Alones Together: Concert coming up Wednesday, Feb. 5!

Alones Together: An Evening of Music for Unaccompanied Solo Instruments

Cellist Caroline Stinson and saxophonist Javier Oviedo will be featured in a concert of music by Jon Liechty and poetry by Andrew Kreider, on Wednesday, February 5, 2014 at 7:00 PM at the Bloomingdale School, 323 West 108^th Street in New York City. The program will include Strength and Beauty, a set of pieces for unaccompanied cello, the world premiere of Sonata No. 1 for tenor saxophone, and works for piano solo performed by the composer. The concert is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Donations will be gratefully accepted.

Strength and Beauty was inspired by the portraits of Li Ming Shun, whose art focuses on the Asian male nude. Its four movements are both lyrical and uncompromising, reflecting some of the many contradictory emotions the body can evoke.

The frank melodies of Sonata No. 1 defy easy classification; even those that seem simple at first prove to have unexpected twists and turns.

Poetry by Andrew Kreider is the inspiration for the piano pieces that will round out the evening, and the variety in the music matches the wealth of expression in the words. From the Azerbaijani-influenced “Keepsakes” to the mad dash of “What Won't Wait”, Kreider's verbal adroitness pairs well with Liechty's lush harmonic imagination.

Praised for her vibrant lyricism, fresh interpretations and expressive performances, cellist Caroline Stinson’s solo invitations include the Museum of Modern Art's Summergarden Series, Poisson Rouge and Bargemusic in New York; Cité de la Musique Strasbourg and the Lucerne Festival in Europe, and the Centennial Centre and Winspear Halls in Canada. As a soloist she has performed with the Banff Festival and Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestras, the Alberta Baroque Ensemble, and the Interlochen World Youth and Syracuse Symphonies. A champion of contemporary music, Ms. Stinson has commissioned concerti from Steven Bryant (Cornell Wind Ensemble) and Andrew Waggoner (Syracuse Symphony), works for cello with electronics from Canadian composer Patrick Carrabre, in addition to chamber music with the Lark Quartet and her new music and improvisation group, Open End Ensemble. Performance highlights include Elliott Carter's "Triple Duo" with conductor Pierre Boulez in New York and Europe, the premiere of Paul Moravec's Piano Quintet with Jeremy Denk and the Lark Quartet in New York, and performing Esa-Pekka Salonen's "YTA III" for solo cello at the composer’s recommendation at Scandinavia House in New York in 2011. Caroline's début CD, Lines, was released in 2011 on Albany Records, and she has over a dozen other chamber music recordings to her credit on labels from Bridge to Naxos. Her teachers were Alan Harris (Cleveland), Maria Kliegel (Germany), Joel Krosnick (Juilliard) and Tanya Prochazka. Caroline is co-Artistic Director of the Weekend of Chamber Music in NY State and teaches cello and chamber music at The Juilliard School in New York City in the Pre-College Division and as Assistant Faculty for Joel Krosnick.

One of the brightest soloists of the classical saxophone world, Javier Oviedo is acclaimed for his lustrous tone, sensitive musicianship, and formidable technique. He debuted at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in New York City last June performing a newly commissioned work for saxophone and orchestra to thunderous ovation.

As a soloist Javier Oviedo has appeared with orchestras in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Texas. He has also appeared with the Orchestre Lamoureux and L’orchestre à cordes d’Ariége in France. In spring 2011 Oviedo appeared with the National Orchestra of the Republic of Moldova and later that year with the State Philharmonic of Oryol in the Russian Federation. This performance was hailed by the local press as “a triumph of a concert.”

An accomplished chamber musician, Oviedo has performed in recital on many of New York’s most prestigious stages such as at Carnegie Hall and The United Nations. He was a founding member of the Elision Saxophone Quartet in his native-born Texas. The quartet will celebrate its 25th season in 2014. Oviedo was also a founding member of The F.R.E.D. Chamber Players which explored new or under-performed chamber music, theater pieces, plays, dance, and art from centuries old and new.

In 2008 Oviedo recorded his debut recording, The Classical Saxophone A French Love Story, which featured original music for saxophone and orchestra from around the early 20th-Century. The American Record Guide said of the disc,

“The music is rich, lush, and colorful, and one is tempted to praise repeatedly Oviedo’s gorgeous sound, which fits these pieces perfectly.” -American Record Guide

The disc was recorded in Paris with Orchestra Pasdeloup under the direction of Jean-Pierre Schmitt and released on the MSR Classics label.

Jon Liechty's compositions have been performed in New York’s Weill Hall, at An Die Musik Live! in Baltimore, at the Midwest Composer's Symposium in Oberlin, Ohio, at the Indiana Contemporary Music Festival in Terre Haute, Indiana, at the Sound in the Land festival in Waterloo, Ontario, and at the Escuela Nacional de Música in Mexico City. He is the recipient of grants from Meet the Composer, and from the Honors Division of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in music composition from the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana, where his teachers included Donald Erb and Claude Baker.

Liechty has appeared as a pianist at An Die Musik Live! in Baltimore, at Symphony Space in New York City, at the SummerKeys festival in Maine, at the Lotus World Music and Dance Festival in Indiana, at the American Composers Alliance festival in New York City, and on Azerbaijani National Television. He gave the world premiere performance of Andrew Nishikawa's Piano Concerto No. 1, written especially for him, at the Boston Conservatory. He is the Associate Music Director at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

Happy New Year!

As 2013 draws to a close, I'm looking forward and back.  What happened this year?  What didn't?  What's in the works for next year?

For one thing, 2013 was the year I started this blog.  There are a lot of things I have to share that simply don't fit in a tiny FaceBook post.  That's as true now as it ever was.  One of my goals for next year will be to pick a better title; if you search "About Music" on Blogspot, you'll find a large number of blogs with similar titles.  I'll be looking for something a bit more poetic and descriptive, and will welcome suggestions.

My inaugural video went up on YouTube this year.  Hopefully there will be more, and better, to follow.

2013 was also the year of Moving Seven Ways, a set of seven short pieces for viola and claves.  They stay in first position throughout, which makes them good for intermediate students.  The viola part of one of them is entirely col legno, which will be challenging for those who haven't yet explored that technique extensively.

The number of my piano pieces inspired by poetry increased in 2013, with "Gəlir", a response to a poem by Nigar Rafibeyli.  There will be more to come; I discovered many fine poets in 2013, both from Azerbaijan and other places, and several of those poems are prompting musical responses.

Scenes from a Fantasy Novel is not based on poetry, but it's a set of ten short pieces with titles inspired by fantasy-novel kinds of scenes.  Still some editing to be done, but basically ready to intrigue and delight.

Piano four hands is a genre I started exploring in 2013.  Most of the pieces I've produced so far have been pretty lightweight: a chorale prelude, and a set of variations on "The Spanish Lady's Love", to name two, but more substantial fare will likely follow.

My biggest disappointment of 2013 was not finishing the string quartet.  It's getting closer, but there's still work to be done.

I did get a short piece for saxophone quartet finished, this one a chorale prelude on "Nun danket alle Gott".  My avid saxophonist uncle finally has something of mine he can play with his friends!  This was extremely long overdue, and it's great to have it done.  More saxophone quartet music is planned, in one form or another.


Apart from composition, 2013 was the year of Audacity.  I've been using it for some time for small tasks such as converting between file formats, but this year I started digging in and actually moving things around.  I've been wanting to produce some CD's for awhile, and this is a substantial step in that direction.

Which brings me to next year.  On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 at the Bloomingdale School in Manhattan, 7:00 PM, a concert of my work will feature cellist Caroline Stinson, saxophonist Javier Oviedo, and me.  This is a concert of unaccompanied solo pieces, including Strength and Beauty, inspired by portraits by Li Ming Shun, for unaccompanied cello, Sonata No. 1 for unaccompanied tenor saxophone, and piano pieces inspired by the poetry of Andrew Kreider.

In mid-June, I'll perform in a concert in Goshen, Indiana, but right now don't have much information about what will be on the program.  It's likely it will include Scenes from a Fantasy Novel, maybe some of the Goldberg Variations, and perhaps some of the pieces being worked on for the CD mentioned below.  But I'd also like to do some things with musicians from Goshen, and plans for those are still up in the air.

The home-recording work is leading toward compilation of a CD, likely to include keyboard music of Frescobaldi, Froberger, and J.S. Bach; more news as it happens.

In terms of composition, it's long past time for the string quartet to be finished, but of course these things don't always happen on cue.  More saxophone quartet music, and more music for piano four hands are in the works, with plans also for some wind ensemble music and a string orchestra piece for a youth orchestra in Washington Heights.

My musician friends are certainly laughing at this point, because they know too well how easy it is to decide you want to do something ... and how difficult it is to actually get it done!

Good wishes to all for a safe, happy, and healthy New Year!

Wikimedia Commons

One of my goals with this blog is to highlight underutilized resources that could be of benefit to musicians.  Today I'd like to write about a companion project of Wikipedia, and some opportunities for the right people to make a big difference ... maybe.

Wikimedia Commons is a huge collection of digital media (pictures, sound files, video, etc.) that are available for anyone to use, remix, and so on.  This doesn't mean there are no restrictions on using them, but the restrictions are considerably fewer than customary in this age of increasing digital rights management.  Most of the content is in the form of pictures, which is what is inspiring my post this morning.

One obvious thing this means for people looking for posters, CD booklet art, and so on, is a huge source of possibilities.  The data included with each file includes the specific restrictions that may apply to it; often this consists simply of crediting the artist/contributor, and releasing the copies/improvements under the same terms.  It's not clear to me whether, if you use a photo licensed as CC-BY-SA (Creative Commons, with attribution, share-alike) on the cover of your CD, you would have to release the entire booklet, the whole CD, or just the cover photo (the part containing the picture you used, with any modifications you made to it) under CC-BY-SA.  More information on Creative Commons licenses can be found here.  Note that I'm not a lawyer; if you want legal advice on the details of re-using other people's work, please get an appropriate professional to advise you.

Another intriguing possibility for musicians is contributing work.  The gallery for J.S. Bach contains recordings of a number of his works, but there are many gaps in the list.  Contributing a recording or two could be a way to market yourself to an audience that might not otherwise find you.  If you were the sole contributor, say, of recordings for most of the WTC Book II, you might gain some advantage from that.  Your user page can list your contributions, or whatever else it might be important for people to know; if you contribute a number of files, a category might be created for them.  I'm a bit wary, however.

For one thing, the point of Wikimedia Commons is educational, not promotional.  The kind of video you might want to release as an artist to showcase your abilities is not necessarily the kind of video you would make for educational purposes.  This is a bit of a judgment call, of course; there's a sense in which it's instructive to watch any performer in action.

Another consideration is cost.  If you are making recordings in your own home, using your own (relatively inexpensive) equipment, it may not matter so much to you whether you give away the results.  If you are recording in a studio at a cost of thousands of dollars, you'll want to think carefully about your return on anything you release.  If you decide to make a sample track available as a free download from your web site or through another online service, you would could remove it at any time.  You could set whatever restrictions you wanted on other people's re-use of your recording.

Not so Wikimedia Commons.  Once you've released something there, it's there for good.  If someone decides to use it in a way you detest, tough.  The recording you might release at the beginning of your career will remain there to haunt you at the pinnacle of your success.

Another possibility for a welcome contribution would be demonstrations of the capabilities of an instrument.  Someone who wants to hear what a violin sounds like (for example) can get a good basic idea from files like these, and there's less of a sense that you're giving away something of direct commercial value.  Demonstration videos showing a particular technique are another opportunity.  So are pictures showing the correct way to hold an instrument.

If you are a music educator, at any level, Wikimedia Commons is the place for you.  If you need a diagram showing the relationship of the keys on a keyboard to notes on a staff, find one here.
This is also a great place to contribute material you've developed that someone else might be able to use.  Because this material is freely available to anyone with an internet connection, your contribution will help teach people around the world.

If you simply want to watch and listen, there are things like these.

Happy holidays, regardless which ones you happen to celebrate!

Explorations

Yesterday, on a friend's recommendation, I visited composerscircle.com, a site that features a different (usually) living composer every day.  I'm not sure how long they have been operating; the online archive goes back to May 2012.  But it's an impressive site, and well worth the time to check out.

One thing that's impressed me is how wide the stylistic range is.  If you were hoping for guidance about any particular direction in which things might be headed, the only reasonable conclusion is they're going in all directions at once, which makes this a particularly exciting time to be writing.

Another thing that's impressive is the wide range of levels and backgrounds represented.  There are composers with major awards and performances by big-name ensembles, and there are composers who are just starting music school, not always at places with famous composition programs.  Most of the names are new to me, which means I'm going to be back; it's not possible or reasonable to expect to take it all in in one visit.  The quality is uniformly high.

The only slightly negative thing about the site is it's not very easy to browse; within a year you have to page forward or back month by month.  Be aware that every page will begin playing music or video immediately upon loading; you'll want to check your volume settings before navigating to the page.

Enjoy!

Connections

Music for me is about connecting with people.  But it isn't always straightforward.  The performer I had in mind while writing a piece may not be the person who finally picks it up and plays it.  Maybe it's the wrong kind of material for that performer, or maybe it's the wrong composer.  Or maybe it's just not the right time for that piece.

What has happened more than once, though, is that musicians I've met later, long after a piece was written, have turned out to be interested in what I've done, and as a result things I wrote years ago have been resurrected and performed.
My ideas about the whole process of working with a performer haven't always been accurate, either.  Mostly there haven't been a whole lot of questions about scores of mine; instead of the back-and-forth I expected, people who have played my music have often simply gone into the practice room, and emerged later with everything in place.

So composition isn't a great way to meet people in and of itself.  Going to concerts is better for that: you have a natural topic of conversation, and a shared experience, that helps break the ice.

Two recent pieces, and two concerts

I'll be playing in two concerts coming up, and since I'll be performing the same two pieces both times, I'd like to describe them.  These were written last year, for a performance given with Elkhart poet Andrew Kreider.  The pieces are responses to two of his poems, and I'll be reading each poem before the appropriate piece.

Pumping Iron is about a father and son lifting weights, and the ostinato in the bass mirrors the weights moving up and down.  A highly emotional dialogue takes place against this background, as the father and son deal with their changing relationship, and the son becomes able to compete with, and overcome, his father.

What Won't Wait is about rushing a mother to the hospital to give birth.  Here there's both a mad rush and a sense of inevitability; the child isn't unexpected, after all, and birth, whenever it happens, becomes the most important thing in the world.

Here are the concert details:

The New York Society for Ethical Culture's Building Fund benefit concert will include Alison Davy, Jon Liechty, Mila Milosevic, Javier Oviedo, and Gene Rohrer. The concert will take place at 2:30 PM in Ceremonial Hall on the 4th floor of the Society's building at 2 W. 64th St. in Manhattan. Tickets: $15 general, $10 seniors/students.

Alison Davy, soprano; Javier Oviedo,saxophone; and Gene Rohrer, piano will perform music by Lee Hoiby and Elliott Carter; Mila Milosevic will perform Serbian and Hungarian folk music, plus selections by Charles Gounod and Frederick Loewe.




 The Brooklyn New Music Collective will hold a concert at the Firehouse Space on May 31 at 8:00 PM. Tickets $15 general, $10 seniors/students.

Here's the program:

Sofia Gubaidulina – Chaconne – Michael Rose, piano

John Cook – Trumpet Concerto (III mvt) – Roger Lent, trumpet and John Cook, piano

Thomas Millioto – solo work (premiere) – Thomas Millioto, electric guitar

JBM Trio: Jen Baker, trombone; Ben Holmes, trumpet; Mary Ziegler Roberts, French horn– 2 pieces TBA

Ben Holmes, trumpet and Patrick Farrell, piano/accordian – 2 shorts TBA

Penderecki – 3 Miniatures – Neil Rynston, clarinet and Michael Rose, piano

Richard Cameron-Wolfe – solo clarinet piece – Neil Rynston, clarinet

Christine Moore, soprano – TBA

Sean Hickey – “Longitude” vla/pno; “Cursive” Klara Min, solo piano

Matthew Kajcienski – piano solo TBA – Miori Sugiyama, piano

Jon Liechty – “Pumping Iron” and “What Won’t Wait” – Jon Liechty, piano

Works by Libby Larsen – Michael Brofman piano, Charlotte Mundy soprano

“Refrain” by Yehudi Wyner and “Spy vs. Spy” by Michael Rose-  Beth Levin, piano

Students for Free Culture Conference

I spent the day at a Students for Free Culture (soon to be Free Culture Foundation) conference.  Instead of writing about all the things that happened during the first day of the conference, it's more interesting to give a composer's-eye view of a few of the points.

For one thing, musicians and other artistic creators did not seem to be in evidence.  This was particularly glaring during a panel discussion regarding copyright reform.  For instance, Patricia Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media and professor at American University in Washington, D.C., spoke about the progress certain communities, such as documentary filmmakers and poets, have had in defining for themselves standards of fair use, which they have then been able to get the Copyright Tribunal to agree to recognize.  She referred to the Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive web site, a comprehensive online collection of dance videos which would not have been possible without defined standards of fair use, and to a number of documentaries which had been stuck in never-never land until the documentary film-making community adopted a code of best practices for fair use.

Well and good.  This is not the same, however, as having a dancer, poet, photographer, or musician discuss the knotty questions of copyright as they pertain to creative work.  For instance, I often send PDFs of my music to performers I hope will play it, or at least look it over and send me some kind words.  If one of those performers passes it on to someone else who plays it (or who passes it on to someone else ...), I probably won't complain, because right now the performance is more important than whatever cash they might have paid me.  If someone uploads a video of that performance to YouTube, I probably won't complain if the performance is good.  If the performance isn't good, I might send a polite note to the poster asking that the video be removed, because I don't want to be represented by something that's not well-played!

A more established artist, however, might view the situation differently.  Someone who already has a number of fine YouTube videos, doesn't necessarily need another one.  Someone whose work is already being played regularly by top musicians around the world, and who is being paid for those performances, doesn't care so much if their work reaches one more player.  They have their audience; to them the compensation is more important.  Someone in that position could be excused for getting upset by the suggestion, or worse, the assumption, that no one should ever have to pay them to use their work.

There's also the case of the composer whose music is used, without permission or compensation, in a major motion picture, which goes on to make millions.  Certainly, exposure is worth something, but it does not pay for groceries or rent.  This actually did happen to one composer; eventually the studio did pay him something as a courtesy, but it's clear that someone else in that situation might not be so fortunate if the law didn't provide some remedy.

None of this was said during the panel.  While some of the issues were addressed during other talks, the absence of any creative artist stuck out as a major omission.   There are creators (e.g. Cory Doctorow) who have succeeded in releasing some of their work free for certain purposes and getting paid, and it would have been wonderful to hear one or more of them talk about what works for them.  It didn't happen here.

The afternoon keynote, by James Vasile, was more useful in that regard.  He gave a broad history of the impact of the development of cheap, accessible copying technology on several areas of endeavor, starting with computer games and going on to such things as movies, music, books, and web comics.  In each area, he outlined the initial responses of the industry in question (DRM, regulation, and so on), the failure of those measures, and the ways the industries have adapted to the situation.

Vasile went on to say that currently artists who are also entrepreneurs can make a decent living; the problem is for artists who are not entrepreneurs to make any living, and the current need is for services to take care of those tasks for them, in a way that allows them to continue their work.  These are good things to hear; they would have been even more powerful if there had been someone at the conference for whom they worked, who could have spoken first-hand, instead of second or third-hand.  My observation has been that the currently-available services often have predatory pricing attached; the people running the service will make money on every unit sold, but the prices offered are high enough to be unattractive even if the artist makes nothing.

None of this means that I'm against free or open culture as a concept, and in fact I've contributed to certain forms.  The issue is that a major discussion of issues affecting artistic creation and production is happening in the absence of artists and students of the arts.  Something's wrong with that.

This post edited on 4/21/2013 to add links and extend proper credit for some of the remarks.