1999 (the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death) I was playing all-Chopin concerts. If I remember correctly, it was in the summer of 1998 that I got a phone call, out of the blue, from Carl Viggiani. “Neely,” he said, “you don’t know this about me, but Chopin is my favorite composer.” He went on to say that he was an amateur pianist, and he had played the music of Chopin almost all his life.

This phone call was the prelude to a unique and wonderful friendship. Carl and I would meet from time to time and talk about Chopin. I would play pieces for him, just to try them out. He was most encouraging, and really enjoyed my playing. He totally approved of my project to relearn the Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Liszt, etc., I had played as a young man. He encouraged me to start performing Mozart again. “Neely,” he said, “there is someone missing from this project of yours.” This was his way of saying “Why aren’t you playing any Mozart?” (I think Mozart was his second-favorite composer.)

Carl was particularly fond of my performance of the B minor Sonata. I think this is the finest romantic piano sonata, and one of the great pieces of all time. The third movement is certainly a candidate for the single most beautiful piece written for the instrument. Carl shared my enthusiasm for this work, and was equally convinced of its greatness. “Neely,” he said, “when I die I don’t want a memorial service—I want you to play the B minor Sonata in my memory.”

I agreed to do it, of course. He reiterated this several times, and also told his family and some friends. As it turned out, there was a memorial for Carl. Many spoke and read eloquently. Three pianists played. The complete performance of the sonata was put on hold. I announced it for the fall of 2010, as part of the series Chopin @ 200 that my pianist colleagues and I planned in October and November. Because of Phyllis’s final illness it was necessary to reschedule yet again. Tonight I honor my promise to the dead.

There is an elegiac quality to much of Chopin’s music. It seems that he knew from an early age that he would not live very long, and this knowledge informed his composing. I played the D flat Nocturne at my sister’s funeral, and other Chopin pieces at funerals and memorials for other family members and friends. The pieces I play tonight are designed to tell a story that ends with the sonata. In keeping with that narrative, and the meditative nature of this event, please maintain a reasonable silence and refrain from applause until the end. Thanks, and enjoy the music!

Blogging to resume at neelybrucemusic

2011-03-26T18:28:00.000-04:00

Dear friends—I have not written a blog in a year and a half. This has been a time of great sadness for me. My beloved wife of thirty-six years, Phyllis Ruth Bruce (née Behuniak) died on November 8, 2010 of pancreatic cancer. I will write more about Phyllis as it seems appropriate, and as I am able. For a fine memorial piece in the Hartford Courant, let me refer you to:

http://articles.courant.com/2011-01-02/features/hc-exlife-20110102_1_female-composers-choir-director-neely-bruce

The power of music is immeasurable. Music has gotten me through the most difficult period of my life, and I am ready to write about it again.

Some previews, and other news

2009-08-04T08:42:00.003-04:00

August 4, 2009

I have some exciting news as a composer—I'm writing what amounts to a new opera. Details will be forthcoming as soon as it's appropriate to make an official announcement. In the meantime, because so much time is spent composing (and practicing) and September 8 (when I have to start teaching again) is right around the corner, I will not be blogging as frequently as I have, at least until the opera-composition task is out of the way. But there is much to be said, and I'll try not to get TOO far behind.

Later today, at a private home overlooking Long Island Sound, Phyllis and I will present a preview of some things we're doing this fall. First on the program will be the song cycle Gitanjili by John Alden Carpenter, on texts of Rabindranath Tagore. We have performed these pieces at least a half-a-dozen times over the past decade, including a performance at the Dartington International School of the Arts (Tagore was a consultant in the founding of Dartington College and visited the school many times in the early twentieth century). We're getting geared up to do the cycle again at South Congregational Church in Middletown as part of an event that will be a tribute to Tagore, with a short speech, readings from his poetry, some of Tagore's own musical compositions, and a public exhibition of prints of some of his paintings. That's going to happen on Sunday 27 September, and we'll be ready for it!

After the Carpenter songs, I'll preview the Twelve Fugues of Gerald Shapiro. They are coming along, but they are the sort of thing one needs to play privately as many times as possible, before playing them publicly. I'll be playing them for the composer again this coming Thursday, two days from now! Yikes! (As anyone knows who plays new music, playing for the composer can be nervewracking—but forewarned is forearmed.) Shep is a great critic, and has a very clear idea of what he wants his music to be. So the fugue preview today is preparation for the next composer preview, as well as the public performances in October. I will have at least two more private performances of these pieces in August. I've become very fond of them, as has my teacher, Sophia Rosoff. I'm about to find out what a few other people think.

News Flash about A. P. Heinrich

2009-07-30T06:36:00.002-04:00

July 30, 2009

Through a series of surprising connections on FaceBook I find myself contemplating the remarkable music of Anthony Philip Heinrich (1780-1860), known in his day as "The Beethoven of America." One of the early champions of the performance of this most original composer (he is the subject of my DMA thesis), I have become aware of a small groundswell of interest in his music among the next generation. I've just been in communication with two other Heinrich fans, and I think it's time to start playing his music again.

After the premiere of the Gerald Shapiro fugues in October I'm going to start practicing APH, relearning the pieces I did in the late 1960s, early 1970s. There's a lot of misrepresentation out there about this man. For a sample, check out Bernard Holland's piece in The New York Times on February 25, 2008:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/arts/music/25cham.html

I promise I will return to the subject of Shep's fugues on Saturday. But for the moment all I can think of is Papa Heinrich! Now to force myself to practice for my lesson in NYC with Sophia Rosoff…

More about Hansel and Gretel

2009-07-27T10:24:00.002-04:00

July 27, 2009

I have just discovered that this blog was never posted. I'm still getting used to Blogger.com and I'm sure this was posted earlier. However, it seems to have disappeared somehow, so I'm putting it up again, a month later! (Good thing I save these blogs as files.)

* * * *
BLOG #13 – CHANGE OF BLOGGING SCHEDULE; H&G WRAP-UP

June 25, 2009

It’s hard to believe that I wrote Blog #12 about Hansel and Gretel in Urbana and only now am finishing up the task, almost seven weeks later! Of course I have very good excuses. I’ve begun a number of new pieces, I have to practice for the premiere of Shep Shaprio’s Twelve Fugues in the fall, ditto Tom Johnson’s Organ and Silence, and above all I’ve had to recruit, organize and conduct 80+ trombones for the New York premiere of “Orbits” by Henry Brant. And I’ve been busy writing as well. I’ve been able to keep up with my other blog, the one on the Ives Vocal Marathon website.

But something clearly has to change. There are too many things to write about that are not related to the Ives songs, and I’m getting restless to discuss and promote my own work to a greater extent. So here is the New Blogging Policy—three days a week I’ll write about the Ives songs, and three days a week about my own music and other projects. Specifically:

MWF see the latest musings about the Ives songs at www.ivesvocalmarathon.com
TuThSat read about what I’m doing otherwise at www.neelybrucemusic.com

Notice that today is a Thursday—I’m getting started with the new schedule right now. This includes new announcements of upcoming events, to be posted later today.

And what about wrapping up Hansel and Gretel? The main thing I have to say about this piece is that it works. I’ve seen three different productions with different strengths and problems. I’ve conducted it, I’ve played the piano part in the orchestra, and recently in Urbana I sat in the house and watched/listened to a Sitzprobe, two piano dress rehearsals, two orchestra dresses and three performances. I’ve observed the reaction of audiences in three different cities in two different countries, as well as groups of school children in many towns around and about Connecticut in the late 1990s. I have gone over the parts more times that I care to remember, and tweaked the piece and tweaked the piece until I know it represents my final intentions. And of course I wrote the thing in the first place. I know it inside and out, as composer, copyist, performer, spectator and observer of other spectators, all this over a period of twelve years. I have earned the right to say it works!

I also know that this opera has succeeded in making the dance an integral part of the drama, one of my conscious goals in composing it. I learned that the preparations for the Illinois production began with Rebecca Nettl-Fiol teaching the dance steps, before the cast learned a note of the music or even read the book together. The first two rehearsals were entirely devoted to dancing. The principals were also required to take dance classes the semester of the production. The result was a seamless integration of the dancing into the flow of the show, to the delight of composer, cast and audience alike.

This opera has, I believe, a bright future. I just have to find the key that unlocks the door to it. There are seven directors around the United States who have expressed an interest in doing it, and I’ll be sending out some sample vocal scores very soon. And I hope the wonderful singers who devoted so much energy and expertise to my work will tell others about it. Electronic communication is remarkably fast these days, but word-of-mouth moves more slowly than in the past. We’ll see what happens. My goal is to replace Humperdinck on the stages of the world in five years.

For the record, the wonderful cast of the Urbana production was as follows—my deepest thanks to you all.

The singers:

Hansel: Jeremy Fisher
Gretel: Alison Wahl
Their Father: Chadley Ballantyne
Their Stepmother: Yoo-Sun Na
A Wicked Witch: Laura Kimmel
A Messenger Bird: Jackie Schiffer
A Duck: Sam Lopata

Non-speaking roles:

Storybook Reader: Renata Herrera
A White Cat: Young-Sun Lee
A Pigeon: Joseph Hutto
Lead Dancer: Aaron White
With other dancers and a Chorus of Birds, big and little

A New Organ Stop

2009-07-27T06:43:00.002-04:00

July 27, 2009

Not really meaning to take a week off, nonetheless I did it. The principal reason was practicing Twelve Fugues by Gerald Shapiro! But it's time to catch up. I've been analyzing the fugues as well as practicing them, and I'll have a lot to say about them, starting tomorrow. This is just a short note about yesterday at South Congregational Church in Middletown.

Five years ago the baritone soloist at our church died. His name was Heyward M. Foreman, Jr., but everyone called him Woody. Woody was not a musician by profession, but he had a wonderful natural voice. He also had an uncanny resemblance to my father. We were friends for years. He beat two forms of cancer and died of a hospital infection. He was so popular that there was an outpouring of generosity from his family and friends towards the music program at South Church. We decided to build a new stop for our 1963 Schlicker organ in his memory.

These things take time, of course, but after five years of planning and the usual delays the stop was installed and presented to the public yesterday. Woody's widow Mary, his two sons, and his grandchildren were there, along with lots of other Foremans. (Mary said they would double the size of the congregation, and she was about right!)

The stop is an 8' trumpet, installed on the great. It has a real 16' extension and the lowest C is quite something. It is the work of the Austin Organ Company of Hartford. Its indefatigable president Mike Fazio was there to do the installation himself, with an able crew of course. The result is fabulous. This organ was always very good (it's the study organ for the Schlicker that used to be in the Wesleyan Chapel, now in St. Laurence Church in Killingworth) but it had three problems. First of all, it lacked color. Second, the only reed on the manuals is on the Swell, limiting the solo possibilites quite a bit. Most important, it's not an enormous instrument, though it's beautifully proportioned to the space—and while there was a nice kick to the top and a good full sound on the bottom, there wasn't a great deal in the middle.

The new trumpet takes care of all of these problems. It is very colorful (one young man in the congregation was amazed that it sounded "just like a trumpet"). It's on the Great. And it really fills in the middle register.

I will have more to say about this beautiful instrument in future blogs, when I start to write more about Tom Johnson's masterpiece, Organ and Silence. But for now—thanks, Mary, and all the Foremans, for your generosity. Thanks, South Church, for following through with an amibitious project in difficult times. And thanks to Mike and all the guys at Austin Organ Company for doing such a great job. We now have the best organ in Central Connecticut!

Shep's Fugues: General considerations

2009-07-16T08:44:00.001-04:00

BLOG #22, July 16, 2009

As some of you will know, since 2004 I have been writing fugues myself from time to time. But there is a big difference between Shep’s fugues and mine, and that is the nature of their subjects. My fugues are based on the names of family and friends. Shep writes his own subjects, and thinks about them for a long time. So my fugues are essentially games. I don’t think this makes them trivial, because some games are very serious, and games can even be matters of life and death. But the basic idea of my fugues is to generate a subject by a pseudo-random process and see what I can do with that.

There is a sense of gamesmanship in Shep’s fugues too, but it is definitely not the focus of these compositions. Rather, the expressive character of the subject is what counts. And even if there is a direct connection between the subject, or the fugue, and a person, it is of a different nature, as the reader will learn when I consider these pieces individually.

Then there is the question of contrapuntal devices. I’m always on the lookout for tricky things to do with my subjects. I delight in multiple stretti, finding useful retrogrades, fun ways to combine and recombine the subjects in a double fugue, etc. Of these various devices Shep likes to write stretti, but that’s about it. Such contrapuntal games do not interest him—again, the expressive nature of the pieces is what is important.

Shep’s avowed model is the keyboard fugues of Shostakovich. I must confess that these fugues are a mixed bag for me, although Shep has done me a great service by communicating his enthusiasm for them. He especially likes the performance of Keith Jarrett, which I must say is far superior to other performances I have heard. With Shep’s encouragement I’ve listened to them many more times, and find that they grow on me. (My teacher Sophia Rosoff also really likes the Shostakovich preludes and fugues, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before I like them too, just as much as Shep and Sophia!)

There is one more thing. Since Shep is not primarily a pianist, he is not particularly concerned that his piano music be “pianistic.” The result is that the pieces are usually straightforward and of intermediate difficulty, but when they are hard they are really hard. I can also report that they were written one voice at a time, with three or four different instruments in mind (a saxophone quartet, for example), then reduced to two staves and tweaked if necessary to make them playable by one person at a keyboard. So these fugues, while almost never virtuosic by design, contain passages of great difficulty and always require attention to the voice leading.

These are pieces of great beauty and subtlety. Every day I find some new felicity of voicing, or something distinctive about the harmony, or figure out some new rhythmic effect. They are a joy to work on, but they are keeping me on my toes! And they are pieces one must practice every day. Yikes! It’s July 16 and the premiere is less than three months away. Gotta get to the piano… Saturday I’ll start commenting on individual pieces.

Twelve Fugues by Gerald Shapiro

2009-07-16T08:38:00.002-04:00

BLOG #21, July 14, 2009

[The reader may notice that I wrote this entry on the 14th and posted it on the 16th. That was simply a function of getting used to working through Blogspot, rather than posting my blogs directly to my website as before. From now on there should be no such inconsistencies, knock on wood!]

Gerald Shapiro, a.k.a. Shep, is one of my oldest friends. We teach at Brown and at Wesleyan, an easy hour-and-a-half drive. We met when we were freshmen at the Eastman School of Music in 1960-61. We lost track of each other for the rest of the ‘60s, but when Shep showed up at the University of Illinois around 1970, for a performance of his milestone piece of live electronic music entitled “From the Yellow Castle” we reestablished contact, and have seen each other on a regular basis since I came to Wesleyan in 1974. We’ve collaborated on lots of projects since then. He wrote a fabulous piece for Wesleyan Singers back in the day when I was the choral conductor here, he arranged for me to write a piece for Trio Saxiana (two saxophones and piano), he helped me with the tour of the Ricciotti Ensemble in the early 1980s, we both wrote pieces for a tour of the Mondriaan Quartet, and so on. A complete list of these projects would be an interesting exercise in itself, and would chronicle some neat pieces and bring back lots of great memories—the stuff future blogs are made of.

About five years ago we were sitting around, talking about piano playing. I was telling Shep about my lessons with Sophia Rosoff and the pianistic principles of Abby Whiteside. We were also reminiscing about unorthodox methods piano practicing recommended by the late Armand Basile (he was teaching at Eastman the one year I was there) and generally talking shop about aspects of piano playing. Shep is a sometime pianist—he likes to play and has a good sense of rhythm, and from time to time writes piano music. I feel that my playing has taken a series of quantum leaps since beginning to work with Sophia in 1998, and I said—“Since I’m playing so well these days you should write me a big piano piece to play.” He thought this was a good idea, and agreed to do it.

At first both of us imagined it would be a big piano sonata, or some other magilla of a piece. But it turned out to be a set of twelve fugues, elegant, brief and to the point. They appeared one or two at a time, over a period of about three years. The whole set has been in my possession about two years, and I’ve practiced them off and on since they began arriving. Since the completion of the Ives Vocal Marathon my principal focus as a pianist has been to prepare these pieces for their first performances in October of this year. I’m going to write briefly about each one for the next several blogs. These are beautiful, subtle pieces that raise interesting issues about the technique of composition, how to play the piano, and the current state of the art of music. I’ll begin with the first of them in the next blog.

BLOG #20, Seven Songs on Poems of Emily Dickinson

2009-07-14T16:37:00.002-04:00

In 1970 I set seven poems by “The Belle of Amherst” to music using a different method than I usually employ for setting texts. First, I chose the poems using chance operations. Here are the results:

Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea [76]
I felt a cleavage in my mind [937]
It’s such a little thing to weep [189]
The reticent volcano keeps / His never slumbering plan [1748]
My friend must be a bird [92]
From all the jails the boys and girls / Ecstatically leap [1532]
God permits industrious angels / Afternoons to play [231]

(The numbers in brackets are the numbers of the poems in the Thomas H. Johnson edition, published by Little, Brown and Company. Just the act of looking up the numbers raised some issues about these little pieces. Clearly I didn’t use this edition when I composed them almost 40 years ago—the punctuation is almost completely different, and there are even a couple of different words. What to do? Shall I start doing critical editions of my own songs? The mind boggles… Well, not today, that’s for sure.)

The vocal lines are in a free chromatic style—not serial, but lots of pitches all the time, often with a key center but no clear modality. My model for these melodies was clearly Charles Ives in his more experimental aspects. David Barron and I were doing all-Ives programs at the time, including songs like “August,” “Paracelsus” and “The New River.”

The accompaniments are made up of individual sonorities or short phrases—usually three or four gestures, but the third song (“The reticent volcano…”) has five, and the last song (“God permits industrious angels…”) has only two. These gestures are always fragmentary and usually distinctive as to contour, pitch content, register, etc. Each is indicated as a single measure of music and given a letter: A, B, C, D or E. Variables include the number of beats of rest between gestures. The damper pedal is to be held down throughout the entire set of seven songs. The voice part and the accompaniment are not coordinated.

Pitches are always specified, that is, there is no improvisation, but each accompaniment is quite free in another way. The various gestures are linked with concatenation operators, for example:
A • B • C • D *

to indicate that the performer may play the fragments in any order, as many times as he or she chooses. A spacious, open reading of these piano parts is the way to go—the gestures should not interfere with the voice, though obviously they will overlap often. Both performers should allow plenty of time to hear the resonance of the instrument, which will change constantly.

Why am I writing about these songs today? Two reasons. Phyllis has decided to learn a lot of my music that she has not sung before, and is starting with these songs. So we are practicing them. I’m not sure about public performance, but we’ll certainly do them for a class of mine this fall.

The other reason is that I had occasion to play the accompaniments as a solo on Michael Pestel’s magnificent 1920s prepared German Steinway. I have described this piano on my other blog more than once (go to http://www.ivesvocalmarathon.com/ and search for “Pestel”). It turns out that these little accompaniments make an amazing piece for prepared piano. We hope to record them that way later on this summer, with and without the voice part. In the meantime, my mind is full of ideas for compositions involving the prepared piano. As if I didn’t have enough to think about!

BLOG #19, Organ music

2009-07-09T16:33:00.001-04:00

Later this morning I will be meeting at South Church with a young woman named Sharon who wants some tips about playing the organ. She is a pianist who has a summer job in a small church and wants to get some advice. The organ, of course, is a tremendously seductive instrument, and I think she’s feeling the pull. (She writes enthusiastically about practicing and playing services on Face Book—a dead giveaway.) As my professor Hubert Kessler used to say, back in the day in Illinois, the thing that is so majestic about the organ is the “effortlessness” of the thing—all that enormous sound, produced with so little effort. (On the part of the player, at least.)

Sharon is a college student who lives in the greater New Haven area. In the summer she comes to the shaped note singings we have here in Middletown. The connection between organ playing and The Sacred Harp brings to mind a project of a few years ago, which I mean to reinstitute later this morning. In the summer of 2003, and for some time thereafter, I began my practice sessions at South Church by improvising on Sacred Harp tunes. My intention was to work through the book in a systematic fashion, then write a sort-of-shaped-note-tradition response to J. S. Bach’s Orgelbüchlein. This project came into my mind at the same time I was writing “The Sacred Guitar,” a set of seven free pieces, “take-offs” as it were, on Sacred Harp tunes. There were two immediate effects—first, I played “The Sacred Guitar” on the organ (with appropriate elaborations) and found it worked beautifully. Then I began to introduce this sort of improvisation into the services at South Church. (For this purpose, by the way, I use a copy of the 1936 edition of The Sacred Harp I inherited from William Satler.) I kept a notebook of what I thought was working particularly well. When the South Church sanctuary was restored and painted two years ago the notebook, like everything else in the choir loft, was packed away. It’s time to dig it out and resume systematic practicing along these lines.

This meeting with Sharon will also be the occasion to stick around and practice Tom Johnson’s Organ and Silence. I’m playing this unique collection of pieces in Kansas City on Friday, September 4th of this year, as part of the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music. I’ll be writing a lot more about this conference and Tom’s pieces in future blogs. If you’d like more information right now see:

http://2ndminimalism.org/

Practicing the organ, and writing organ music, are very satisfying activities. Writing this blog is firing my imagination and making me want to get more performances of my organ pieces. There are over seventy of them, composed over a period of almost fifty years!

Blog #18, Additions to my catalogue

2009-07-07T15:58:00.003-04:00

I’m going through the academic exercise of updating my curriculum vitae, which Wesleyan requires me to do from time to time.

Obviously, this entails updating the catalogue as well. So here’s a list of what I have to work into the catalogue in the next few weeks. In it’s final form it will have dates and (estimated) timings, just like the entries do now.

“Two for Helen,” settings of Emily Dickinson in honor of the 92nd birthday of Helen Boatwright

Scotsman (a humorous song on an anonymous text)

A Garland of Sacred Song

The Portals of Saint Bartholomew

Where I am… (a quasi-improvisational piano piece; see last Thursday’s blog)

A Friendly Fugue for…
Peter Alan Hoyt
Mary Luongo
Joyce Hubbard
Lorry Yelding
Mary Decker Klaaren

A Double Fugue for…
Sarah and Richard
Peter Standaart
Kay Briggs
Jennifer and Andrew
Jim and Carol

A Partita for Wilhelm Gertz Prelude; Fugue; Allemande; Eccosaisse; Gigue

Trazom: A prelude for piano, based on a familiar passage from Mozart

Modal Study No. 1

Arrangements of earlier works for two pianos:
A Fugue for Bitsey Clark Chorale Fantasy on Old 124th

The Year of Jubilo

Fifty-Four Nifty African Countries (mnemonic chant)Spatial Chorales (2003)

Lamentation for Good Friday (1996)

The last two items are omissions. (There may be others—I have to go through the catalogue with the proverbial fine-toothed comb…)

Otherwise this is music I’ve written since the summer of 2006. I think it’s striking that there are so many fugues. I never thought that at this point in my life I would be so interested in imitative counterpoint. I have a handful of unfinished fugues as well, and ideas for lots of others. In addition to the fugues there is a great deal of imitative counterpoint in Portals (see earlier blogs on this subject), though the spatial nature of that work insures an emphasis on its non-imitative aspects.

I’ve been writing on my other website about A Garland of Sacred Song—see the various “Composition lessons from Charlie.” These are songs for David Rinald and Susannah Knoble to perform—there are four of them so far.I’m also struck at how many of these pieces involve gamesmanship.

From time to time I pick up Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga. I’ve got to read this book from cover to cover. I have other books on this subject I have yet to read.

Anyway, the whole art of musical composition has a profound element of play in it, and that seems to be where a lot of my ideas are coming from right now.

Blog #17, Independence Day

2009-07-04T15:54:00.000-04:00

Happy Independence Day everyone! I hope all readers of this blog will take a few minutes and sing through my setting of the First Amendment, which can be downloaded elsewhere on this site. We’re going to sing from The Sacred Harp at my house tomorrow (Sunday 5 June) and sing the First Amendment as well.

My previous blog elicited spirited responses from both Susan Matheke and Ian Ganassi. Just to set the record straight, Ian did indeed do the exercise, and I stand corrected. I jumped to the conclusion that didn’t do it because I didn’t see him fill out the paper. He wrote to me that he “assigned two instruments to each of [his] responses,” which indeed I noticed at the time.

Susan liked the blog, but took exception to my use of the word “routine” to describe a dance phrase. What I learned from her response is that dancers really don’t like the word “routine,” which has pop culture overtones they find objectionable. My piano teacher Sophia Rosoff has a similar aversion to the word “exercise” when used in the same sentence as “Abby Whiteside,” as in “Abby Whiteside has a wonderful exercise for developing awareness of flexion and extension in certain Chopin etudes.” At her insistence, in Sophia’s presence I always refer to “Abby Whiteside principles” and never to “Abby Whiteside exercises.”

What is interesting is that in both cases I have inadvertently used words that have (for me) a positive connotation and have (for others) a negative one. I suppose everyone does this from time to time, and I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill. However, I would like to observe that to a person such as myself, whose life is almost chaotic in its irregularity, the word “routine” has connotations of blissful self-assurance, especially if that “routine” is a springboard to making beautiful art. Similarly, the word “exercise” means something desirable, even wonderful, to someone who needs more of it and is afflicted with middle-age spread.
So I can say with pleasure, and some measure of pride, that blogging has become an important part of my daily routine. And speaking of exercise, it’s time to get in the swimming pool.

Blog #16, Where I am

2009-07-02T15:51:00.000-04:00

Tuesday I got a call from Susan Matheke to see if I could fill in as an improvising pianist for a dance workshop she is doing at the Educational Center for the Arts. Susan is a wonderful dancer and choreographer, and the head of the Dance Department at ECA. Her husband Willie Feuer is also on the ECA faculty, and the two of them were members of the legendary Viola Farber Company, back in the day.

Working with dancers is a special joy. Every time I do it I wish it did it more. To see Susan work with so many talented students and adults in such a high-energy situation was inspiring. Two things stood out. First, her students have such a high degree of concentration that they can learn rather complex routines almost instantly. Susan demonstrates once, and eighteen people just do it! A little has to be fixed, but surprisingly little. The other thing was how easily Susan could get some interesting but rather etude-like and somewhat routine sequences to turn into art with the simplest instruction—a tribute to her imagination as a teacher and the ingenuity of her students alike.

There were two examples of this. First, she gave the instruction to cross the open dance space doing one of the routines, but on the return do the same routine but interrupt it—either with “silence,” or with a sudden stop, or with some unspecified surprise. The musicians (Ian Ganassi and myself) had a similar instruction. We made straightforward eight-beat phrases for the first cross, and really opened it up for the second one. Instant choreography, instant music, very satisfying—just for us, though. Not for the public.

The last part of the workshop Susan handed out a sheet of paper. Ian didn’t do this, but I did, along with the dancers. The paper had instructions at the top, and three incomplete sentences, with space to write:

Please finish these beginning phrases with a simple sentence or two. Then create a small phrase of movement for each phrase. To get started on your phrases you may want to find one word or idea in your sentences that seems to stand out.

I am from…

I am now…

I will be…

I will make no attempt to describe what the dancers did as a result of this exercise, because I saw too little of what it was to say anything meaningful. As a musician and as a composer, however, I have something to report. In such a situation there is no time to think, and first impressions are essential. So I wrote the first things that came into my head, which were place names (a combination of autobiography and wishful thinking):

I am from the South—Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee

I am now from New England—Middletown CT Maine

I will be from South Carolina from France from London from Illinois

I have reproduced the punctuation as I wrote it, no editing, but I have not attempted to reproduce the space on the paper. I used the piece of paper as source material for a series of pitches, register free, all over the keyboard. I made no use of letters other than those of the musical alphabet, but I did allow that H was B natural and S was E flat. (For more about my use of letters as pitches see my earlier blog about the Friendly Fugues.) I also eliminated Susan’s original instructions, using only the words in my own hand. The resulting series:

B E Eb B A A B A A G E G A Eb Eb Eb Eb E E Eb Eb E E

F E E A D D D E C A E

F Eb B C A A F F A C E F D F Eb

I found this series of pitches a provocative combination of redundancy and self-imposed limits. The distribution of these pitches is also beautiful, suggesting but never confirming certain tonal centers (though the F major seventh chord does occur). Specifically, the numbers of the pitches are (in the order of appearance):

B—4x

E—11x

Eb—9x

A—10x

G—2x

F—6x

D—4x

C—3x

So in addition to a little pocket money, from this unexpected gig I got a new piano piece! The working title is “Where I am.” (I hope I can come up with something better than that, but for now “Where I am” will do just fine.) There were four groups of dancers, so I played the series four times, with different register games going on each time through. All of this will be written down sometime soon, before I forget it. Perhaps Susan will dance to this music sometime, or she and Willie can make a duet out of it.

Susan and Willie, by the way, have become first-rate tango dancers, as well as heirs to the Viola Farber legacy.

Blog #15, Orbits & Henry Brandt

2009-06-30T15:48:00.001-04:00

The score to “Orbits” is enormous, as you can imagine. In the NY Times picture it is clearly visible, on the special black backing the folks at the Guggenheim made for me and placed on a music stand that they then adjusted so it would actually be straight on the ramp! On the subject of the oversized score, I have received the following Email from Peter Beck in Chicago. I have never met Mr. Beck, but we have several common interests, especially The Sacred Harp and Henry Brant. He read about “Orbits” and sent me the following Email, which I have annotated in italics:

“I was a student of Henry Brant's at Bennington during the time when he wrote the piece. You knew Henry, and everybody has their own stories to tell; here's one of mine.

“Henry was a brilliant composer but not particularly adept with mechanical things. (Do you know the story about him ‘learning’ to drive a car?)

I do not. But I can imagine. I never saw him drive, and I knew the man for twenty-eight years.
“I remember passing by the photocopier in the music building one day and encountering the abandoned and evidently unsatisfactory results of Henry's attempts to cut and paste to create a copy of the score for "Orbits." There was paper everywhere, taped (and glued?) into gigantic sheets, overflowing the wastebasket and covering the floor. Lots of it was crumpled up and there were toner smudges all over everything.

Frustration with getting this musical conception on paper is entirely understandable. And since the score was made, thirty years ago, the frustrations continue. Even in its final form (what one rents from Carl Fischer) it is awkward to handle. The noteheads are tiny, making it very difficult to read. I wanted to produce an oversized copy of it, for purposes of conducting, but I was totally defeated. You can’t really get the original onto the glass in a position to copy it efficiently, and I quickly realized that a lot of Scotch tape was going to be required, not to mention a paper cutter much larger than any to which I had access. After fooling around with the blowups for fifteen or twenty minutes I realized that it would take me an entire day, including the cutting and pasting, to do this job. The solution—I learned to live with the published score.

“Needless to say, I treated myself to a longish peek at what was there (but felt it would be wrong to walk off with any of it), and you could just see it, how it was absolutely essential for the performers to be separated in space in order for the polyphonic textures to be anything other than brutal sludge, but that if they were separated, there was a ton of cool stuff going on in the piece. (I prevailed upon one of my NYC friends to attend your performance, and he called me right away the next day to share his excitement and enthusiasm. I wish I could've been there.)
“I also remember a photograph of Henry with a diagram/model of where the performers would be placed when the piece was premiered in San Francisco, very cleverly using paperclips to represent the trombones.

I have seen this photo somewhere but it was decades ago. Peter sent me some suggestions about tracking it down.

“A little further afield—I don't know if this is something he routinely told everybody, or if I was somehow privileged, but one day when Henry was in one of his rascal/raconteur moods, he said that whenever one of his pieces was performed on a program with the works of other contemporary composers, he always proposed that, for a finale, all of the pieces would be played simultaneously. None of the other composers ever wanted to go along with this idea. He was somewhere between wistfulness and outright disappointment at the intransigence of his colleagues. (And that's Henry in a nutshell—his world was chock full of enticing sonic possibilities, and he figured out, early on, that the only way most of those possibilities would ever be realized was if he made it happen.)”

About Henry wanting to perform lots of pieces simultaneously—he used to say to me, along these lines, that "If any piece of music sounds good, it will sound better if you play another piece of music at the same time." He told me that, to demonstrate this, he arranged a simultaneous performance of the last five piano sonatas of Beethoven at Bennington. I pressed him on this point, and he admitted that he had used phonograph recordings. So I filed this information in the back of my head. When we did a big concert at Wesleyan for his 85th birthday I arranged for this to be done live, with six grand pianos! Why six, you ask? Because the "Hammerklavier" is so much longer than the other four, it needed to be split up. Henry played the first two movements, and I played the last two. The four other pianists were Christopher Oldfather (Op. 110), Jacob Smullyon (Op. 104), Paul Marquard (Op. 111) and William Braun (Op. 109). Needless to say, the six pianos were spatially separated, surrounding the audience. It was a brilliant success, and I would love to do it again some day.

The resulting Beethoven bash is called "Homage to Luigi." Elsewhere on this website it is listed in my catalogue. I was going to call it "Homage to Ludi," thinking that Ludwig's nickname would be, back in the early 19th century, what it would be today. But Henry informed me that Beethoven's friends actually called him "Luigi" because he was such a fan of Italian music. (Not the image that Luigi/Ludi has today, that's for sure.)

Peter Beck should have the last word on Henry today. In a subsequent Email he writes:

My first term at Bennington (I was a junior transfer), Henry was assigned as my faculty advisor. Not a role he was particularly well-suited for, but we did fine together because a) I wasn't a freshman and b) I was a musician. I fell into the habit of greeting him, “Hey, Henry, how’s tricks?” and he would always say, "Getting trickier!” and give me the eye-twinkle and impish grin.

Blog #14, Orbits

2009-06-25T15:41:00.001-04:00

There have been several events in the past few days worthy of mention here in these blogs, among them seeing the thought-provoking production of Dido and Aeneas by Mark Morris (I finally got to see it, in New Haven) and the death of Michael Jackson. But one must prioritize in blogging as in all else, and surely the most important thing for me to write about right now is the recent performance of “Orbits” by Henry Brant at the Guggenheim.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, here is a link to the review by Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/arts/music/23orbits.html?hpw

The next edition of The New Yorker, on the stands Monday June 29, will have a feature review of the performance by Alex Ross. There are other reviews of the piece various places on the internet, and clips are already posted on YouTube.

On June 10, eleven days before the performances (June 21 at 7:30 and 8:30 p.m.) I wrote about this piece on my other website, www.ivesvocalmarathon.com. This blog hasn’t been read by many people (it’s on a website devoted to Ives, after all), and it’s a good introduction to my ideas about “Orbits” and what the performance involved. So here it is:

“Yes I know it's a piece for 80 trombones. But it does have a single soprano voice in it, and Ives wrote songs, and it has an organ in it and Ives was an organist. Moreover, the two soloists improvise their parts, and Ives was a great improviser. So I'm going to write briefly about ‘Orbits’ by Henry Brant. It's been the main thing on my mind today. I've been spending most of my time, the last six hours, working on the rehearsal schedule. I've got eight groups of ten trombones, and one of them has already had its only rehearsal, and one of them has its rehearsal scheduled for late afternoon on Saturday 20 June. There's another group that has its rehearsal scheduled, but we have no venue. (Several people are working on that.) So that means I've got to find times and places for five groups of ten+ trombones.

“When Ives ‘gave up music’ to become a rich insurance man, he didn't just give up playing on Sunday morning and writing pieces he didn't really want to write. More than that, he gave up the scheduling problems, dealing with what some have called ‘ze artistique temper’ment,’ lugging instruments about, and all sorts of pesky real-life details that we can call ‘the business’ end of music. As the late great character tenor Jim Atherton (my long-time friend from back home in Alabama) used to say, ‘I hate the business part of this business.’

“I can't say I hate this sort of stuff, but sometimes it's a lot to juggle. And since the performance is only ten days away, and the rehearsal schedule isn't set, I have a right to be apprehensive. But this sort of grunt work is what makes the glorious artistic experience possible. My reward for doing the schedule is that I get to conduct 80 trombones (actually 87, we have a few extras and no one will hear the difference I assure you) in a fabulous space in one of my favorite buildings. Just as my reward for four years of preparation and Emails and negotiations was that I got to play all of the Ives accompaniments in three days!

“Performing is a funny thing, and it's not for everyone. The hard work isn't just practicing—in fact, the practicing is part of the fun, at least for me. The real hard work is ‘the business part of the business.’ Charlie is my hero, no doubt about it, but he didn't have the stomach for the business of music.

“Having said that, ‘Orbits’ is truly one of Henry Brant's finest pieces, probably the finest piece for a mass of instruments that I know. Amazing contrapuntal conception—eight masses of instruments, moving together (though not usually in unison), making dense chromatic clusters, and even at one point an 80-note quarter tone cluster (yikes!). Imagine eight groups of brontosaurs bellowing back and forth at each other from different points on a curving hillside. Rarely loud, and never too loud, nonetheless you get the impression they mean business.”
On Tuesday I’ll continue about “Orbits,” making reference to a particularly interesting Email I have received about Henry in the days when he taught at Bennington College. But this is certainly enough for today! It’s time to practice, not to mention to write some music.

Blog #12, Hansel and Gretel's 3d production

2009-05-04T14:46:00.001-04:00

May 4-12, 2009

The third production of my Hansel and Gretel is now history. It was, if I do say so myself, a triumph. I hope the word gets out this time. The perceived wisdom used to be that it was easy to get an opera premiered, but if you got a second production of the work it would surely have a life of its own. Well, the first full production of H&G, meaning two acts with orchestra, took place in 1998. (In 1996 and 1997 it had 60 performances as an abbreviated show for school kids.) The second production was in 2002 and, taking the perceived wisdom for granted, I thought the piece had it made. Even though an intense effort was made to interest many professional and university opera agencies, the third production wasn’t immediately forthcoming.

All of this was going to change, starting on February 17, 2006. The Wind Symphony of the University of Illinois, under the baton of James Keene, made its historic debut at Carnegie Hall that evening. Phyllis and I were invited to the concert by Karl Kramer, director of the U of IL School of Music and long-time friend. Karl also invited us to have lunch with his wife Jean and various members of the Illinois faculty and administration at Rosa Mexicali, earlier that same day. I was seated next to the recently-appointed director of the school’s opera program, Eduardo Diazmuños. We hit it off immediately, and in my usual shameless fashion I began to promote Hansel and Gretel. He was taken with the idea of the piece, and asked me to send him stuff about it. I sent the vocal score, a program, and a CD of the original cast with me at the piano, conducted by Robert Ashens. Eduardo contacted me soon afterwards and said he definitely wanted to do the piece, and by the summer of 2007 the production was projected for the spring of 2009.

The foresight and imagination of Maestro Diazmuños included engaging a first-class director, Ricardo Herrera; a kick-ass choreographer, Rebecca Nettl-Fiol; and conductor Serge Pavlov, who is as devoted to the work as any composer could ever wish. Phyllis and I arrived in Urbana on Friday 24 April, just before the start of the second Sitzprobe. (For those of you not familiar with opera lingo: the Sitzprobe, or just “Sitz,” is a seated rehearsal for singers and orchestra. No moving around the stage, just staying still and working with the conductor once more on musical details before the chaos of the final rehearsals sets in. An operatic “calm before the storm,” as it were.) I didn’t see the director and choreographer at work, but I quickly realized that the orchestra was in more-than-capable hands and that Serge was going to do a great job with my piece.

The schedule:
Sunday 26 April—first dress rehearsal with piano
Monday 27—second piano dress
Tuesday 28—first dress rehearsal with orchestra
Wednesday 29—second orchestra dress
Performances on May 1, 2 and 3

There was to have been a performance on Thursday the 30th, but there was a massive power failure in the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and the Chancellor of the university ordered the evacuation of the facility and the cancellation of all events, rehearsals, etc. So opening night was actually on Friday.

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. As Becky Nettl-Fiol said, the cast really needed a night off. Gretel was on the verge of getting really sick, lots of the dancers were feeling their aches and pains, vocal fatigue was starting to show in most of the cast (especially Hansel, who cracked on his high C in all four dress rehearsals, but not on opening night). After a good night’s sleep and not having to do the show eight times in a row (!!) we opened on Thursday to tumultuous applause.

I have more to say about this production, and will write again soon. In the meantime, you may want to know more about the original Grimm Brothers tale. I found a great comparison of their first edition of the tale (1812) and their final one (1857). Check it out:

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm015a.html

Blog #11, Hansel and Gretel and the Ives Vocal Marathon

2009-02-27T14:21:00.005-05:00

It’s hard to believe that I have not posted a new blog on this site
in two and a half years! Tempus fugit. The Ives Vocal Marathon
simply took over my life. That event has its own website, and its
own blog (with a number of interesting responses). Check it out at:

http://www.ivesvocalmarathon.com

But it is time to get back to writing about my own music and my own
activities. What has prompted me to resume blogging here at
neelybrucemusic.com at this particular time is the upcoming
production of my opera Hansel and Gretel at my alma mater,
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This is a singular
honor, and I am delighted to be returning to Urbana on such a
festive occasion. Thanks, Opera Program! Thanks, School of Music!

This will be the third production of this work, and in the future I
will write about the other two. But for now, here are the
performance dates: April 30 and May 1, 2, 3, 2009. For details about
starting time, ticket prices, etc., go to:

http://www.krannertcenter.com/performances/details.asp?elementID=22909

Here are some notes I have written about the piece, including the
cast of characters, the orchestra, and some details about the first
production. These are tweaked versions of material that can be found in the vocal score and program notes from the earlier productions.

Enjoy!

ABOUT HANSEL AND GRETEL

In 1996 Connecticut Opera commissioned me to write a new opera on
the subject of Hansel and Gretel, surely the most famous children
ever lost in the woods. I have known and loved the story all my
life, and one of my earliest memories of opera is seeing the famous
Humperdinck piece on the screen when I was about ten years old. The
film showed at a theatre that no longer exists in Birmingham,
Alabama; it featured films like The Red Shoes, the re-release of
Fantasia, and Stravinsky’s chamber opera The Nightingale, which,
like Hansel and Gretel, was done with puppets. The look of that film
has stayed with me ever since, and I have carried the music around
in my mind as well. At the age of seventeen I wrote a short set of
variations for piano on the folk song with which Humperdinck opens
his show, “Suzy, little Suzy.”

Composing my own opera on this subject would never have occurred to me. George Osborne proposed it, and I agreed to write it on the spot. Friends asked me how this piece would differ from the one which already existed. I imagined several ways, prompted by Osborne’s vision of “a new Hansel and Gretel with American pop music.” First, the Humperdinck is, in spite of its subject matter, Wagnerian in scope, with expansive music for large orchestra and lots of special theatrical effects. My piece would be streamlined, and would exist in two versions. The first would have a small cast and could be done with piano or a small number of instruments; this Hansel and Gretel has been done dozens of times in schools and other venues appropriate for Opera Express, the touring wing of Connecticut Opera. The second and complete version is represented by this vocal score; it has a somewhat larger cast, chorus, dancers, and an orchestra, albeit not a large, Wagnerian one. Incidentally, the role of Hansel, a mezzo-soprano in Humperdinck, is be sung by a tenor. The trousers role convention seems no longer useful for portraying children on the operatic stage, and boys who can sing demanding roles are quite rare, so my protagonists are a young man and woman, pretending to be fourteen and twelve years old. And they dance a lot.

Second, my opera by design contains many vernacular musical styles, with healthy doses of rock, pop balladry à la Whitney Houston and Harry Connick, Jr., funk, rap, and other genres as they presented themselves to my imagination. Since 1971 when I wrote my opera The Trials of Psyche, which has a rock band on stage throughout the piece, I have written several large-scale works incorporating American popular music, including the song cycle cum musical review Neighbors, the “Piano Rock Album,” and the “rock phantasma-goria” for Electric Phoenix, The Plague. My biggest work, the opera Americana, or, A New Tale of the Genii, has a rock band and a bluegrass band in it. During the twenty-five years I was composing these pieces George Osborne was envisioning a new Hansel and Gretel with a strong pop music element; I’m delighted he chose me to write it.

Finally, I decided to make my opera as faithful to the Brothers Grimm as possible. To prepare myself to write the libretto I read the entire collection of 200-plus tales from cover to cover, and re-read “Hansel and Gretel” about twenty times. Humperdinck makes a lot of changes. The distracted but basically kind mother in his opera is, in the Brothers Grimm, the prototypical wicked stepmother.

The gingerbread children whom Humperdinck’s little heroes save from enchantment are, in the original, tasty meals which exist only in the witch’s memory. And there is much which Humperdinck left out, especially the marvelous duck, ferrying the children across a vast lake. I have added a few touches of my own for the sake of stagecraft — in the last scene the Father has built an observation tower, and the Stepmother’s death occurs on stage. (In the original production this was considered too gruesome and the villainess simply screamed and ran into the woods.) But every episode and most details of the story are there, including the no-longer well-known fact that witches have red eyes, which is why they have such poor
eyesight.

And this old German tale is so much more frightening than all of its sanitized retellings. The version told in the early nineteenth century to the Brothers Grimm touches much more deeply on the anxieties and hopes of children and the mysterious ways in which nature and humans interact. While the first production has demonstrated that my music can entertain and the action is lively, I hope that my opera taken as a whole in some measure approaches the depths of this marvelous and profoundly satisfying story which, in one version or another, has amused and instructed us for so many generations.

A FEW NOTES TO THE PERFORMERS

The difference in the various vocal styles should be clearly marked; in particular Hansel and Gretel’s rapping should attempt to be as authentic as possible, and since the Witch is a bit of a hick she should sing her waltz song accordingly. I strongly prefer to have a male voice singing in falsetto for the role of the Duck, but so far no one has been willing to do it!

The orchestra parts are virtuosic and should be played as if they were chamber music. This is especially true of the string parts, which are designed for one on a part but do not sound good unless they are approached as if they were a Bartok quartet. Of course if a small section is used (I suggest 4432) a more moderate playing style is appropriate.

The words are crucial in an opera such as this, and to that end George Osborne decided to use body microphones and discretely amplify the singers. This was a total success in Bushnell Memorial Hall, where the first complete production took place, and I recommend it for all performances in large halls. In more intimate spaces it is of course not necessary.

All of the characters dance at one time or another, and dancing is crucial to the plot as well as entertaining. Although Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel do not dance, Humperdinck’s do, and dancing is a completely appropriate activity for bored children trapped in apparently hopeless situations, just as children dance today on the corners of inner-city streets.

Animals play an important part in this story, and the role of animals has been expanded in this opera. The “Ballet of the Beasts” can be cut, of course, but it is great fun for the audience, and can be done on a small scale as well as a large one. The “pretty white cat” is mentioned in the original tale, and it was George Osborne’s inspiration to have the cat become a full-fledged character and dance along with the children.

Details concerning the cuts for the Opera Express version of this work can be obtained from the composer or from the ConnecticutOpera. This version is slightly longer than one hour.

Inquiries concerning future productions of this work, and orders for
copies of this vocal score, may be addressed to

Chamberlain Hill Publications
c/o Neely Bruce
440 Chamberlain Road
Middletown, CT 06457
(860) 347-3003

Email [PREFERRED]: neelybrucemusic@comcast.net

The composer also welcomes inquiries concerning his other operas
(there are three of them, and many more in the works).

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

HANSEL, a boy of about 14 tenor

GRETEL, a girl of about 12 soprano

their FATHER baritone

their STEPMOTHER soprano

a wicked WITCH mezzo soprano

a messenger BIRD soprano

a DUCK baritone

Chorus of BIRDS treble voices [women or children]

the pretty white CAT dancer (silent)

other dancers as BIRDS, BEARS, WOLVES and ELEPHANTS

THE ORCHESTRA

Flute (doubling piccolo)

Oboe (doubling English horn)

Clarinet in A (doubling bass clarinet and Eb clarinet)

Bassoon (doubling contrabassoon)

Saxophone One (alto, doubling soprano)

Saxophone Two (tenor, doubling baritone)

Timpani (doubling

Percussion, two players (trap set with 4 toms; large bass drum;
triangle;

cowbells; vibraphone; marimba; optional other instruments)

Harp

Piano

Violin (solo or small section)

Viola (solo or small section)

Violoncello (solo or small section)

Double Bass (solo or small section)

NOTA BENE: There is no second violin part.

JUST A BIT OF THE HISTORY

Opera Express began to perform this work for school children on
March 30, 1997; the first complete performances took place on March
20 and 21, 1998, in Bushnell Memorial Hall, Hartford, Connecticut.
The singers and principal dancers were as follows (the asterisks
indicate the singers at the Bushnell):

HANSEL: Daniel Cafiero* and Timothy Olson*

GRETEL: Teresa Eikel* and Regan Stone

FATHER: Kenneth Overton* and Jason Parkhill

STEPMOTHER: Rebecca Carbino* and Dana Fripp*

WITCH: Jennifer Grum Seiger* and Holly Sorensen

BIRD, DUCK: Jennifer Ayres* and Rebecca Carbino

CAT: Alyssa Alpine* and Merissa Starnes*

Children of the school of the Hartford Ballet were the BIRDS and
other animals of the forest.

Other credits, for both the school performances and at the Bushnell,
were as follows: conceived and directed by George Osborne; conducted
by Robert Ashens; costumes by Margaret Carbonneau; scenery by
Crystal Tiala; choreography by Ambre Emory-Maier; lighting by James
F. Franklin.

The composer would like to thank all of the members of the cast for
their good singing, hard work, and patience with all of the
rewrites. And special thanks go to Robert Ashens, who from the
beginning was a wonderful music director for this piece, coaching
the singers, playing the piano for the school shows, and conducting
the world premiere of the complete work with complete cool control,
under harrowing circumstances! (How else does one premiere an
opera?)

Blog #10, This bout of hyperactivity

2006-09-20T14:17:00.001-04:00

Yesterday the list of my upcoming performances was posted on this website. Sometimes I wonder, “What was I thinking?” This fall is going to be exciting, but somewhat harrowing. Take my word for it, there is a reason for this bout of hyperactivity, but I won’t bore you with the details. Instead I’ll write a few words about the music for each event.

Organ recital, 24 September: I don’t get to play organ recitals very often. In fact I can only remember playing six or seven, all of them short, all of them at South Church in Middletown. On Sunday mornings I get to play what is probably the best organ in Middletown, and one of the best in central Connecticut—in the future I’ll describe it in more detail. This Sunday is my first foray into another church as a solo organist. My concerns with the King of Instruments are quite straightforward. First of all, it is the greatest solo instrument for improvisation. Irresistible, in fact. Second, there are specific collections, a bit off the beaten track (or farther), that I practice a lot and keep in repertory, namely the Fiore Musicali of Frescobaldi, Organ and Silence by Tom Johnson, and the astonishing Messe des Pauvres of Erik Satie. All of these compositions assume manual dexterity and modest pedal technique. But that raises a third concern, the strong desire to improve my pedal technique, however gradually that has to be done. To that end I’ve decided to learn Orgelbuchlein of J. S. Bach. Except for Organ and Silence, selections from all of these works are included. Toby Twining will join me to sing the Kyrie from the Satie mass and “Grandfather’s Clock” (one of the favorite songs of the deceased). And I get to improvise on Gladys’s favorite hymns and two tunes from The Sacred Harp. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

Piano recital, 25 September: Back-to-back recitals, however brief they may be, are a new experience, even for me. The Wesleyan chapel has a new piano, a magnificent August Förster, brand new. After seven (!!) years of lobbying and brainstorming, and through the good graces of the current administration, we have been able to purchase this instrument from the remarkable Wilhelm Gertz (of W. Gertz and Sons, New Haven), who kindly saved the instrument for us (rather than have it go to the beach house of a perspective wealthy buyer). Thanks to Sophia Rosoff, my current piano teacher and the finest piano teacher I know of, anywhere, any time, I feel in top form. I played the recital yesterday (Tuesday the 19th) for my associate Sue Birch, and it went quite well. The variations are one of my favorite Mozart piano pieces—I have a theory that the sort of virtuosity they require (occasional fast passages in double notes and octaves, some big leaps which are occasionally awkward, left hand trills, etc.) are more like Amadé actually played that most of, say, the sonatas, which almost never require these things. Mozart boasted that he never played one of his concerti the same way twice—maybe he was adding this kind of lick, who knows? In any case, eager to experiment with this possibility, I have added MORE octaves, some extra doublings, a couple of cadenza-like flourishes, tasteful ones I hope, but more to the point quite spontaneous and NOT what’s written on the page. At least I can emulate the master in this respect, and never play the “Come un agnello” variations the same way twice!

These variations also bring to mind an old friend whom I have not seen in years, the pianist Jerome Sampson of Jackson, Mississippi. He and I studied with Roy McAllister in Tuscaloosa (University of Alabama) at the same time. Although I haven’t heard Jerry play in 44 years, I remember his performance of this piece as if it were yesterday—he played these variations beautifully.

For the past two and a half years I have been composing a series of “Friendly Fugues,” based on the names of some of my friends. Some of them, including the first one, have been composed at the request of the person whose name becomes the subject (see below). Katchen Coley approached me at a Christmas party in 2003 and asked, “Neely, will you write a piece for my eightieth birthday?” Of course I agreed, and this piece was the result. I turned her name into a fugue subject by writing down the letters of the alphabet in seven columns, thus:

a b c d e f g
h i j k l m n
o p q r s t u
v w x y z

then I mapped any letters in the various columns—below the first row—onto the letters in the first row, i.e. the letters of the musical alphabet. (For example, the letter R, which is not used in musical nomenclature, becomes the note D.) In this process I also allow the German alphabetic equivalents of certain letters, so B can be B flat, H can be B natural, and S can be E flat (my choice). Incidentally, I didn’t invent this method of transforming words into notes, and there are other ways of doing it.

Katchen’s name becomes “D A F C B E G C A E E D,” with an appropriate rhythm of course, and Billy Weitzer (a member of the Wesleyan administration who has been quite supportive of the Music Department and helped us purchase the August Förster) turns out to be “Bb B E E D B E B F E E D,” something of a challenge as a fugue subject because of the repeated cell (EED EED), but challenges are what makes composition fun.

Blog #9, TnTnT

2006-07-07T14:02:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends -- This Blog about an upcoming performance is going primarily to folks I know in and around New York City. Some of you live too far away to even consider coming to this event but you may find the information of interest. Help me spread the word about this performance. I think it's going to be a knockout.

WHAT: A complete performance of my largest organ piece, "Tunes 'n' Timbres 'n' Time: The History of Western Music" [TnTnT for short]

WHERE: St Bartholomew's Church, New York City, Park Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets

WHO: William Trafka, director of music at St Bart's and organist extraordinare

WHEN: Wednesday 19 July, 2006, at 7:30 p.m.

HOW MUCH: This event is FREE and open to the public

The organ at St Bart's is the largest one in NYC and the tenth largest in the world. TnTnT was composed to 1) provide an overview of the history of western music; 2) showcase the unique properties of this gorgeous instrument; and 3) have some fun. It was premiered in 1997, then extensively revised and presented by Trafka at Wesleyan in the summer of 2005, as the opening event of one of that year's Pipe Organ Encounters-- a special set of programs by the American Guild of Organists to make the youth of America more aware of the King of Instruments. (The performance on July 19th is also part of a POE, but that's another story.)

Let me explain this composition a bit. It is in fourteen movements, and traces the history of western music from shortly after the invention of the organ (in the second century AD) to the recent past (the late 1960s). It consists of original material and extravagant arrangements, in roughly equal measure. On one level it serves an obvious didactic purpose. But on another level, it is an opportunity for me to make yet another large artistic statement about the nature of history, as I perceive it (and what other kind of history is there, other than the history we individually perceive?).
Those of you who have been aware of my music for a long time will recognize that TnTnT shares this character of "historical commentary" with other large-scale works of mine -- "The Plague: A Commentary on the Work of the Fourth Horseman" (this "rock phantasmagoria" takes place simultaneously in the fourteenth and twentieth centuries); the operas "Americana" (an allegorical retelling of the American Revolution with mythological characters) and "The Trials of Psyche" (which takes place in "mythological time," i.e. outside of time and space); and most recently CONVERGENCE, a mammoth work for hundreds of performers which simultaneously comments on American music in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, on the eve of the 21st. I'm going to elaborate on this aspect of TnTnT in a blog on my web site, sometime between now and the performance, should you want to check it out:

http://www.neelybrucemusic.com

For the moment, I'll just list the movements. Your imagination can fill in the gaps. The re-GAL (not RE-gal) mentioned, by the way, is neither the modern organ stop nor the Renaissance reed instrument, but the ancient battlefield organ of the Romans, a giant noise-making machine designed to frighten their enemies and send them into disarray.

1. Regal Fanfare

2. Organum for St Hildegarde

3. A Madrigal from Marenzio

4. Quasi Gabrielli

5. La Bataille

6. Concerto in the manner of Vivaldi

7. Toccata and Fugue in D minor (a significantly abbreviated version of the famous Bach [?] piece)

8. Don Giovanni, Finale, Act One (a tour de force for the five manuals of the St Bart's organ)

9. The Beethoven Fifth Symphony (Readers Digest version, all four movements, SEVERELY abbreviated)

10. Romance a la Chopin

11. Love Music from "Romeo and Juliet"

12. The Entertainer

13. Avant Garde Fragments

14. Strawberry Fields Forever

Hope you can come. And please help spread the word about this performance. The more the merrier! There is a little narration which I will provide, and the whole event will be just over an hour.

All the best -- Neely

Blog #8, First Amendment

2006-03-01T13:56:00.002-05:00

I expected this blog to be about Round Five of the Ives Vocal Marathon, acronym IVM. However, Johana Arnold got sick the day of the projected concert at Hartwick College and we’ve had to postpone the concert. Bummer. The previous concert was postponed from February 12 to February 19 because of a near-blizzard snowfall. And the very first pair of these concerts, in January of 2005, had to be postponed a couple of days because of show. Sometimes I think the weatherman confuses Chares Ives with Currier and Ives and thinks we at the IVM really WANT all this snow! The elements (and now the germs) are clearly not being cooperative. So my report on Rounds Four and Five of the IVM is delayed until Johana’s concert is rescheduled. (A nightmare, by the way—juggling two college professors’ schedules is bad enough, but add that of Paul Woodiel, Broadway fiddler [The Color Purple at the moment], and Kim Patterson, professor who’s musical director of a college musical about to start production [Urinetown] and it’s very hard to come up with a date.)

But there is real news on the First Amendment front. The Associated Press has just released information from the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum about our woeful ignorance of our rights. 22% of Americans can name all five Simpson family members, but only one in a thousand (that’s .1%!!) can name the five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment. To this we’ve come. And the margin of error of their poll is 3%, so it’s possible a whopping one-quarter of us can name Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and… (What’s the baby’s name?) I don’t know off the top of my head how to reduce .1% by three percentage points and I’m not going to try (this is a blog, after all). But any way you slice it, the spread is appalling.

At least this woeful state of affairs is inspiring me to get cracking on the details of the spring tour of “The Bill of Rights,” my plan to have a download in all the states (way behind schedule), and other business pertaining to my most recent choral composition. The Unitarian Church in New Haven is going to do the whole piece in the spring. And other performances are talked about here and there across the country—more on this subject very soon. Grading midterm exams be damned! Ives performances move over! Let’s educate at least a handful of folks about their rights in this great democracy.

For more about the Freedom Museum, the poll, and the First Amendment, check out:

http://www.freedommuseum.us/
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/

In case you’ve noticed that I only produced one blog in February, I’m counting today as a mythical “February 29, 2006,” In such a short month I need a couple of extra days—at least one—to fulfill my obligations. I’ll catch up with two new blogs later in March.

Blog #7, Ives

2006-02-15T13:52:00.000-05:00

Since opening this web site last summer I have concentrated on my setting of the Bill of Rights and its performances. There is some news about that topic, and a blog on the updates (future performances and related matters) will be forthcoming in a few weeks. The two blogs about my Introduction and Grand March were timely, of course, and the whole episode fresh in my mind. For the month of February, however, I would like to concentrate on another project, the Ives Vocal Marathon. Here’s something I wrote in the fall of 2005 for one of my Ives recitals in this series.

The IVES VOCAL MARATHON
Neely Bruce first encountered the vocal music of Charles Ives as a freshman at the Eastman School of Music, when he accompanied Sylvia Anderson in “Evening.” He played a few more songs in undergraduate school at the University of Alabama. In 1966 he entered graduate school at the University of Illinois, and in the late sixties began to work on Ives with his office mate, baritone David Barron. They began to present all-Ives programs and other recitals featuring this extraordinary repertory of song, and in July of 1969 they presented the earliest documented performance of “August.” In 1972, as part of the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, they presented the first major performance of Ives songs in Poland—the second half of a concert which opened with John Ogden playing the “Concord” Sonata.

Over the years Neely continued to perform the vocal music of Ives—with his wife Phyllis Bruce, the American Music/Theatre Group (AM/TG presented an all-Ives and Foster program at the Bushnell in 1982 and participated in “Wall-to-Wall Ives” at Symphony Space, NYC, in 1984), and other soloists and ensembles. His paper comparing 114 Songs of Ives and the collection of Stephen Foster songs known as the “Morrison Foster Songbook” was published in the proceedings of the 1974 Ives Festival-Conference, An Ives Celebration.

In the summer of 2004 the long-awaited critical edition of the bulk of Ives’ vocal output, 129 Songs, was published by MUSA (Music of the United States of America). Master-fully edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock, and exhaustive in its detailed treatment of Ives’s many eccentricities, this volume, with the critical editions of early and miscellaneous songs by John Kirkpatrick and James Sinclair (Forty Early Songs, Eleven Songs and Two Harmonizations), makes it possible for Bruce to produce a complete Charles Ives song series, up-to-date, full of surprises, and drawing on forty-five years of experience with this repertory—the Ives Vocal Marathon.

Neely Bruce is joined by soprano Johana Arnold, mezzo Elizabeth Saunders, tenor Gary Harger, his old friend David Barron, other soloists, members of AM/TG, flutist Peter Standaart, violinist Paul Woodiel, and two other pianists (“On the Antipodes” and “Vote for Names” require more than one) to present all 183 Ives songs over a three-year period. This project will culminate in a festival of Ives vocal music at Wesleyan University (and other locations in Connecticut and New York) in the fall of 2007: five song concerts, with lectures, panel discussions, and other special events.

* * * * *

The first concerts in this series took place in January of 2005. Saunders, Harger and I performed two blockbuster concerts, with the assistance of my wife Phyllis, flutist Peter Standaart, members of the South Church Choir, and old buddies Toby Twining and Martha Smith (formerly Hanen) from the glory days of AM/TG. That summer Gary Harger and I did a chunk of the tenor songs at Wesleyan, and called it “Round Two.” On Saturday 24 September 2005, we did two more concerts (“Round Three”), the shorter one in the afternoon and the bigger one in the evening. To introduce the first concert there was a panel discussion—Ives scholar and conductor Jim Sinclair, my colleague Yonatan Malin who studies art song, and myself. There have been spinoffs: a recital with Harger at the Hartt School, a couple of previews at South Congregational Church at Middletown, and other previews planned for local educational venues. The Connecticut Humanities Council has given us a handsome grant to do Ives songs about religion at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, in conjunction with the current exhibit of American paintings (1780-1920) entitled “Finding Religion”—check out the details at their web site, www.flogris.org.

In future blogs I will have a lot to say about this project—what Ives means to me at this time in my life, how the songs are typical (and atypical) of his output, what I think “the Ives method” of songwriting is, grouping these songs into topics (not just Ives/religion, but Ives/nature, Ives/peace/war, Ives/politics, etc.), the special challenges and rewards of this venture, and many other things. For now, suffice it to say that this is turning into the most meaningful performing project of my life. I’ll explain later.

Notices about future Ives performances (and there are lots of them in the works) will be listed on the web site.

For Ives aficionados and those who may be curious, here is a list of the 121 songs (out of 183) we will have performed by the end of February 2006, in alphabetical order. For details about the way we have grouped this material into concerts and other points of information about the Ives Vocal Maraton, please feel free to contact me directly.

Afterglow
Allegro
The All-Enduring
Ann Street
At Parting
At Sea
At the River
August
Autumn
Because Thou Art
Berceuse
The Cage
Canon (first version)
Chanson de Florian
Charlie Rutlage
The Children's Hour
A Christmas Carol (the one in 114 Songs)
The Circus Band
The Collection
December
Disclosure
Down East
Dreams
Ein Ton
Élégie
Evening
Evidence
Far in the wood
Feldeinsamkeit
Flag Song
Friendship
General William Booth Enters Into Heaven
Grace
Grantchester
The Greatest Man
Her Eyes
Her Gown Was of Vermilion Silk
Hymn
I travelled among unknown men
Ich grolle nicht
Ilmenau
Immortality
In Autumn
In My Beloved's Eyes
In the Alley
In the Mornin'
The "Incantation"
The Indians
The Innate
Kären (Little Kären)
The Last Reader
The Light That Is Felt
Like a Sick Eagle
Luck and Work
Die Lotosblume
Maple Leaves
Marie
Memories: a. Very Pleasant; b. Rather Sad
Minnelied
Mists [II] (second version)
My Lou Jennine
My Native Land
Night of Frost in May
A Night Song
Nov. 2, 1920 (An Election)
Old Home Day
The Old Mother (the version with Ives’s text)
Omens and Oracles
On Judges' Walk
On the Counter
"1, 2, 3"
The One Way
The Only Son
Pictures
Premonitions
Qu'il m'irait bien
The Rainbow (So May It Be!)
Religion
Remembrance
Resolution
Rock of Ages
Romanzo (di Central Park) [five different versions!]
Rosamunde (first setting)
Rough Wind
The See'r
September
Serenity
The Side Show
Slugging a Vampire
Soliloquy
A Son of a Gambolier
Song
A Song–For Anything
Song for Harvest Season
Song without words [I] (world premiere)
Song without words [II] (world premiere)
The South Wind
Sunrise
Tarrant Moss
There is a lane
The Things our Fathers Loved
Thoreau
Those Evening Bells
Through Night and Day
To Edith
Tolerance
Two Little Flowers
Two Slants (Christian and Pagan): Duty/Vita
The Waiting Soul
Walking
Walt Whitman
Waltz
Watchman!
Weil' auf mir
West London
When stars are in the quiet skies
Where the eagle cannot see
Widmung
Wie Melodien zieht es mir
William Will
Yellow Leaves

PLUS: The following piano pieces as change-of-pace items:
Three Protests
Some Southpaw Pitching
From the Concord Sonata: “Hawthorne,” “The Alcotts” and “Thoreau”
(performed on different programs, in relation to different songs)

AND: The following songs by German composers (Ives set the same texts):
Romanze, aus dem Schauspiel Rosamunde, by Schubert
Widmung, by Robert Franz
Wie Melodien zieht es mir, by Brahms
Wanderers Nachtlied, by Schubert
Ein Ton, by Peter Cornelius
Die Lotosblume, by Schumann

AND: The following miscellaneous items:
The first “Song Without Words” as a violin and piano piece
The arrangement of “A Christmas Carol” by Paul Echols for voices SATB

Whew! What a workout.

Blog #6, 1st Performance of Introduction and Grand March

2006-01-24T13:34:00.001-05:00

I’m back from Columbia, South Carolina and the premiere of my “Introduction and Grand March.” It was a very full and eventful trip. I arrived at the Columbia airport late Tuesday night, January 17 and was duly ensconced at the home of Peter and Mary Hoyt. Wednesday morning I picked up a rental car and drove to Durham, North Carolina (four hours there, four hours back!) to see my teacher and mentor Lara Hoggard, his wife, his daughter and his grandson. (On the way I stopped at South of the Border for a quick couple of tamales.) The Hoggards were in fine shape, all things considered. Dr. Hoggard will be 91 in March, and hasn’t been in the best of health. But he is as lively as ever, and we had a wonderful visit, filled with music and reminiscing about Indian Springs School. I improvised for a while, and played the Chopin B minor sonata for him. Then we listened to almost half of the recently released 2-CD set of the ISS Glee Club under his direction in the late ‘50s (gorgeous stuff). Then there was more improvising, a little Mozart, a bit more Chopin, and a performance of my new harpsichord piece for the Physics Department at Wesleyan, albeit on the piano—“Albert’s Chaconne,” in honor of Einstein and the 100th anniversary of the theory of special relativity. I left about 7:30 and drove back to the Columbia airport where I picked up Phyllis about 11:30.

Thursday I finished the “translation” of the text that the chorus sings at the end of the Grand March—see below. The German is the result of pseudo-random operations on selected pages of The Abduction from the Seraglio. The English version was begun by Peter and Mary Hoyt, with assistance from their niece Lizzie. I had a good time finishing it, although the finished product makes rather too much sense, considering the almost totally arbitrary nature of the original. It can be read aloud so that it makes even more sense, if that effect is desired.

From 11:30 to shortly after 1:00 I rehearsed with the chamber choir of Dutch Fork High School. They are a fine group, and their director, Marjorie Turner, did a fine job of preparing them to sing my piece. I worked mostly with the text, hoping to get them to enjoy nonsense in German as keenly as they might enjoy it in English. We also listened to part of the Overture to Abduction, the Vaudeville that precedes the final chorus, and the brilliant little hymn of praise to Pasha Selem itself. They got the point, and sang with gusto and real pleasure. Just before I left I was treated to a performance of the “Dies Irae” from the Mozart Requiem. They sang it very well indeed. I told them to get some of the hell and brimstone of that piece into their part of the Grand March and all would be well.

Thursday evening was spent en famille with the Hoyts. Their little girls danced a bit around the piano, and we made a plan to have more dancing later in the trip. I spent the morning on Friday preparing for the talk I was to give for the composers’ seminar in the afternoon and the first rehearsal that evening. Specifically, I went through the score and the various photocopies I had used as source material, matching the results with the sources. (Not surprisingly, I had forgotten the details and my notes on this matter were incomplete. I was able to identify thirty-seven quotations, and the source of all but seven of them—not bad, but sooner or later I have to complete this little bookkeeping task.) I was also able to practice “Hawthorne” by Charles Ives a bit. USC composer John Fitz Rogers, Peter Hoyt and my buddy Ellen Schlaefer from the Connecticut Opera (now the opera director at U of SC) had lunch together. Reginald Bain joined us later. Then final thoughts about the talk, the talk itself (with good questions by the U of SC composition students) and a beer with my friend Tayloe Harding, now the dean of the School of Music there, whom I hadn’t seen in years, a quick supper (Mexican again) with Peter, and a brisk walk to the stage of the Koger Center, where at last I was to hear the orchestra start working on my piece. Whew!

The first person I saw backstage was Dr. Benjamin Woodruff, a.k.a “Woody,” whom I knew both from my teenage years at the Brevard Music Center in the late 1950s and also from graduate school at the University of Illinois. For several years Woody has been the librarian for the South Carolina Philharmonic, and though we were in communication about the score and parts for the Grand March it was the first time we had seen each other in about forty years. We caught up on several decades of news in several minutes, and then I went into the hall to sit with Peter and await the downbeat!

The rehearsal itself was not without the normal problems of working through a new piece for the first time. Most of the orchestra was reading, and the style that was needed was not completely clear to everyone. The entrance of the chorus, three-quarters through the piece, injected some much-needed energy into the proceedings. Some singing with gusto triggered some playing with panache. After checking out a few cues with the Turkish percussion and a few notes from the podium the rehearsal was over.

I felt the orchestra needed to know more about the ideas behind this piece. Later that evening I re-formatted Blog No. 5 (elsewhere on this web site) and printed it out on Saturday morning. Peter photocopied it in the School of Music offices and I left copies backstage for the orchestra. I was also able to quietly circulate and tell some of the players a few details—a bit louder here, a bit softer there, not too many things but crucial ones. Somehow it all worked. The second rehearsal (actually a run-through, dress rehearsal sort of thing) was about 400% better. I had high hopes for the performance, and indeed it was quite good. Here’s what Gregory Barnes, the reviewer, had to say in Tuesday’s The State (Columbia’s daily newspaper).

Careful examination of Columbia’s Mozart Festival schedule reveals an abundance of delightfully creative musical ideas.
Take Saturday night at the sold-out Koger Center: The Philharmonic paired Mozart’s first and last symphonies, the Palmetto Opera sang enchanting arias, the perfect composer for the job premiered a new musical homage to the master, and a Philharmonic principal performed a work by a Mozart contemporary.
…Neely Bruce’s Introduction and Grand March…” proved a great, if under-rehearsed, festival opener. Disguised quotes from Mozart operas marched in strict rhythm to Ivesian bi-tonality and juicy dissonance, but the musical result was clearly the-one-and-only Neely Bruce.
Eau Claire and Dutch Fork high schools contributed percussion and chorus, the latter unfavorably positioned, singings words unfortunately not reproduced in the program.

Actually, from where I was sitting, I could hear the hot-shot singers from Dutch Fork quite well, and they sounded wonderful. As for the words, here they are (as I said earlier, the result of pseudo-random operations on the text of various pages of The Abduction) with a “translation” by me and Peter and Mary and Lizzie. Would it really help if this material had been reproduced? It would have been fun, of course, but helpful? I doubt it.

abgetan geschlagen

abgetan geschlagen Schlag
die Bastonade Himmels Charlie sei
belehne Aufschub Himmels drein

Treue Segen meiner Streite
Selim Ränke Lagerstroh
frisch zum gute Leopold

lange Freud und Jubel marsch
Wir gehn hinein, ich mögen dich gefragt!
mag Hurtig muss fliegende sein

zeihe trefflich Eifer Mozart
Weibern Scheitel fache George
Welche anderen Gefahr

Teufel Brust fort großen Tropf
Ich schlage dran entschlossen Flut gewagt
ein Mann zuletzt doch Jubelklang

Freuden wegen Könnte teuer
prange zitten Göttertrank
willig Singen herlich Lust

wieder Huld mein Dank der ganz
Erdross sein Wolfgang Scheitel marsch bekannt
und prophezeihn in Eigentum

Tücken kampfe Liebe gaffen
lebe mit Verachtung Platz
Bacchus schenken es sei Ives

du bist unverdrossen ganzes Türe Scherzen Eigentum
schändlich Winde Blonden schwachen Aufschub Amadeus Wort
früh aufstehen wahrhaft dummen Wagen feiger umzugehn
Mädchen passen wonne Stärke Arten gehn hinein Gesang

disposed of beaten

disposed of beaten whipped cream
heaven’s cudgel is Charlie
invest with postponement heaven therein
true blessing of my quarrel
the schemer Selim is a batch of straw
long march Joy and Jubilation
we’re going inside I have to question you!
get moving must be flying
accuse the excellent eagerness Mozart
the apex of women fans George
such a different danger
devil breast be gone big moron
thereby I beat the resolute, risky flood
finally a man a jubilant noise nevertheless
joy because of expensive possibility
the drink of the gods glitters and trembles
voluntarily we sing magnificent pleasure
again kindness my thanks for the whole
strangulation his Wolfgang the top of his head is famous for marching
and prophesies in possessions
malicious pranks struggle to stare love
live with contempt place
Baccus presents it is Ives
you are unflagging the whole door jokes possessions
shameful winds feeble Blondie postponement of Amadeus word
rises up early true dumb carts cowardly going around
maiden is suitable delightful strength the species going inside to sing

A SOCIABLE FOOTNOTE: Saturday afternoon we went on a successful hunt for the house in Columbia where Phyllis lived in 1958 and ’59. The landmark was the Colonial Heights Baptist Church, no longer in the phone book but clearly recognizable now at the renamed Family Worship Center. Saturday night My sister Linda and her husband the painter/sculptor Jerry Luke of Savanna met us at the concert. We had a couple of meals together and a very good time. After breakfast with Linda and Jerry on Sunday Phyllis and I played hooky from church and drove to Rocky Mount, North Carolina to visit Ben and Betty Johnston. (Another eight hours on the road, round trip! On the way we stopped at South of the Border for ice cream.) It was a wonderful visit, though a short one. The highlight of the trip was hearing the new recording of Ben’s Ninth, Third and Fourth string quartets in new performances by the Kepler Quartet. (The Second Quartet is on the same CD, but we ran out of time.) Recently released by New World Records, these amazing pieces, in cleaner, brighter-than-ever performances with ferocious attention to detail, are a must-buy for serious collectors of twentieth-century music, string quartets, or even different versions of “Amazing grace.”

For an excellent descriptive review of this CD, and an informative interview with one of the members of the Kepler Quartet, see http://dram.nyu.edu/dram/_html/news.html. Ben is the featured composer and the date is January 12, 2006.

Blog #5, Introduction and Grand March

2006-01-12T13:15:00.005-05:00

My new orchestra piece is entitled “Introduction and Grand March: An Orchestral Homage to the late W. A. Mozart of Salzburg and the late C. E. Ives of Danbury.” It is a collage of dozens and dozens of tunes, fragments, and stretches of recitative from seven operas of Mozart: Idomeneo, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte, The Magic Flute, La Clemenza di Tito, and especially The Abduction from the Seraglio. It was commissioned by the South Carolina Philharmonic, Nicholas Smith, conductor, with funds from the School of Music from the University of South Carolina. It will be premiered in Columbia on January 21, 2006—details of the performance can be found elsewhere on this web site.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have conceived of such a work. While I am quite pleased with the result, in no way can I take credit for the idea. That goes to my good friend Peter Hoyt, Mozart (and Haydn) scholar extraordinaire. Peter and I first discussed “Ives Meets Mozart” last July, over margaritas and dinner at Rosa Mexicali. This fine restaurant is right across the street from Lincoln Center, where he had just given an excellent talk on Mozart and travel (which quickly broadened itself into “travel in the eighteenth century throughout the continent of Europe”). Peter has heard a great deal of my music over the years, and is completely aware of my love for the music of Ives and the impact Ives has had on my compositional career. But more to the point, as a Mozart scholar and new music enthusiast he was quick to speculate about appropriate ways to commemorate Mozart’s 250th birthday (January 27, 2006)—he argues that we, the musical public, should look at the influence of Mozart on composers from his time to ours, and we should get lots of composers writing new Mozart-influenced works. Ergo, specifically, I should write a piece in which “Ives Meets Mozart,” and it should be a march.

The idea appealed to me from the start. In August (2005) Phyllis and I visited Henry Brant and his wife Kathy in Santa Barbara. Henry and I went for long walks and talked about lots of things musical and political. I asked him to help me brainstorm about what to do with the Mozart orchestra that wouldn’t sound like Mozart orchestration. We came up with lots of ways to do this. I continued to think about appropriate Mozart source material. Though Ives’s works contain literally hundreds of musical citations, in all his compositional output he never used a Mozart tune or fragment or even a suggestion of a Mozart texture. Actually Ives did not like Mozart very much. In this respect Charlie was very much a man of his time—the late nineteenth and early twentieth century musical world had little use for Mozart, with the predictable exception of Don Giovanni, (especially when the statue drags the vile-seducer-as-hero off to Hell).

I began to think about what Ives and Mozart had in common, which is more than one might think. Both composers had a keen sense of musical humor, and composed elaborate musical jokes. Both wrote small experimental pieces that informed their larger ones. Both boldly escaped from ecclesiastical patronage, though in totally different circumstances with totally different results. Both liked games. Both had a keen sense of orchestral color. And both were very idealistic about the power of music to ennoble and transform human life. Maybe Ives would have had a different opinion of Mozart if he had seen The Magic Flute a few more times. Or known about Mozart’s dirty jokes.

So I decided to write a giant musical collage of fragments from the seven Mozart operas mentioned above. The first step was to go through the vocal score of Abduction and make photocopies of pages that could easily be transformed into march music. This turned out to be a lot of music, far more than I actually used in the composition. Then I faced the problem of making a random selection from the other six operas. I wanted a system that would give equal probability to any page coming up in six volumes with a wide spread of page numbers (Figaro has over twice as many pages as Flute). The method I came up with had two stages. First, I drew three digits from zero to nine out of a plastic container. This allowed numbers smaller than ten (007 for example) to turn up with equal probability as much higher ones. Then, rolling a single die, I assigned an opera to each resulting page number. In this manner I came up with sixty number+score combinations. Predictably, some of these did not exist, though I was surprised at how many phantom pages there were on the list. I ended up with thirty-nine real pages of music, which I shuffled and divided into three piles of thirteen pages each.

I made an outline:

Introduction
A1 (a la marcia, based on Abduction)
B1 (first collage based on the other six operas)
A2 (a second passage based on Abduction)
B2 (second collage)
A1 with variations
B3 (third collage)
A2 with variations
Coda

I was ready to start serious work on the piece.

The first step was to play through all of the material at the piano and improvise connections from one thing to another, see what might be superimposed on what, how to reharmonize this or that, and so on. This was an exciting process, one that took several days. I was struck by several properties of this music. First, it was very easy to combine passages with each other, in a most natural manner—a comment on the homogeneity of the Mozart œuvre, perhaps. But there were some surprisingly quirky passages, especially in The Abduction—the Lydian-sounding first chorus of the Janissaries (implying an oscillation of triads a whole step apart, C major and D major) proved particularly useful as my march developed, and some distinctive lines of Osmin morphed into the double-reed solos of my introduction. I also rediscovered some repetitive figures, used almost obsessively, which give certain Mozart passages a proto-minimalist quality. Two of these—the main motive of the overture to Cosi Fan Tutte and the string figurations at the end of the finale to Act Two of Abduction—were to figure prominently in the final moments of my piece.

But the biggest surprise was the amount of recitative that turned up in the thirty-nine pages. This was a possibility I did not foresee, and one that gave me pause. Statistically, of course, this should have been no surprise at all. A great deal of Mozart opera is recitative. But how to deal with nine out of thirty-nine pages—23%—of brutal formulaic material of no thematic interest? (By the time the piece was complete, an even larger percentage of the total—123 measures out of 373, a whopping 32.9%—was based on this stuff!) I decided this was a golden opportunity to exploit hitherto ignored properties of such passages. I would concentrate on the rhythm. Played in time, as march music, it turns out that recitative rhythms are quite distinctive. Also, I harmonized these passages with tight, dissonant chords based on the pitch content of each recit. Finally, a constant texture dominates these passages. The two French horns in unison play the speech-based melodies, the two trumpets play close harmonies below the horns, and the clarinets and bassoons double on a narrow-range bass line. So the B passages are held together by characteristic rhythms and a unique orchestral texture, although the melodic material is never repeated.

All this intellectual gamesmanship had to be turned into music, of course. It had to become the ebb and flow of phrases, it had to build to some rhetorical high points, it had to have a climax and a denouement, it had to work as orchestration, it had to engage the audience (and the performers) on a deep enough level that it became fun, even exciting. I hope I have succeeded, and I hope some of you get a chance to hear it for yourselves.

A NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION: I will be writing at least two blogs a month in 2006. Eventually I’ll be able to write one a week. There is certainly enough to write about.

Blog #4, Happy New Year

2006-01-07T13:08:00.001-05:00

It’s January 7, 2006, and I am WAY behind on these blogs! I have a good excuse—a commission for a new orchestra piece from the South Carolina Philharmonic. But the score is bound and in the hands of the conductor, and the parts are safely in the hands of the orchestra librarian, so I can catch up on the rest of my life. The piece is entitled “Introduction and Grand March: An Orchestral Homage to the late W. A. Mozart of Salzburg and the late C. E. Ives of Danbury.” I’ll write about it in Blog Number Five, but let me finish up Number Four first. It was eight weeks ago (!!!),

WHAT I WROTE THEN:

I wrote to Lila Ferrar, who intended to perform the First Amendment at her church last Sunday (November 6, 2005). She wrote back right away:

“Yes indeed! We did sing the First Amendment in church, yesterday, and I was very pleased and proud of how it went.

I just finished putting a copy of the order of service along with our November church Newsletter, in the mail to you.

I read the First Amendment aloud to the congregation before we sang it.

I am very happy to hear you are making progress with singing the whole thing in DC and elsewhere. I have had at least one choir member (besides Rob Adams who came with me and sang with you at Wesleyan) express interest in doing the whole thing. I don't know about logistics, but am eager to hear more. Thanks for keeping me posted.

Best to you

~Lila”

And here’s a follow-up comment from her a few days later:

Neely,

when I met with the minister today, she said that at least a dozen different people came up to her after the service Sunday and said, what a wonderful service (the whole thing) She herself was blown away by the First Amendment.

CONTINUING AND FINISHING UP, JANUARY 7, 2006:

There have been some other performances of the First Amendment since that time, but I don’t know anything about them. There are also plans in the works for a tour of the Bill of Rights, under my direction, in June 2006. It’s premature to talk about the details, but soon I hope to share more information.

I didn’t achieve my goal of a download in every state by Thanksgiving 2005. However, there was a December download (and possible performance) in Georgia, and a second one in Pennsylvania. The New England states still lead in the number of downloads. It’s time to seriously get to work on the other twenty-nine states where my setting of the First Amendment has not seen the light of day! That’s one of my New Year’s resolutions, and one which I should be able to meet, with a little help from my friends.

A CD of the performance at Wesleyan last September of the entire Bill of Rights is just about edited and ready for limited release. More on this subject in the next blog.

HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone!

Blog #3, First Public Performances of Bill of Rights

2005-09-06T13:02:00.004-04:00

In the middle of August I was interviewed extensively by New York Times writer Brian Wise, in preparation for a feature article for the Sunday Times Connecticut section. The article appeared yesterday (September 4, 2005). For obvious copyright reasons I can’t reproduce Brian’s fine summary of my most recent choral composition (and the career of its composer) here, or link readers to it. However, I can tell you about it, and you can look it up on your own.

The same goes for the excellent piece which Matt Erikson wrote for the Hartford Courant about “The Bill of Rights.” Check it out—it appeared on July 4, 2005.

I have been invited to talk about this piece to a sixth-grade social studies class in West Hartford. I’m more than happy to visit other classes, far and wide. Contact me directly at:

neelybrucemusic@comcast.net

As many of you will know, Congress, late in 2004, passed a bill which establishes September 17 as Constitution Day. On this date in 1787 the final signatures were added to the Constitution (including of course the Bill of Rights) and copies were sent to the States for ratification. If the 17th falls on a Saturday (as it does this year) the holiday is to be celebrated on the 16th. Wesleyan has planned various events to celebrate Constitution Day on Thursday and Friday (15 and 16), including a lecture by Paul Finkleman, professor of law at the University of Tulsa, who will speak on the separation of church and state at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday in Olin Library.

Featured will be the FIRST PUBLIC PERFORMANCES of my setting of the Bill of Rights. (The event at South Church on July 10 was a public reading, not really a performance.) I have assembled a group of area singers (professional, semi-professional and amateur), including students and colleagues at Wesleyan, to sing under my direction. For those of you reading this blog who are in the area and want to come, here’s more information:

What: The first complete performances of "The Bill of Rights"
When: Thursday September 15 at 1:10 p.m.
Where: The Lobby of OLIN LIBRARY on the Wesleyan University campus

AND...
When: Friday September 16 at 12:10 p.m.
Where: Wesleyan Memorial Chapel

The performance on Thursday in the library is in honor of the founding of the new Wesleyan Pre-Law Society. (I expect it will be sung by a smaller group of voices—many people can’t be around the Wesleyan campus in the middle of the day two days in a row, though some have told me that they are clever about masking their absence from work and wouldn’t miss it for love nor money.) The Friday performance is the opening event in the new Wesleyan Music Department/Center for the Arts series of informal Friday noon concerts in the Chapel. Area residents take note!

News of the Friday performance has attracted singers who will be coming from as far away as Washington DC and Albany NY, and others from Massachusetts and Vermont are planning to participate. If you would like to join in this historic event there are rehearsals on Sunday night the 11th from 7:00 to 9:30, Thursday at noon for an hour, and Friday morning at 10:30, these rehearsals just before the two performances. Contact me directly at the Email address above for details of location, getting the music, or any questions you may have.

On other matters pertaining to this setting of this text: people all over the United States and the territories continue to download the music for the First Amendment. However, there are no new states represented. I need to get working on that aspect of this project. In my second blog I expressed a desire to have at least one download in all of the fifty states before Thanksgiving. That is still quite possible, of course, but I have to get the word out more efficiently and much more broadly. Help and suggestions are more than welcome.

Blog #2, Bill of Rights - Performance Options

2005-07-20T10:40:00.001-04:00

Many people all over the United States have downloaded my setting of the First Amendment. I am delighted with the widespread interest in this composition. There were downloads first from Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont: i.e. the readership of the Hartford Courant and the New England network of Sacred Harp singers. But word has spread about this project, and there have been downloads from California, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin, and even the US Virgin Islands. That’s twenty of the “fifty nifty United States” plus one of our territories. Downloads in 40% of the states and the web site has only been up for a month! Help spread the word about this site and the FREE SHEET MUSIC on it—let’s aim for at least one download in the other thirty states before Thanksgiving.

Some of you have been asking about performance options for this piece, so I am writing about that in this, my second blog. First of all, it’s a piece in the Sacred Harp tradition and I suggest that it be performed that way (if you are unacquainted with this style of music check out http://fasola.org). However, if you would like to sing it in a more refined manner, like mainstream American choral singing, or in another style altogether (gospel for example) that is fine too. Singing the Bill of Rights is more important than stylistic nicety—i.e., in the endless controversy “which is more important, the words or the music?” in this case it’s the words.

Second, this First Amendment setting is written in imitation of the music of the United States at approximately the time of the Bill of Rights itself, so certain conventions apply. Specifically, directors should remember that the melody is in the tenor—bring that part out, loud and clear. Also, it is in the style of this music to double the soprano and tenor parts at the octave, so feel free to do that if it’s appropriate to your ensemble and if you like the sound. (This is also a good way to achieve the proper balance if you don’t have enough tenors.) And in the late eighteenth century voice parts in such compositions were routinely doubled by instruments, if instruments were available. (Sacred Harp singers no longer do this—the music, as heard today is 99.44% a cappella.) I suggest the following doublings, all of them completely stylistic:

Soprano: doubled at the same pitch by a flute
Alto: doubled an octave higher by a clarinet (believe it or not, an authentic practice of the time)
Tenor: doubled an octave higher by an oboeBass: doubled at pitch or an octave lower by bassoon, cello or contrabassTenor and
Bass: played at pitch (or the tenor an octave higher) on the organAnd ANY combination of the above.

Not quite as stylistic as these suggestions, but effective musically, would be doubling the parts with a string quartet. I’m not sure brass instruments would work as well, but if the players are available go ahead and experiment. I don’t think the piano sounds good with this kind of music, but organ sounds wonderful (harpsichord too).

Third, many of you have written asking about the suitability of this composition for different choral situations. This warrants more extensive discussion. When I wrote the First Amendment my “sonic image” was a moderately large chorus, SATB with balanced parts. I attempted to “write easy” so that amateur choruses could sing the piece without an enormous effort, though clearly some rehearsal would be required. In all this I feel I was successful. The First Amendment is a piece of cake for professional singers, a bit more work for a good community chorus, and well within the capabilities of a fine high school choir (willing to do some woodsheding, of course). As the set of motets progressed I became a bit more adventuresome—there are some hard spots, but nothing which is substantially more difficult than I have described, just a bit more work to make it happen.

That leaves a lot of choral situations which are common, for which the First Amendment is not specifically designed—treble choirs, church choirs without any tenors, male choruses, etc. But my goal is to have the whole country, the whole world singing the Bill of Rights! So all of these choral situations need to be accommodated. Consider some of the possibilities, case by case.

Treble choirs: It’s hard to imagine this work sung by young children. However, preteen treble voices can do it with some work, and singers high school age and above certainly can perform it. Unison treble singers should sing the tenor line, up an octave. Instruments can play the other parts or not, depending on availability—if there are none, leave out the rests in the fuguing sections. Two-part treble choirs can sing the tenor an octave higher (you always need the melody) and the soprano. Three-part choirs add the alto, four-part choirs add the bass.

Church choirs without any tenors should have women’s voices sing that part an octave higher. The organ doubling the tenor and bass parts (or more, if your organist can manage it) sounds fine. Other instruments doubling the appropriate parts (see above) will also be a fine effect.

Certain choirs have no basses, i.e. they are SAT ensembles. I have encountered these forces in a number of situations—choirs of teenage boys, black gospel choruses, and certain Latin American ensembles. In these cases I strongly urge the use of at least one bass instrument, but even if that is not possible sing the upper parts without it! Remember, it is better to sing the Bill of Rights than not to sing it.

Male choruses should put the highest available voices on the alto part (baritones singing in falsetto are great for this purpose) and sing the soprano down an octave. It can be a good idea, depending on the size of the chorus and the number of mature male voices, to transpose the music down a step or even a minor third.

There are probably more situations to be considered—if your kind of choir is not covered in these comments feel free to experiment. I know from personal experience (years of work in church music, and especially adapting the choral music in my piece CONVERGENCE to a multiplicity of circumstances) that all of these suggestions work and can be very effective. Contact me directly if you have questions or comments.

Blog #1: First Singing of Bill of Rights

2005-07-14T10:24:00.001-04:00

On this beautiful Bastille Day in Connecticut I would like to take stock of the Bill of Rights composition project. Last Sunday—July 10—a group of some fifty singers joined me at South Church to sing through "The Bill of Rights" for the first time in public. (Six of us met earlier at my house for a bit of a rehearsal, and several people had the music in advance to look it over.) There were another fifty to sixty people who just came to listen—most of them I did not know. Among the singers were Martha Smith, Toby Twining, Paul Anderson and of course Phyllis Bruce, all members of the late great American Music/Theatre Group (AM/TG) which some of you who read this will remember. Many members of the Connecticut Opera Chorus showed up (one of the hats I wear is chorus master for Conn Op), and most of our regular once-a-month Sacred Harp singers as well. The rest of the singers and most of the listeners read about the event in the paper or on the web.

As promised, a video cameraman and a sound engineer from Brave New Films, sent by the ACLU, were on hand to videotape the proceedings and interview me and some of the singers. I will keep you posted on the broadcast of some of this material by the ACLU, which is supposed to take place in September 2005. I also arranged for an audio recording of the singing—excerpts will be available soon on this website for listening.

We rehearsed from 2:30 p.m. to 3:00. My strategy was to go through what I thought were the hardest parts, leaving most of the easier stuff for real sight reading. From the earlier six-person rehearsal it had been determined emphatically that the setting of the Tenth Amendment is the hardest motet of the bunch. This amendment is the "states rights" amendment (see the text elsewhere on this site). I decided that an appropriate musical image for delegating whatever to the individual states "or to the people" would be to delegate a specific musical idea to each section of the chorus. So there are four fugue subjects, and four expositions—the first begins with the tenor subject, the second with the bass, the third with the soprano and the last one with the alto. The fugal treatment is not like Bach or Beethoven (my favorite fugue composers) but rather like the fuguing sections of fuguing tunes. As I write in the score: “If William Billings had written a quadruple fugue it might sound something like this."

After we had gone over the parts and practiced the four expositions we worked through the setting of "cruel and unusual punishment" (completely diatonic but relentlessly dissonant) and a few other tricky spots. Almost exactly at 3:00 p.m. we began with the First Amendment and sang straight through. There was one and only one breakdown. We repeated that place, got through it, and plowed ahead. The end of the reading was greeted with prolonged, enthusiastic applause. Many of the singers indicated a desire to sing the piece again, and many have volunteered for a public performance. Watch this web site for information about such events in the future.

[Sidebar Comment: There are almost 100 downloads of the First Amendment score to date! At least four choral groups in four different states want to do the whole piece.]

After a much-needed break for water, lozenges and general vocal rest, we resumed singing with "Liberty" from The Sacred Harp—a great little piece by Connecticut’s own Stephen Jenks (originally from New Canaan). The text, written just after the American Revolution, seemed especially relevant that afternoon:

No more beneath th’oppresive hand
Of tyranny we groan.
Behold the smiling happy land
That freedom calls her own.

From 4:00 to 5:00 we did some of the best versions ever heard in Central Connecticut of various Sacred Harp favorites, including most of the patriotic pieces (it was the singing closest to the Fourth of July, remember). If any of you would like to join us—our REGULAR SINGINGS from The Sacred Harp and other shaped note collections, old and new, take place on the SECOND SUNDAY of the month from 2:30 to 5:00, usually in the Wesleyan Chapel. Send me an Email to neelybrucemusic@comcast.net for details and updates.