the dreaming tree

tonight a dream comes true. tonight i get to see joshua bell play. for those that don’t know, he’s one of the top violinists in the world today. in my opinion, the best. i’ve been hoping to see him since i first heard him on his recording of the nicholas maw violin concerto during my freshman year. i’ve been waiting to see him since last year when i learned that he would be playing with the arkansas symphony. it’s going to be amazing. he’s playing the mendelssohn e minor concerto, which is fabulous. and i’m really hoping i get to meet him after, cause he usually hangs out in the lobby to meet people after he plays (so i’ve heard). i really want to get my photograph taken with him. this is about as fan boy as i get. i’ll probably swoon. and it’s going to be so great.

yes, i have officially scheduled my senior composition recital. it’ll take place next april the 19th in fayetteville. pretty exciting, but also a little nerve wrecking, particularly for one piece that i’m going to be conducting. all the pieces are being performed not-by-me (which i’m very thankful for), but this one requires a conductor and my professor told me i’m going to do it. it’s a piece i wrote for a full wind ensemble at ouachita, but i’m transcribing it for 9 players (flute, clarinet, trumpet, french horn, trombone, violin, cello, piano and percussion). it’s called with lights of amethsyt, which i think is a really cool name, if i’m allowed to say that about my own piece. anyway, it’s going to be very interesting, seeing as how i’ve never really conducted a group in a performance, but it’ll also be a great experience, i imagine, and loads of fun. here’s a list of the other stuff on the program:

violin and piano sonata
two art songs
piano sonata
kyrie for a capella choir (hopefully i won’t have to conduct that, too)

and maybe one more choir piece if i have time.

so weird that this is finally happening.

and in other exciting news, mayor dave is recording once more. we’re just gonna lay down one track next friday, but i’m really really excited about it. i’ll put it up here when we’re done.

you can call me salieri. i just learned about this prodigy composer on 60 minutes…he’s 14, has attended julliard, has already written 5 symphonies and has a recording contract for his music. they interviewed his teachers, who absolutely fawned over him and proclaimed him to be one on the level with the greatest musical prodigies in history (mozart, mendelssohn, etc.). and i’m annoyed. maybe even pissed. i can’t even really explain it, i just know i want to write stuff that catches the ear (haha) of the world. i guess it’s too late to be proclaimed a prodigy, but i’m still comparing myself to the kid. and i haven’t even done anything. i need to work harder. except i can’t force my mind to work like his does, wherein he writes, or as he says hears, the entire piece in his head before writing it down. i don’t know…i feel stupid to even be writing about this, but it’s apparently something that irks me enough into wanting to do something mind-blowing even more than before. recently i’ve got all these ideas surging through my skull…but it’s almost like i’m scared to explore them, like perhaps i won’t do them justice and i’ll prove myself to be a wannabe. maybe that’s what pisses me off: i don’t do anything with the ability i do have. that needs to change.

sometimes i really hate being a composer. like tonight, when i basically stared at the paper in front of me for five hours. i wrote down five new notes…awesome, at this rate, it should take me a thousand years to finish. it’s this solo piano piece i’m working on (which i’m drastically hoping to avoid calling “piano sonata”), and it frustrates me because i don’t play piano, and so therefore i’m having a difficult time writing idiomatically…even though i do have ideas of what i want to happen, i can’t realize it on paper, and it’s really hard for me to imagine in the first place since i can’t play what i’m thinking. everything i write looks stupid to me and i’m afraid it’ll sound like i didn’t know what i was doing. i’m basically unable to move on from something when i can’t figure it out, so i either quit working on it, or get nothing done. it’s like my brain won’t let me skip over the problem and work on something else until i have it figured out…which is also why i didn’t finish my math exam the other day, but that’s another story. so i’m stuck. and it’s an horrific feeling.

i was also thinking about my days at ouachita when i knew all the other composition students. we had lessons together, so i knew what the others were writing and how my stuff compared. it kind of urged me on to be the best and i miss that. i especially miss talking with one michael reed about music (ours and others). i realized that i don’t know any of the other composers here at fayetteville, and that kinda makes me sad. and i’d like to see how i compare with their stuff, too…it might fuel my creativity a bit. now, despite all my complaining, i’m mostly enjoying doing composition again, and i’m having a good experience thus far with my professor. i just want to be better.

this past weekend i went to st. louis for an ultimate frisbee tournament (glory days). as far as the tourney went, well, it was pretty miserable. we lost all 5 of the games we played, and none of them were even close. our best one we went up 3-0, only to lose 13-4. also in the last game i nearly broke my ankle…in fact, i might still get it checked out, cause it’s swelling up quite nicely and turning all kinds of nice colors. anyway, it wasn’t a pleasant weekend for ultimate, but it was my first collegiate tournament and i learned some things playing against other teams. i just hope our next experience will be a little nicer. however, the weekend wasn’t all a wash. saturday night joan was gracious enough to drive to st. louis from peoria, il so we could hang out for a couple of hours saturday night. it was really great to see her again after 2 years, and we had a good time eating and roaming around a couple of record stores. here’s a picture of us that i stole from her:

and on monday night was the university orchestra’s concert, where we played beethoven’s fifth (along with “royal hunt and storm” by berlioz and the hummel trumpet concerto). i’ve never been so emotional during a single piece as i was during the beethoven. i seriously almost lost it a couple of times throughout, and especially at the beginning of the fourth mvt. and then the audience gave us the most enthusiastic response any ensemble i’ve been in has received…our conductor was called back four times. it was really an amazing experience.

you’ll enjoy this site:

BBC discovering music

i know pretty much none of you will really be interested, but i freakin’ love it. they basically talk in-depth about a piece for about 45 minutes, complete with audio examples of what they’re discussing. and there are many many different choices to explore (both standards of the repetoire and lesser-known works). like i said, you’re probably not gonna want to listen to any of it if you don’t really care about “fine art” music (and i mean besides enjoying listening to “pretty” music), because a lot of what they’re talking about is similar to what you might learn in music history/literature as a music major, basically dissecting the piece. there are even some small amounts of theory discussed. but hey, maybe you want to take a gander and learn a little, no, a lot more about one of your favorite pieces. plus, the hosts are british, so that’s always fun.

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.

Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

the above is an excerpt from the poem “the lark ascending” by english poet george meredith (1828-1909). in 1920, ralph vaughan williams unleashed unto the world a piece for violin solo and piano (later premiered for violin and orchestra in 1921) that is quite possibly one of the most beautiful things i’ve ever heard. i was first introduced to the work in high school when the youth orchestra i was in performed it (the solo played by the then-concertmaster of the arkansas symphony orchestra), and i immediately fell in love with it. if this was the only thing vaughan williams ever wrote, i would consider him a genius. i could go on about how gorgeous and lush the orchestra sounds, playing back and forth with the nimble, fluid arpeggios in the solo violin (the lark), or the beautifully intricate and introspective melodies…but it’s really quite pointless to write words about such a thing. instead, take 15 minutes to stop and listen: here. that’s hilary hahn playing with the london symphony orchestra, so it’s also a ridiculously great recording. and if you don’t like it…well, you may not have a soul, cause i just don’t believe anyone can honestly say anything negative about this masterpiece. i mean, really, it’s amazing. i also wish i was good enough to take on the piece myself…but sadly, i’m not. that’s all i got. listen to it.

hey look, another long post…

i’m sitting here in my lovely apartment listening to mahler’s eighth symphony, the symphony of a thousand, it’s called. the piece is ridiculously amazing and just huge and beautiful and glorious…i sometimes forget how much “classical” music can move me. back in junior high/high school i was in a very good community, youth orchestra. it was so wonderful, because we got to play so many staples of the repertoire, including beethoven’s fifth, overture to the marriage of figaro, sibelius’ second symphony…the list goes on. i remember moments throughout performances that would just cause me to nearly start crying in the midst of sawing away on my violin. the beauty, the genius, the intimate portrait of a man’s soul…i can’t even describe it right. music is just too deep for idle words.

when i came to arkansas, i got play in an orchestra again after languishing in only wind ensembles for the previous five years. (i mean, there were some moments, but you really just can’t compare the two.) sweet majesty was i glad. i felt like i was playing meaningful music again, and where i belonged…in the violin section.

back in high school, i didn’t know jack about music, but i guess i had an intuition about it. i would listen to “classical” stuff here and there, but didn’t really know what i was listening to other than beauty. now, after 5 years of studying music, i know vastly more than i imagined there was to know, and there are still many, many, many things that i don’t know or understand completely. nowadays when i am listening to a piece, i often listen for specific things, like how the parts are interacting, try to follow the composer’s logic in going to where he goes…but it’s interesting how i’m still able to enjoy music. what i mean is, some people argue that learning too much about a subject (particularly music, it seems), causes a loss of enjoyment. not so for me, because i can choose to sit back and be absorbed with sound, ignoring any academic approach to hearing it, or i can attentively and actively study what’s happening in a piece. either way gives me great amounts of joy and the most superb feeling i know. i certainly love rock/folk/whatever, but there is something about the classical genre that moves me beyond those other styles. or maybe just in a different way.

the sheer amount of thought and design that goes into a classical composition is ridiculous. how do i know? i’m a composition major. so not only do i write “fine art” music, i study how pieces are put together to better understand what is happening and to further develop my skills (something i’m actually pretty terrible at doing). i just never fully realized how much hard work it took to complete a piece that was worth something. ya’ll just have no idea. it’s torturing, really. a composer named john corigliano (who is still living) said this about the composing process: “i hate composing. i love having composed.” i’m much the same way. the process is so long and arduous cause i want everything to be just right; i can’t accept mediocrity. beethoven was much the same. it’s encouraging to read that there are accomplished composers who feel the same way…which isn’t to say that i can even remotely place myself in the same league as them, because i shouldn’t even be talking about them in the same paragraph wherein i’m talking about myself as a composer.

i often just want to give up, especially when i go listen to someone like eric whitacre. his choral music just seems so far above what i could possibly accomplish. while it does discourage me, at the same time i am pressed to succeed, to surpass, to achieve greatness. i have this dream that i’ll actually break out of myself and produce something truly worthwhile someday.

so i finally saw elizabethtown the other day. i knew i was going to be writing this post about seven minutes into it, but i still don’t know exactly what i want to write. i liked it and i hated it. i started this post last night, and i still don’t know what to write. i liked the story alright, but the movie confused my emotions. i’m pretty confident that’s what cameron crowe was trying to do, because he’s too good to not know what he’s doing. and so i appreciate that he was able to do that. i did like the last part when he’s following her map. that kinda made me sentimental for some reason. i guess the main thing i didn’t like was how my emotions teetered between laughing and crying so much. i was confused, not from the story, really, but of how i should feel. maybe that was the point.

this is a lame post, because i just can’t figure out what to say exactly. so here’s this…

i finally got to see walk the line last night (the first three times i tried to go it was sold out). it was really well done,and i thought joaquin phoenix and reese witherspoon were both extraordinary. for once, though, i’d like to see a movie about a musician that is about the music more than it is about drugs, but i guess that may not interest the general public as much as it might another musician. i’ve still yet to read cash by johnny cash, so that might include some good stuff about the music, but i bet it’s a lot about drugs and life apart from music, too. that’s fine, though, cause relationships and the like are at least as important, and kinda contribute a lot to the music, usually. i also want to read more about his spiritual life, especially from his later years.

i’ve got more to write about, but i’m not in the mood to sit at my computer any longer tonight.