Spiegel im Spiegel (clip)

After the funeral, Jean felt a quiet sadness. No weeping, no wailing, no depression or anger or guilt, just a plain acceptance mixed with a deep sorrow and a deeper love. Grieving for the might-have-beens, of course, but smiling softly at the memory of glittering eyes and bad jokes and the fluttering terror of a first love. The feeling of quiet: undramatic, simple, full. Words that don’t need to be said, eyes that wake dry, feet that can still walk, a heart not so much heavy, but bigger.

I still DO those?

Apparently. Sorry about all the empty dates on that ‘January’ calendar up there. It’s been an exciting month computer-wise, job-wise, life-wise.

The next few comics are all inspired** by my friend Dawna Davis, the Production Manager at the KWS. Her Twitter is hilarious! Example:

I actually spat my breakfast cereal all over my desk when I read that. So surreal. Only at the KWS.

Anyway, long story short, hopefully I’ll be around more in the next few weeks!
Lots of love,
The First of now many Renegades Oboe.
**Not necessarily true to life – I’m tweaking things for privacy and Heightened Comedic Effect

The last post of 2009! I guess this is when I talk about New Year’s Resolutions, but the truth is: I just don’t do resolutions. They never work out! Sure, I’d like to be healthier; sure, I’d like to exercise more; sure, I’d be a better musician if I practiced an hour a day…but the truth is, life always gets in the way of these things. SO no resolutions.

As far as comics go: the set coming up (which I have drawn, but since I am at my parents’ house away from my scanner, will not go up until I get back to Waterloo) are about Production Managers–I am branching waaaaay out of this “oboe comics” thing, but I think it is a good thing. The Production Manager at the KWS is basically a superhero, and superheroes belong in comics!

I have been in Maryland since the 26th visiting my mom’s family who play word games! Guys, I love word games so much; I will take on all comers in Scrabble or Boggle or what-have-you–I’m not claiming I’ll win, necessarily, but that I will put up a fight! Words, guys. They’re wonderful.

For Christmas I got mostly books, which is normal, but I also got Musicians’ Dice! (My mom keeps pronouncing the company, Philomuse, like “phyllomouse” and it makes me smile. Pastry-wrapped rodents, delicious!) I’m pretty excited for all the fun improvs and compositions I will make with those dice. Once my grad project is well on its way, and my oboe/viola/piano trio is done, I’m writing a piece involving piano and beatbox for my friend Sarah Whynot (who is crazy and sassy and beatboxy) and flute and vocal solos for two other friends. Writing for flute! There’s something I haven’t done before, or wanted to do before, or will ever want to do again. We shall see how it goes.

This term: workin’ full time! Aaaaaah, it will be crazy. Also writing music and rehearsing-recording-producing my grad project, playing oboe in FIRE and taking lessons with Dick, and taking an English course (”Rest. and 18th C. Literature”–what is “Rest.” I would like to know?), and a Theory course (”Music After 1945″ for which I am excited).
And drawing comics, of course, although they will become increasingly about Music and the Arts-World as a whole as I slip further and further out of the oboeverse.

Finally, you all have to enjoy this with me:

I have one last theory-ish class next term, and I am going to have to start being creative with my notes-on-scores.

All the best to everyone in the new year! Twentyten, it is the best to say.

It is the holiday season, and while I am a bit of a grinch and refuse to get into “the spirit” throughout, I do like to take the time off to do multitudinous things. This holiday I’m assembling my grad piece–that work which is simultaneously a song cycle and an album–hanging out with my family (including my mom’s family down in Maryland, hooray!), putting together my application to Bang on a Can, and hopefully reading a few books before I start my full-time job and full-time school in the new year.

I’ve been thinking about my writing style. It has changed a lot this year! I keep incorporating bits of things that I find in other people’s writing–Ryan North’s enthusiasm and punctuation (!) and ALL CAPS (because things are EXCITING, yo!), Joey Comeau’s vivid images, Said the Gramophone’s way of describing something in experiences rather than in adjectives so you know exactly what the music they talk about feels like, sounds like, tastes like. This thing where we Capitalize The Important Words so that it makes them seem pompous and sassy simultaneously (bet you can guess where); “oh yes” is a Kate Beaton quirk, I have been making an actual effort to not do sidebar information or link to random things with random words…I feel like I should start getting my own style eventually, but maybe it is okay to just imitate for now? Dabble, you know. One thing that I do that is all mine is use a minimum of contractions–I tried to give them up for Lent last year, and while it did not work entirely (it’s HARD, try it), it has left me with this dearth of apostrophes in my vocabulary. OH WELL.

People recently have been asking me to try to define my composing style, and it is so hard! Much like my writing, I dabble dabble dabble. I guess my trios are Modernist and Minimalist, I guess my tuba suite is neo-classical (all quartal harmonies and images)…I don’t know! It is weird, this figuring-out what I do, figuring out what I like.

The one trend I think is prevalent across a lot of my work–literary and musical–is a penchant for pointing out how imperfect things can be beautiful. Like this poem:

Spectacle

The first day you wear glasses
you feel short and ugly,
you get a headache;
you see
all the things you missed before:
patterns in hubcaps,
bricks in walls,
leaves on trees.

I submitted this poem as part of my Manuscript for the poetry class I was in last term. Do you see what I mean? Getting glasses is harsh because it hurts your eyes and makes you look like a loser, but you can see detail and that makes it worthwhile. Who knew hubcaps and bricks and leaves could be so attractive? I don’t know if it comes across in the music that I write, but it does appear in my approach to performances–the things that happen that are unwritten make it, separate each performance from each other as a different work of art. At the premiere of a piece by Nancy Tam at the last NUMUS concert (for which I have been meaning to write a review, hurgh), a motorcycle revved by the church just as the last chord was fading away. It couldn’t have been scripted, that sound, but it was perfect. I like the mistakes, guys, I like imperfection. That’s what makes us human, and since music is the expression of human emotion, it’s so much better when it’s not perfect.

Secret Music

Guys! So! I wrote this piece here.
One of the coolest things about the Composition program at Laurier is that we get tonnes of opportunities to have our music performed. This year, the newly-forméd Composers and Improvisers Association (Anonymous) has arranged, with the help of the lovely and talented Narvesons, a concert at the Kitchener- Waterloo Chamber Music Society Music Room, which is perhaps the coolest venue in town: it’s the top floor of the Narvesons’ house. Two ensembles from WLU’s chamber music class will be playing various compositions by Laurier composers there on February 8th.

My piece is for the trio, and they are fantastic, and you can listen to (and download?) it up yonder! But, may I remind you, there is nothing like hearing live music, and there will be many wonderful works premiered there that night, and so you should all come out.

A friend told me about this article in the Times today about a giant oboe gathering around Albrecht Mayer. Some quotes:

“Oboists are a peculiar lot: they give the tuning A before performances and often have the most prominent solos in a piece. Their instrument can sound like a singing human voice or squawk like a duck. Half their lives are spent hewing bits of cane to make the double reeds that can produce those gorgeous sounds but also prove cruelly disloyal.”

“The precarious nature of the double-reed existence creates a bond, several of the oboists said.”

“Crowded between the refrigerator and a kitchen island laden with food, [Randall Wolfgang and Albrecht Mayer] traded stories about Marcel Tabuteau, the patriarch of American oboe playing, who died in 1966.”

Of course.

And my favourite parts:

““I’ve seen you on YouTube,” Mr. Killmer told Mr. Mayer. “It’s a great honor to meet you.””

Dick Killmer watches YouTube!

and

“As they headed for the door, Mr. Mayer expressed wonder at the number of oboe players who had been there.

“Just imagine a terrorist bomb,” he said. “So many jobs in this room!” Then he left to take the No. 1 train to his Midtown hotel.”

Edit: Just discovered that Patty got there first. Man! I was all like, “I am on the ball for once!” But no one is more on the ball about oboe news than Patty.

I discovered a few weeks ago that John Adams has a blog. Initially, I was delighted. Delighted! John Adams! One of the Major Musical Influences of “post-minimalist” composers like me! Has a blog! Like me! I can explore his thoughts and get to know him as a person via word choice and sentence structure!

But you guys, the more I read, the more he comes across like a musical version of Michael Moore: disparaging, cynical, snobby, hatin’ on everything except the few things he prescribes as good and true. Check out this entry on going to movies in this day and age. Mr. Adams, sir, I love your music but don’t go to movies if you don’t enjoy them. If you can pick out all the cheesy particulars, and hate doing it, just don’t go.

Or how about this entry about people coughing at concerts. That kind of attitude bothers me so much! I mean, no one does it on purpose. No one. And what is more, every person there just paid good money to hear your piece being played, to hear you play your instrument. Those people who wait to cough between movements? They are doing their best to *not* disrupt the music. And I bet every person who coughs while there is music playing is embarrassed about it.

Well friends, fellow who get dust particles in your throats, who go to concerts even though you have colds because you want to hear the music, who are allergic to the perfume of the lady sitting three rows down, I’m with you on this one. Cough if you need to, I’ll pat you on the back and hand you a proverbial lozenge and tell you it’s okay because I don’t care if you interrupt the still after the end of the first movement. I’m glad you’re here, I’m glad you’re listening, I’m sorry you’re not feeling well! Please enjoy the rest of the show.

And check out those comments! Apart from mine, and one or two others, there is a whole lot of Classical Music Snobbery! Don’t clap between movements, don’t come if you might cough, even one priceless example of The Stigma Surrounding Classical Music: Richard. Here is his comment:

Jesus Christ. I’ve been going to concerts all my life and I’ve been able to control myself. Why can’t everyone else?
Also, as a matter of biology, I have a hard time sitting still. But somehow I manage the discipline to sit still and listen while at a concert.
I have to say the level of offense is different in different cities. New York has to be the worst. Coughing and eating are one thing, but when you pay $65 to have a pretty good balcony seat (which most of us can’t do everyday), you dress appropriately and then you have to sit next to some idiot who is wearing a T-shirt and sneakers.
Decorum demands that if these people don’t correct their behavior, it’s up to you to be the one who communicates to them that they are being rude, inconsiderate, that they look like a slob, or simply that they are assholes.
I have a friend who is a pretty serious concert goer. Watching him deal with them is always funny. He often threatens to have them thrown out as if he has any authority to do so.
Frequently, the alternative of listening to a near perfect performance at home on a recording is preferable to spending money to hang out with these idiots.
However, there is a rare occasion when it goes down correctly. I went to a Mahler 9 at Carnegie with Eschenbach and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The performance was a tedious affair.
However, everything gave way to a feeling of acceptance at the end of the symphony (as tends to happen with this piece even at bad performances; I forgave and accepted Eschenbach for his sins) and he did the mandatory sitting there in silence for a good minute as the 2,500 people in the audience did too. During that minute, all of us in that room shared something truly profound. I’m grateful that for once it wasn’t ruined by one of these troubled people.

Richard, can we talk for a moment? Sir, you clearly regard concerts as a Matter of Status and everyone who goes who does not operate by Your Predefined Standards does not deserve to be there. But really, if the people around you are detracting from your “experience” it isn’t the music that’s defining your experience in the first place, now, is it? Sir? And if your friend who threatens to have people thrown out based on their attire is that bothered by it, maybe he shouldn’t be there either.

I love music, Richard. I really do, several different kinds of music, in fact! I go to rock concerts, and I wear jeans and a t-shirt, and I love the music, and I love listening to it live. Why, loving classical music to much the same degree, should I dress differently for it? Why does my attire make me an “idiot”? I’ve got a degree (almost) in this music and I have a pretty good brain, actually, and yes, I like to wear t-shirts and jeans and sometimes even orange sneakers when I go to the Symphony. I go to the shows to enjoy the music being made. I’d like to hope most people do. Somehow it seems that you don’t, though, Richard. Somehow I don’t think we could be friends. And please: if your sense of “decorum” demands that you need to tell me off about it, I might get a bit feisty.

My friend Christopher pointed out to me that there probably wouldn’t be all this outpouring of snobbishness had Mr. Adams posted the alternate point of view on coughing at concerts.

Dear Mr. Adams,
Please use your power for good.

****

“Half-Ass” is my life these days. I am doing a lot of things you guys! I am trying to get a whole song-cycle written before the end of December, along with a horn piece for a friend’s grad recital and a contrabassoon piece for another concert. I am trying to write poetry for my creative writing class, and somehow accumulate enough that is in the vein that my professor likes to put together a 15-20 page manuscript to turn in. I am trying to keep up with my information-classes: Counterpoint and Post Tonal Theory and The Novel After 1900, reading the textbooks, doing the homework, going to class. I am drawing comics and updating the site! I am working two jobs, one of which is Quite Needy (the KWS) and the other of which is Just Inconvenient because I either have to work evenings after a long day at school or early mornings on the weekend. Add in “practice oboe and make reeds” into this mess and you have One Busy Esther add “sleep and eat and maintain contact with your friends and family” and you have Too Busy Esther.

So I’m half-assing things. I’m not reading the textbooks, but I try to go to class; I don’t really do my homework, but I make sure to get my assignments in; I don’t practice, but I…okay, I just don’t practice. I make reeds, but I only make enough to last me for a bit and then stretch them out (although I made two really good reeds early this week, and there are 10 more blanks waiting to be scraped that I have high hopes for; should last me until Christmas at the rate I’m going); I work at my jobs, but I call in sick to one of them if I have a conflict; I draw comics, but don’t update on time; I compose, but not anything like as much as I want to.

And it works, this half-assery, for the most part. I’m paying my rent, I’m making progress in my oboing (though this is mostly thanks to Dick’s uncanny talent of making me learn regardless), I’m making good reeds, I did well on my English midterm, decently well on my Post-Tonal midterm–but there are things, things like Baroque Counterpoint, which don’t lend themselves especially well to my particular system. And what do I do about all this? It’s like asking “What are birds?” We just don’t know.

***

I had a bunch of pieces played in the Student Composer concert (the first of five at the school this year) a few weeks ago, pieces that I wrote last year with Peter but didn’t get played in the concerts. And I was really happy with them! (I also had a piece played in the orchestra concert the weekend preceding, but I was less happy with it.) I want to give you all a taste of who I am as a composer, so here is a piece called “How They Felt About the Balloon”:

How They Felt About the Balloon

I used Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Balloon” as inspiration for form and content, particularly this image from the print form. I drew a graph over the words to set up measures and time, and then interpreted the descriptions into music. I like, though, that it doesn’t sound formalized and strict, that it sounds like a person with ADD, leaping and skipping from idea to idea but each idea adds to the one before, and since it is all done with the same pitch set it is all in the same world.

I play the piano extremely poorly, so hearing my friend Sputnik’s interpretation of the piece for the first time was like hearing someone else’s work that is just weirdly familiar.

It was pretty neat.

So I’ve been reading a bunch of people’s Hourly Comics–I guess the “official” day to do it is February 1st, but I wanted to give it a try now. So here is my day in comic form!

So I went to see the Intersections concert at the Conrad Centre–and actually as a paying patron, can you believe it? And so and so and so I got to see the whole thing and so and so and so I am going to write about it.

This Intersections was “Nico’s Choice” featuring “music that he digs”–he being Nico Muhly whose blog I friggin’ love. And man! Good taste, sir. Proper respect. The first piece was music from a film called “Drowning By Numbers” by Michael Nyman which–get this–was one of the first pieces I ever had on my computer. Before I was in music, before I became obsessed with minimalism, before everything when all else in my collection was Switchfoot and Final Fantasy, I listened to “Fish Beach” and “Knowing the Ropes” kind of obsessively, actually. So when they started playing I got one of those jolts of recognition like “Holy crap!” So knowing those pieces like I do–in a backwards and simple sonic-jacuzzi familiarity kind of way–and then listening to them with my newly trained ears was pretty amazing.
The thing about Michael Nyman’s music, and these pieces in particular, is that it is so ordinary. It’s what we’re expecting, the motives are film-soundtracky and mundane–but it doesn’t resolve, it doesn’t really progress, it just sits in this kind of perpetual motion and then just…stops. It is a piece that gets so much of its substance from how it moves (or how it doesn’t move) and how it ends (or how it doesn’t end). It’s so unsubtle that it’s kind of profound.

I made a lot of orchestration notes at this concert–the first one I made, during the Nyman, was this moment in the winds where something about the blend of trumpet and flute and something else sounded MIDI-like.

Then Edwin and Nico chatted to us for a while and my notes are all things like “I totally have a shirt like that except I wear it partially buttoned” and quotes like “I don’t want to sound like a big gay muppet,” and “Piles of things that are the same” which is what this concert was programmed around (not the muppet thing, the piles thing). And there was Powerpoint, making it seem like the most charming lecture ever.
“Piles of things that are the same” refers to the repeating bassline (passacaglia) idea that pervaded the whole concert. People’s different concepts of time–Nico showed us a bunch of different calendars–was also a part of it, how everyone divides things differently.

We heard a Philip Glass piece next–the third movement of his third symphony which was on my listening tests in high school music! MORE jolts of recognition. (What was this, Esther’s musical subconscious night or what?) There was some fantastic segmentation happening (I think I’m going to have to spend some time with the score to figure it all out), but you know, I’d never thought of Glass as a brilliant orchestrator before, but he did things in the strings that I admire: breaking them down so that everyone is a soloist. I loved too how every so often I’d become aware of the bass–that repeating thing–in the stereo effect of listening to one thing which is multiple things.

I still have no idea how Nico’s father’s turkey fryer fit into this concert, but we spent a few minutes on it after the Glass. It was kind of fun, though, you know? Endearing.

Then there was a snippet of Purcell (which would’ve been better at the beginning of the show I think Nico was right), followed by Richard Reed Parry’s piece, “For Heart Breath and Orchestra”! The musicians had stethoscopes and Edwin barely conducted–the idea was that each musician used their own heartbeat for a pulse (get it get it) and the result was shattered and individual and cascading and I felt that everything made sense, but there were dozens of senses. It was contemplative and sparkling at the same time.
In FIRE (the student improv group at WLU), we spend a lot of time focusing on deep listening to the ensemble. This was more about deep listening to oneself. It was so good, though. I could listen to that all day.

One thing I was upset about: they played the David Lang chamber piece during intermission! What Is Up With That, I would like to know. I would’ve liked to hear it while everything was quiet, where I could see the musicians, and where I would’ve known to listen from the beginning. It was wonderful anyway, pointillistic and shifting. Edwin said it is called “Sweet Air” and is what Lang thought his son was feeling during a visit to the dentist which involved laughing gas.

What followed intermission was arrangements of Byrd pieces “Miserere mei, deus” and “Bow thine ear, o Lord”, both arranged for chamber orchestra by Nico. The orchestration was simple, it made sense, there was some neat instrument-coupling-timbres which I made note of for future reference (trumpet and viola, trombone and violin, violin and clarinet), but the coolest colour was the piano! Way up in its high register plinking along under the broad strings! It shook it out of its comfort zone a little (and speaking of comfort zones and not being in them, Jim was playing English Horn. Since when does that ever happen?).

And then and then: “From Here on Out,” Nico’s piece, originally the score for a ballet, and fit with the passacaglia theme; it was so, so great. Edwin said a while ago in a talk at the school that good music expresses emotion, and I love when it’s the complicated emotions that are explored, and that is what I got from this piece. The beginning sounds like quiet wonder feels: not “Wow!” but that feeling that comes when you can see the curvature of the earth in the sky, when something huge just clicks. I got impending excitement later: that tense feeling in your stomach when you’re excited and worried, and later the disconnected feeling that comes when something bad has happened but not yet sunk in, that “I should be sad but I can’t feel anything”.
I expect I’m crazy for getting all this, but even the title says it: “From Here on Out” is one of Nico’s usual idiomatic titles, but it makes *sense* because the thing is a journey. And the orchestration! It was “section” orchestration (strings/winds/brass), but like…SO much colour. I felt like I’d fallen into a bucket of paint. Like it should be a Sony Bravia ad, or something. There was so much happening, and yet somehow the texture was transparent; the changes were sudden, but they felt organic.

Okay, so this is more a “HOLY CRAP AMAZING” entry rather than serious criticism (I’ll leave that to Marcia), but I do have one crit: Jim’s oboing in “From Here on Out”. It was out of place, it stuck out, it was too Strauss and not enough Muhly, and the tone was pointy where it needed to be round and warm and blendy. I am disappointed!

But not really because I am much too happy about music right now to be disappointed.

(SPEAKING OF WHICH I had like 20 pieces played in concerts last week and now have a Giant Pile of recordings, so maybe my next blog will explore those a little.)