Checklist for Composers

I recently came across a blog post by Brandon Nelson on Thoughts Before Composing a Piece that can serve as an excellent checklist for composers, not only before composing, but also during the composition process, especially when one feels stuck. When one is composing, we often feel that something is not quite right but may have trouble pinpointing the problem. This is when I encourage my students to use the table of contents of my book, A Composer's Guide to Understanding Music as a point of reference and ask themselves "How is my use of _____?", where the blank is filled in with the subject of each chapter. Brandon Nelson's blog post is even more detailed than my table of contents, and serves as another way of reviewing or making decisions about composing.

Writing my Music Practice Guide

Dear readers,

I have not posted lately about my composition activities because I am in the middle of writing my free online Music Practice Guide. Musicians spend many hours in the practice room perfecting their craft, yet how many are actually taught how to practice effectively? This free guide is designed for all musicians and teachers as a compendium of ideas that I have gleaned from my teachers, by attending workshops and master classes, by talking to colleagues, and finally, through sheer necessity of needing to help a student or myself solve a problem.

This guide is divided into four main sections; preparations, focusing practice, reinforcing learning, and making practice enjoyable. The appendix contains sample practice sessions that incorporate the ideas of the main sections and are grouped according to the development level of the musician. Most of the ideas in this guide can be applied to or easily adapted for any instrument or voice.

It is my idea to invite others to offer suggestions that can be included in this guide in order for it to be constantly evolving. At this point about a third of the pages are written. You can see what is completed by visiting my website at http://cooppress.net and clicking on “books” then “Music Practice Guide”. I hope this will turn out to be a valuable resource that will enable both the musician and teacher to spend their time more effectively, see more rapid improvement, and find more enjoyment in making music.

Dr. B

Creating Win-Win Opportunities for Performers and Composers

In many fields where competition is stiff, one must figure out a way to stand out. This especially true in the arts where there are many talented and creative people expressing themselves at a high level of competence. It is not enough to be good and hope that someone will discover you. The artist must create methods of getting their work known. In this essay, I will discuss three programs that I created that have been instrumental in fostering my career as a composer and at the same time benefit the performers with whom we interface.

            Early in my composing career, I was exposed to a win-win idea by tenor saxophonist, James Houlik. Houlik is an excellent musician who performs on an instrument that does not have a large body of literature. In order to expand the literature and to build his reputation as an artist, he contacted several composers and asked them to write a composition specifically for him. In exchange for the composition, he promised to perform the work at least a half dozen times. He contacted me because I had started a co-operative publishing company for composers in 1972 where the music was printed on demand as orders were received. Houlik was impressed with our offerings and my music, and the connection was made. I composed two pieces for Jim and I received copies of the programs and recordings of his performances.

            I never forgot my experience with what he referred to as a “performance commission”. When I retired from teaching to devote more time to composing, I began to offer a Commission Grant through my publishing company, Co-op Press, that is modeled after Houlik’s “performance commission”. The Co-op Press Fund was established in 2000 as a means of encouraging performers to experience the excitement of collaborating with a composer to premiere a composition written especially for them and to share that excitement with their audiences by having the composer in residence. This is a competitive program that is available to individuals and performing groups living in the contiguous United States. The applicants can range from elementary level through professional and must demonstrate through the submission of a recording, their level of competency within their grade level. No money changes hands as the program is designed to provide benefits for both the performers and myself. To date, forty-one grants have been awarded.

            While there are many highlights resulting from my creation of this grant program, a few stand out as being career changers. At least a dozen of these commissions have resulted in a performance at national and international conferences. Many other musicians, therefore, heard my music and either purchased my compositions and performed them. Some have decided to apply for a commission grant themselves.

            As an illustration of what can happen when one thinks outside the box and creates win-win situations, I would like to refer to a commission grant we awarded in 2002 to Shelley Jagow of Wright State University. Jagow applied for and receive a grant for me to compose a composition for alto saxophone and violin in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers first fight in December of 2003. The resulting composition was called “Celebration of Flight” and consisted of three movements, Inspirations, Experiments, and Triumphs. The premiere performance was scheduled for January 2003 to kick off the centennial year. After receiving an excellent performance and recording, I decided to send the recording to NPR’s Performance Today to see if they would broadcast it. It wasn’t until mid-November that I heard from Performance Today informing me that they would you use the recording during their program on December 17, 2003, the anniversary of the Wright Brothers historic flight. I was honored that my music was selected as the composition used by Performance Today for this occasion and that it was broadcast over the 250 NPR affiliate radio stations.

            The success of the Commission Grant Program inspired the establishment of our Recording Grant Program in 2005. The Recording Assistance Grant enables talented performers to produce a professional quality CD in collaboration with my recording label, Emeritus Recordings. Emeritus Recordings designs the cover, tray card and insert, obtains and pays for mechanical licenses, manufactures the CD, and commercially distributes the CD through storefront, web-based, and download retail outlets. The artist must include at least fifteen minutes of my music on the CD. The performers also provide us with the digital recordings of all the compositions included on the CD and contribute $600 towards the cost of producing and marketing the CD. The artist also receives 100 CDs that they can sell at their performances and keep the profits. Emeritus Recordings keep the profits from the digital and physical sales we make through our affiliates. This win-win program has enabled us to award twenty grants and manufacture seventeen CDs thus far.

            While the income from sales of our products and airplay on radio stations generate some income that is used to sustain the grant programs, the major benefit comes from knowing that there are people enjoying the CDs, downloads and broadcasts. Reviews of Emeritus Recordings products have been very positive. For example, James Wegg of James Wegg Reviews writes that our “Collage” CD is “a delightful smorgasbord of textures and tones.”

            In 2010, I established our Fundraising Program for Musical Organizations and Schools. Once again the thinking was to determine the needs of performers and align them with the needs of my publishing company in order to create a win-win situation. Schools and musical organizations are always in the need of funding and Co-op Press desires to offer quality recording samples of our music in order to provide potential buyers with a realistic rendition of the music they are considering buying. The cost of hiring professional musicians to record all our music is prohibitive, but by making a financial contribution to a school or musical organization to record our music is both financially reasonable and assists the groups in carrying out their mission. About two-dozen works of mine have been recorded through this program and we have contributed around five thousand dollars to musical organizations and schools.

            The establishment of a professional recording portfolio for a composer is an essential step in obtaining commissions and grants. The Recording Assistance Program and Fundraising Program have enabled me to apply for and receive grants and commissions otherwise unobtainable without these excellent recordings. It is a lot of work to administer and promote these programs, but at the end of the day, I can sit back and enjoy listening to performances by top-rate artists performing the music that I have composed under these programs. This is an accomplishment that always brings a smile to my face.

Please feel free to leave a comment.

Dr. B

My future blogging

Hi everyone,

I have doing my blog for over four years and I have very little idea whether what I am doing is worthwhile to my readers. I have received very few comments during that time period. It takes a great deal of time to write about my composing process and to create the necessary files to illustrate what I am writing. Therefore, I am going to post less often and my posts will be about general composition subjects, unless I hear otherwise from my readers. I will go into details about my composition process only when those I am composing for request it.

At present, I am composing a composition for piano called Time Travel Phantasie. It is based on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I am also working on getting an opera for middle school performers that I wrote in 1979 into Sibelius notation. I have also revised my website to make it mobile friendly and to have automatic downloads of my pdf files.

As you can see, I have been very busy and will continue to be so.

I hope to hear from you regarding my future plans for this blog.

Dr. B

Pinocchio (Ballet) Performance

I recently posted the video for my Pinocchio (ballet) performed by the Spokane Youth Symphony and Sandpoint Studio One Dancers at the Festival at Sandpoint. Not the best video as we were not as close as we would have liked to have been, but fun nonetheless. - Part I - http://youtu.be/K7yBuxn9RNg Part II - http://youtu.be/6XVsm9fHY-g Part III - http://youtu.be/bp1gROcGl9w

It was an honor to have my orchestral composition adapted for this performance and there were around 2000 people in the audience. I enjoyed working with the musicians and conductor Gary Sheldon and the choreography by Scott Brown was splendid.

I also spent part of August making my website mobile friendly. Now you can see and hear every composition on either a computer or mobile device. I also made my pdf files downloadable immediately after purchase. A lot of work, but a definite improvement. Check it out at http://cooppress.net

I'm looking forward to getting back into composing.

Dr. B

Funtasies Movement 4

I have completed the last movement of Funtasies and I am pleased with the results. As my previous post indicated, it was not always smooth sailing.  I began to realize part way through the movement that what I was thinking was writer's block, was just the nature of composing some of the time. I have written some compositions that seem to come very easily and other times, composing comes very slowly, bit by bit until the composition begins to take shape. I realized I just needed to be patient and let the ideas come at their own pace. There were days when I would compose for an hour and get only two to four measures written. But those measures were good and they suggested where to go next and gradually the movement was completed.

The movement is called "Teasing" and is in a modified Rondo form ABACBA. The teasing occurs in many different ways. The first appearance is the way the movement seems to stop and start as if promising a longer line, but not delivering. Measures 14-18 deliver the longer line, however the syncopation still interrupts its flow. Measure 19-32 is a transition section that is filled with imitation, syncopation and chromaticism that keeps the teasing going.

M. 33 begins the B section. The left hand of the piano plays a syncopated idea consisting of wide intervals and frequent rests. The right hand inserts a jeering four note motive. The saxophone plays a melodic idea centered around a descending minor third, the universal teasing chant interval. Some of the roles are reversed at m. 41. From M 47 to 60, the ideas develop and introduce a triplet figure that represents laughing. M 61-75 is a return of the A Section. From M 75-88, the transition section occurs once more but this time with more of the laughing triplets.

M 88 begins the C section in 7/8. I feel this as a chase scene, as if a game of tag is being played. It builds in intensity all the way to M 115 before subsiding into a return of the B section at M 118. M 146 brings back the final A section which morphs into a coda at a faster tempo. The ending continues the teasing by avoiding a strong cadence with deceptive chords and melodic lines of vague tonality/modality.

A lot of the programmatic aspects of the movement must have been happening subconsciously while I was composing the piece, but it wasn't until I was nearing completion, that I was aware of how perfectly the musical ideas present different kinds of teasing.

I am now using flip pdf technology for the musical examples that go along with my posts. It uses Flash Player that most browsers come with. You will be hearing an mp3 of sampled sounds playing the music and you will see the score at the same time. You will need to turn the pages by clicking on the arrows at the appropriate time. To see and hear what I have discussed, go to http://www.cooppress.net/funtasies_blog.html.

As always, your comments are appreciated.

Dr. B

Writer's Block

Hi everyone. I wrote this for my Writing for Fun" group that meets at the Cottonwood Library and thought I'd post it on my blog as others might find something of value in it.

Dr. B

Writer's Block

Most of us have experienced it. I am experiencing it now in both my music composition and in trying to come up with a topic to write about for this week’s writing group. I experience it every time I sit down to write a new composition. With over three hundred and fifty compositions to my credit, I wonder how I am ever going to write something new.

            New! That seems to be the key word. Here is a definition I found at dictionary.com regarding creativity:

Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.

How does a creative artist constantly transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.? It seems like an impossible task.

            I think that “new” is overrated. All the arts went through a period during the second half of the twentieth century where newness was exalted just because it was new, rather than for a work of art’s quality. As Robert Ehle states in his article From Sound To Silence: The Classical Tradition and the Avant-Garde published in the March 1979 Music Educators Journal, “the quest for new ideas without old associations has led to the abandonment of music as sound and the emphasis on music as pure idea.”

An example of music as pure idea would be John Cage’s “4:33” where a pianist comes on stage and sits at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds and does nothing. The idea of the composition is that the sounds in the room are the music.

In the world of theatre, consider Samuel Beckett’s play Breath. Breath is an unusually terse work. Its length can be estimated from Beckett's detailed instructions in the script to be about 25 seconds. It consists of the sound of “an instant of recorded vagitus” (a birth-cry), followed by an amplified recording of somebody slowly inhaling and exhaling accompanied by an increase and decrease in the intensity of the light. There is then a second identical cry, and the piece ends. No people are seen on stage, but Beckett states that it should be "littered with miscellaneous rubbish." He did specify however that there were to be “no verticals”, the rubbish was to be “all scattered and lying.”

The visual arts were not exempt for the newness craze. There are many examples of abstract art that consists of a line or two on a white canvas. I think I’ll create a painting with nothing but a white canvas and call it a painting of a polar bear sitting on an iceberg during a blizzard.

So what is it that creative artists really do? Many years ago, I attended a lecture on jazz trombone playing at the Eastern Trombone Conference. The lecturer described trombone styles as falling into three categories, preservers, innovators, and refiners.

 Preservers are those people who create by copying and already existing style. For example, if I wrote a composition of my own using the tonal language and contrapuntal techniques that Bach used in the early eighteenth century, I would be considered a preserver of a bygone era.

Innovators are those people that try to do something that was never done before. I believe that innovators are very necessary, otherwise we would never move in a forward direction. However, not all innovation is good and only time will be able to separate the good from the bad.

Refiners are my favorite creative people. Refiners take what has come before them and what is new and put those two together in a manner that incorporates the artist’s own personal vision. They take what has stood the test of time, combine it with fresh ideas, and come up with a personal statement that is modern. They do not reward newness just because it is new. Rather, they discriminately filter the new to see if it has practical applications.

With my musical compositions, I feel that I am a refiner. So when I sit down to compose, I’m using my favorite techniques and sounds that have stood the test of time and try to put them together in a new and fresh way. Sometimes I consciously use music I have written before and give it a new setting; new instrumentation, add a section and/or take away a section. Sometimes I borrow from myself without even knowing it.

For example, I am currently writing a composition for tenor saxophone and piano. After working on a part of it, my wife said to me, what are you doing with “Pinocchio”, a composition that I wrote in 2001 and that will be choreographed and performed at the Festival at Sandpoint in Idaho in August. I replied, “That is my tenor saxophone composition, not Pinocchio.” But there is a section in the saxophone piece that sounds like a section of Pinocchio! I must have had Pinocchio on my mind and borrowed subconsciously from myself.

In conclusion, I believe that to be creative doesn’t mean that one always needs to do something totally new, something that has never been done before. Creativity means taking one's craft and putting things together in a manner that is unique to the artist. Many different things can inspire the artist to create, but if one sets out each time to create something totally new in the artist’s field, one can easily experience a block. I guess I solved my “writer’s block” for this week’s writing group as I wrote this essay. I hope that this creativity will carry over into my musical compositions.