S:nk - Premiere Performance

If you missed Wednesday's hoedown (or if you just can't get enough of my music), come by the Atlas black box at cu boulder 7:30 on Saturday. My newest piece, "S:nk" will be performed by the Boulder Laptop Orchestra, in a concert with special guest Pamela Z.  It should be even cooler than the piece I wrote for Shodekeh and laptop orchestra!

In the 1960’s, biologist John Buck traveled to Thailand with his wife Elisabeth to study the patterns and behaviors of native fireflies. Curious how the small insects could find each other to mate in such dense foliage, Buck captured fireflies from the banks of tidal rivers outside Bangkok and brought them back to his hotel room. When the light was turned off, the fireflies slowly started syncing the flashes of light from their abdomens. Within a half-hour, large groups of insects were blinking at the exact same time. They were looking at each other and altering their phase and the tempo of their flashes to match with the rest of the group! One firefly, flashing alone and out of sync in the middle of the rainforest is weak and ineffectual. But an orchestra of fireflies blinking in unison can light up and entire hillside. In S:nk, each musician is a firefly. This composition asks performers to create and synchronize a wide variety of sounds using only audio and visual clues from others onstage. And only when everyone is grooving in perfect synchronicity does the wild cacophony of beeps, bloops, ticks, and pops start to make musical sense.

The Girl Who Screamed Dixie - Orava Quartet

One of the more entertaining and educational activities when I visit my in-laws is hearing stories of my wife as a kid. A child who would run, at full sprint, around her childhood home, singing Dixie with abandon. A girl who burst into tears at the age of three when she learned that the South had lost the war. A kid for whom the term unsweetened tea was an oxymoron. Someone whose unstoppable energy and remarkable perseverance makes me wish I had known her growing up. I’ve been with my wife for ten years; she still sings Dixie with abandon.

Pallbearers - Premieres on Halloween

Premiered by Hunter Ewen, Carter Pann, Dan Kellogg, Michael Theodore, Ryan T. Connell, and Kathryn Mueller.

1. Cream
2. Maroon
3. Celeste

I am biking home from work. Fifteen miles into my ride, I notice a buildup of cars ahead. A car tire has blown. I pass the stranded vehicle without incident. An enterprising young motorist realizes that he can bypass most of the gridlock by veering onto the grass, behind the disabled vehicle.  His cream colored Civic flies safely around the tire shrapnel, behind the car, down a small embankment, up through the bike lane, and into me.

I lie still, marooned, another roadside attraction. His engine pauses briefly—inquisitively, then growls and retreats at full speed. A quarter-mile down, a fortuitous turn-lane provides this mad motorist a safe escape.  I feel nothing.  I am nothing.  I hear the 'click click click' of my rear tire gradually slowing as the inertia dies.

When my eyes can open, I notice spots—dozens of tiny blotches in a light-blue cloud field. The visual momentum from the bike ride pushes the dots further and further away, higher and higher into the celestial sphere. As they rise, I start to rise. When I'm floating above myself, I hear the sound of my accident in thirty-six giant, soft chords.

Concert About Nothing - With Third Coast Percussion

Part of a week-long CU-Boulder festival, the Concert about Nothing will feature the music of John Cage performed by CU students, faculty and special guests Third Coast Percussion. The Chicago Tribune writes that this quartet, using an impressive array of percussion instruments, combines "the energy of a rock concert with the precision and sophistication of classical chamber music."

From Boulder Weekly:

"If someone says 'can’t,' that shows you what to do."

This was advice the inventor John Milton Cage gave to his son, the future composer and musical provocateur John Cage, Jr. The father could hardly have imagined how his advice would bear fruit and transform the musical landscape in the second half of the 20th century.

The younger Cage’s 100th birthday was about a month ago, and the College of Music at the University of Colorado Boulder is joining many others in the musical world with a festival celebrating his music and ideas. The celebration will be wide-ranging, since the list of Cage’s contributions to the post-war avant-garde musical world is lengthy: recognizing the musical potential of all sounds, both planned and accidental; introduction of chance in the composition process by using the Chinese Book of Changes or I Ching; adding variability to performance by leaving some compositional choices to the performer; music for prepared piano, with objects placed in the piano to change the sound of the individual pitches; and one notorious piece in which the performer never plays a note.

All of these innovations will be represented in the festival events, which includes lectures by Cage scholars, performances by CU faculty and guest artists, CU’s Pendulum New Music ensemble, Third Coast Percussion from Chicago, and CU students (events are free; see the list accompanying this article or check the College of Music October Calendar at http://music.colorado.edu/events). Throughout his unpredictable and often controversial career, Cage maintained a puckish sense of humor. Indeed, the vegan, Zen Buddhist iconoclast would probably as soon be remembered as a mushroom lover as a musician.

“Part of the festival is just celebrating this eccentric, wildly interesting person and keeping that spirit alive, because those are rare figures that can cause such a stir,” Daniel Kellogg, composer and co-director of the Cage Festival, says. One of the more wildly interesting things about Cage is that he is one of the most influential, and at the same time one of the least performed, composers of the 20th century. Indeed, it is likely than many in Boulder’s audiences — frequent concertgoers who never miss the Boulder Philharmonic or the Takács Quartet — have never heard a note of Cage’s music performed live.

In spite of his music’s silence (ironically a quality he notoriously valued and advanced in music), most who know the contemporary music scene agree on Cage’s importance. “Without him clearing the way for a broader perspective of what is music and what is art, I think a lot of the things that we have today would not have happened,” Hsing-ay Hsu, pianist and director of Pendulum New Music, says of Cage. Kellogg is quick to note that Cage is important for his music as much as for his ideas. “Some of the people I worked with when I was a student would say that he was more of a philosopher than a composer, but I would say he’s both,” Kellogg says. “He certainly wrote some great music, even in the conventional sense of here’s a beautiful piece of music. But then he began to ask questions that were just huge, questions about what’s the nature of sound, what’s the nature of the concert experience, what is music.”

If Cage is known to audience members today, it is for those questions. Nothing he did better expresses that side of the inventor’s son than his famous — or infamous — piece “4’33” (pronounced “Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds”). This is the piece where the performer comes on stage and sits before the piano and doesn’t play a single note for precisely four minutes and 33 seconds. This piece, on the program for the Oct. 9 concert (7:30 p.m., Grusin Music Hall), was greeted by many listeners as a stunt when it was first performed in 1952. But Cage had something very serious in mind: to make listeners think about what constitutes a piece of music or a performance, and not incidentally, to demonstrate that we are always immersed in ambient sound that becomes part of every performance — whether the rumble of subways in New York, the sound of the wind outdoors, or the rustling of our neighbors just about anywhere.

The piece relates to at least two other ideas that Cage championed: that any sound can be music if you listen to it that way; and that a composer could give up control over the way a composition would sound.

“It’s such a simple idea and yet it had never been done,” Kellogg says of “4’33”.” “It did provoke so many people to think, to argue, to wrestle with all kinds of issues.

“That performance is one part of the festival that I’m really excited about. It will be a completely unique experience to see it performed with (a large audience) present. That’s a completely different experience than sitting on your porch and being still for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.”

Another highlight for Kellogg will be Wednesday, a concert by Pendulum New Music and Third Coast Percussion (7:30 p.m., Grusin Music Hall). “We’re going to be presenting his construction pieces for percussion quartet. And the third piece I think is really, truly a masterpiece. Any composer that’s skilled enough to leave behind even one masterpiece is a composer of note.”

Cage’s legacy is hard to assess, because the controversy around his music sometimes obscures his more serious aim in writing it. But his notion that any sound can be music has crept into the musical world without necessarily calling attention to itself.

Kellogg, an admittedly traditional composer, observes, “As a young student I would have been encountering Cage’s concept that everything, every noise is music. Silence simply does not exist, and that certainly has influenced the way that I think about landscape and how I represent it in music, which is something that I’m drawn to.” Mark Phillips, an award-winning composer and distinguished professor of music at Ohio University, another traditional composer, agrees that Cage “really played a large role in opening up a broader sound world and creating a landscape that offered a lot more possibilities to composers.”

The use of chance — or what Phillips calls Cage’s “divorcing the process of composition from the conscious will of a composer” — has been important too. At its most extreme, few after Cage have embraced the idea of using pure chance to create a score. But the idea of leaving some aspects of a performance to the performer is widespread today. “That’s something certainly that I’ve kept in a lot of my music,” Phillips says.

But if these ideas are so important, why isn’t Cage’s music performed more often? The music is complicated to present, Kellogg says.

“We’re doing a piece called Sonatas and Interludes,” he says. “It’s for prepared piano, and it’s gorgeous. You hardly get any sound out of the piano that you would expect, so it’s a wild experience. But it takes one to two hours to set up that piano. So we had to find a piano that we could leave prepared for several weeks, we had to find a room where we could put it, then when it gets moved it has to be unprepared, moved, tuned, put in Grusin Music Hall, re-prepared. So it’s gorgeous music, but it’s not the kind of thing that a graduate student can say, ‘Oh, let me put 10 minutes of Cage on my recital.’”

Considering how rare Cage is in the concert hall, Kellogg has some advice for the audiences next week: “Come in with a smile, and ready for a completely unexpected experience.

“There are people who come to that concert hall regularly to hear their Beethoven and their Mozart. Probably many of those folks will show up, and I hope that they walk away delighted by the richness of the musical experience that they can have at the College of Music.

“Some of them may be frustrated, but I hope that they come with a smile and a sense of adventure.”

John Cage Festival Schedule: Musicology Colloquium, 1 p.m. Monday, Oct. 8, Grusin Music Hall 5th

Annual Robert / Ruth Fink Lecture by Tim Page, 7:30 p.m. Oct. 8, Grusin Music Hall

"Imaginary Landscape": Tuesday faculty performance, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 9, Grusin Music Hall

"Under Construction": Pendulum New Music and Third Coast Percussion, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10, Chamber Hall (C199, Imig Music Building)

"Concert About Nothing": Pendulum New Music and Third Coast Percussion, 7 and 9 p.m. Friday, Oct. 12, Atlas Black Box Theater, Directed by Hunter Ewen

Slow and Pretty Things - Now Available for Free

The album Slow and Pretty Things is a tone poem, in nine sections about my final conversation with my grandmother, Elizabeth Huff. In the last year of her life, her dementia had progressed to the point where she had lost all sense of time. Her stories could go for hours, slowly ebbing and flowing, circling around themselves like an eddy at the edge of a river. And as she sunk deeper into dementia, her timelessness became more pronounced. The destination of her stories was no longer relevent; for her, it was about the journey—the act and art of communicating. I found myself intensely engrossed in these conversations. The humanity in her voice was clear as day, but her message was obfuscated. We achieved a kind of understanding–an elegant compromise where she and I both said a great deal, and neither of us understood. She meditated on her childhood and mine, holidays with family, her pig, the war, and our spouses. Our final conversation was a beautiful moment, suspended in time and space. It was only after she was gone that I started to understand what she was trying to say. This album is structured around the themes and mood of our last talk: real instruments are altered, repeated, and stretched as if they were afflicted with Alzheimer's. There is loss and sadness, but there is also beauty and hope. Each movement is a timeless ghost, who at some point long ago had a voice, a form, and a message. The titles of each movement form the poetry upon which my tone poem is based:

Slow and Pretty Things (Hunter Ewen, 2012)
Sea-foam cotton undertows
Our last forgettable conversation
Her wholeness struck
Out across delicate, bobbing adventures–
Soft curled tales
To buoy a grandson. In meantime
She surfaces, recognizably
And we finally speak–
Slow and pretty things

Scholastic Books

Yay, I just found out that I'm going to be featured in Scholastic magazine! If you're a 6-8th grader (or more likely have a child in 6-8th grade), start getting excited - for me AND for Goosebumps.

Circles on Quiet Water - Encore Performance

If you're looking for something fun to do Saturday at 4:30, check out Cassandra Mueller's recital in Grusin hall at CU-Boulder. Among many excellent pieces is my solo for viola and live electronics "Circles on Quiet Water."

Light...A Musical Journey

Come out tonight or tomorrow night at 7:30 in ATLAS Black Box, Kari Kraakevik's genre-bending performance "Light: a Musical Journey." A very cool experience awaits!  Oh, and I'm singing Baritone.

H.W. Pennywell and His Unstoppable Robot Army of Doom

Written for wind ensemble. For Doctor Pennywell, fictional father of modern weaponized robotics. May your warriors shine like the morning sun!

Amy Pence's Armor, Amour

A very cool book of poetry by my step-mother-in-law. My song cycles are printed in the pages, and one of them was art-ified for the cover! There's also a sweet digital download of the poems being read, on top of my awesome background soundtrack. Cool enough to buy 4 or 5 copies I'd say.

http://www.ninebarkpress.org/order.html