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.

So I did this thing on my Facebook where I promised to draw comics about the first six musical figures/things that people put in the comments. Some of them are hard, and only one was anything close to what I was expecting!
Maybe they will be funny anyway?

The second idea from the list of 6 on my Facebook wall was: if all the Laurier Double Reeds went on vacation together, it is from Megan-the-bassoon who is seen occasionally in comics!

Request #3 in my little challenge was just “Mahler”. (Actually, request three was “A Mariachi band breaks out of prison” but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet!) This is the only comic idea that was sort of like what I was expecting. Thanks Agatha!

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.

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.