On Being a Visiting Composer, Part 1: The Rehearsal
I recently dropped in on a band rehearsal for one of my pieces at my alma mater, The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Things have changed a lot since I graduated over a decade ago. The faculty has changed quite a bit as have the facilities. There is a new performance hall on campus, the Faulkner Performing Arts Center, which is where the rehearsal was happening. I’ve been here for a few concerts, and I’ve even heard one of my percussion ensembles performed here during a day of percussion. But this was going to be the first time I would hear a college band play one of my pieces. (A chamber orchestra at a university commissioned me last fall, but this would be the first college wind band!) It was exciting that it would also be happening where I got my bachelor’s degree!
Over the past 2 years of being a full time composer, I’ve dropped in on a handful of rehearsals. I never know how things are going to go. I have had some visits where I felt completely at home talking with the director and performers and some where I felt like the ensemble members didn’t even care I was there. Maybe they appreciated me being there, but they were just focusing on playing well. Who knows? I have also had some visits that showed me just how much something I had written didn’t work when humans were playing the parts instead of my computer. Though the piece I was dropping in to hear today has been played multiple times, I wrote it over a decade ago, and I have changed a lot as a composer since it was initially conceived. Would it stand up to time? Would the things I thought were so cool when I wrote it, sitting in my office in the Green Forest Band Room, still be cool or effective now?
I met up with my friend Kolby Palmore, who is finishing up his masters degree at the U of A, at the band hall (which has also gone through a significant face lift since I walked the halls), and we headed over to Faulkner together. There were a ton of decorations in the lobby, which I neglected to photograph, and columns of balloons on the stage. What a reception for a visiting composer! (Just kidding, it was actually for the women’s basketball team’s annual banquet)
The backstage area was filled with students getting their instruments out in preparation for rehearsal. I didn’t hear it but while another friend, Chris Scherer, was backstage, he overheard a student say, “It’s super lit that the composer is coming to rehearsal!” I don’t know if me or my music has ever been described as “super lit” before, but that was a pretty nice welcome.
Soon after entering the stage area, Dr. Benjamin Lorenzo walked up and welcomed me. He told me that after warming up, it would be great if I wanted to talk to the band a little about “Yellow”. (The piece they were playing) I sat down in the hall for a bit with Kolby and Chris and watched the students drift in and begin rehearsal. I hadn’t really thought about saying anything when I showed up and kicked myself for not preparing something. When I stepped on stage, I was just going to have to wing it. (…which is pretty standard for me, actually)
Dr. Lorenzo introduced me and the band gave a nice round of applause which helped calm my nerves a bit. I spoke briefly about my time at the U of A from 2002-2007 as well as how “Yellow” and the other two movements of Primary Colors came about. I wrote the first draft of Primary Colors while I was a band director in Green Forest, Arkansas. I student taught in Berryville (which is just down the street from Green Forest) the year before and wrote a crazy piece about a robot named Lazerhands for them while I was there. The students seemed to enjoy it, so Daniel Hodge asked me to write another one for his band the next year.
The three movements of Primary Colors are each based on a color and the feelings or images that pop into my head when I look at the specific color. “Yellow” is about happiness, the summer, playing at recess, school buses, and the carefree life I had as a kid. “Blue” is about sadness and the irrational feelings that often accompany sadness and is essentially about those times when you are sad and you simply don’t want to be cheered up. “Red” is about anger, passion, and simmering rage. It contains both the loudest and the softest moments of the entire piece.
As the band played through the piece, I kept getting hit by waves of nostalgia from my times working on “Yellow” when I was a director in Berryville. The band sounded so good! It was such a joy to hear such great musicians playing a piece that in many ways was the first piece that made me feel like a real composer.
When I started writing this entry, it struck me how interesting it was to feel two different parts of my musical life being brought together with this rehearsal. “Yellow” will always remind me of living and working in Berryville. I can’t hear it without thinking about Daniel Hodge bringing me up on stage after the premiere performance to shake his hand. He presented me with a box of half eaten chicken nuggets as if it was a plaque or medal! A classic Hodge moment. Another element that took my mind back to Berryville was having Kolby there (I worked with him for 2 years in Berryville. Sorry if I didn’t mention that before). We never played “Yellow” while Kolby worked with me, but there are so many moments from my past that will forever link Kolby with Berryville in my memories. Berryville was a place where I always got to work with great friends. Not everyone is so lucky in their teaching careers.
A friend of mine in college used to refer to the strange feeling of your college life and high school life colliding, such as when your college friends and high school friends meet, as “the vortex”. I was experiencing that vortex big time, except it was my college life, my band directing life, and my life as a full time composer colliding this time.
On the college side of the vortex, here I was, back where I was a student for 5 years. I parked on the same level of the parking deck as I did most days of my last two years of college (and got way too many parking tickets). The only way it might have felt even more surreal would be if the rehearsal was happening in the band hall, where I spent hours upon hours of my life, instead of Faulkner.
As the band continued to rehearse, I chimed in from time to time and we tweaked a few things, but it sounded great already! I am really looking forward to hearing the performance in a few weeks! (If you happen to be reading this before April 30th, 2019, drop by the FPAC at 7:30 and you can hear it too!) After rehearsal, I thanked Dr. Lorenzo for playing my music and having me out. His work on “Yellow” made me remember how much I loved the piece. There are moments that made me laugh as they always did when I was writing it. There were moments that I could have seen myself writing today. And there were moments that I would have written differently, but that is good. My composing voice has changed in the past decade, as have my skills. I left rehearsal loving “Yellow” just as much in 2019 as I did in 2008!
On the way out, I’m pretty sure I heard the band kicking into Michael Markowski’s “Shadow Rituals”. Talk about worlds colliding! We played that piece in Berryville and had Michael come out to work with us in a rehearsal. Here I was doing the same exact thing. It’s a small world after all.
When rehearsal was over, I walked back over to Kolby’s office to chat for a bit. While we were talking, I heard “Why do we Fall?” being rehearsed in the band hall with another band! I knew they were playing that piece, but it was still a cool feeling to be surprised to hear my own music! It has happened once before and thrilled me then as well.
Being a visiting composer is a wonderful experience. I write music in my office by myself (with occasional visits by my cat Pumpkin) listening to my computer spit out the audio over and over again. I have some decent software that makes it sound pretty good, but nothing like live musicians. I don’t remember who said this, and I’m paraphrasing, but “Music doesn’t exist until it is performed (or rehearsed). Until that moment it’s just dots and lines on paper.” Getting to hear the realization of my dots and lines is something I always cherish. This visit with Dr. Lorenzo and the University of Arkansas Red Concert Band was a great experience, and I can’t wait to hear the performance!
