People have often told me that my [wind band] music sounds very “cinematic,” and then they almost always follow up with, “why don’t you write music for movies?” If only it were that easy!

Frankly, I don’t think I’d be very good at it — the long hours, the grueling schedule, the cutting room floor — I tend to like my 8 hours of sleep and my music has become really personal to me that I definitely wouldn’t want it on any floor. There are lot of composers who specifically study film scoring at places like USC or Berklee or UCLA (my friend and fellow composer, Vinny Oppido, happens to be AMAZING at it), and these composers live in media hotspots like Los Angeles where all the significant work is and where all the important people are. You probably can’t learn to surf in Mechanicsville, Iowa — you’ve got to be where the beaches are.

One of the things that has always turned me off about film/tv composing is that in movies (and particularly in television dramas), music is often used primarily as an ambience and emotional soundscapes. I’m not saying this is a bad thing at all because music absolutely has a place and when music and visuals marry like this, music should absolutely respect its place (often) in the background. For me, however, I like writing music that is dramatic, often in the foreground, which is why I love writing concert music. In a concert hall, the music, itself, is the main event. This means that I can go crazy with it and do whatever I want because no one, other than me, is telling me what or how to write.

Again, I’m not saying I don’t like writing music for film — I’m saying that the concert music world and the commercial film music world require two very different mind sets. One of the most important elements in the film music mindset is the collaborative mindset.

Collaboration is such a powerful tool to help make big ideas even bigger and better than they would/could/should ever individually be. (Author Jonah Lehrer even structured the second half of his book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, dedicated to understanding successful collaborations). Composers often like to think of working on a film as a “collaboration” — especially if the composer is young and the filmmakers don’t have much of a budget to pay said composer. But the reality is that it’s not a true collaboration in that, according to auteur theory, the director ultimately has creative control and gets the majority credit for the overall creative “vision.” So for composers, this means that the most important thing we have to do is to attempt, with all our might, to get into the director’s head as soon as possible. If we composers are not on the same creative page as the director, we could end up wasting a lot of time and effort writing music cues that might ultimately have to be completely rewritten or perhaps not be used at all.

Scary, right? No, not really —  that’s just how the world of film music works.

Again, I’m totally not anti-film projects. I actually love collaborating on these different projects from time to time. One of my favorite collaborations to date, Voyage Trekkers, (which I’ve written about before) has been an immensely gratifying experience. Even recently I was asked to sequence a short orchestral score to a trailer for the Gaudioso Twins’ film, Duke. You can view the trailer to their film on the front page of the movie’s website. Even though it took me a rough 4 or 5 tries before the final music cue fit the tone of the film and matched the director’s vision, the ability to wade through these rejections is what I think is absolutely essential to being a successful film composer, even on a small scale. If you, as a composer, accept this mindset and are willing to give (and give up) your best work for the best interests of the project, I think it is absolutely possible to have a successful collaboration that everyone can be proud to own.

Having the urge to create is an amazingly overwhelming (and sometimes underestimated) feeling. In preschool, I loved to draw, and had several journals full of drawings. In first grade, I used to draw Garfield cartoons that my teacher would photocopy and hand out to the class to color during free-time. In fourth grade, I published a book of [terrible] poetry, decorating each page with sketches drawn with colored pencils and later setting heavy books on the glued bind to ensure the pages didn’t fall out. I even sold a few copies to my teachers. In fifth grade, I spent a bunch of time creating interactive, “choose-your-own-adventure” type stories using one of the first versions of HyperStudio. In sixth grade, I created my own homemade planetarium, with instructions drawn up by my science teacher, and put on magic shows (like, maybe two of them) for kids in my neighborhood. Yeah, I even had business cards. They might as well have said “PIMP.”

I also spent several lunch periods messing around with one of the first versions of Finale on the band room computer. In 7th grade, I made my first film for an English project, complete with rockets, fog, and strobe lights (we will still in the 1990’s then, and iMovie didn’t yet exist, so it was at least somewhat impressive). In 8th grade, I made a CD of some of the very first pieces I had ever composed and, again, even sold a few copies to my teachers. In 9th grade, I was making short Flash animations and student-conducting our band; in 10th grade, I recorded my very first performed-live composition; in 11th grade, my friends and I debuted a 45 minute movie-musical to our high school student body; and in 12th grade, I was writing and producing comedy with my friends as part of a sketch comedy troupe. Looking back, the urge to create never stopped. I hope it never does.

Few things upset me more than when someone or something tries to suppress this urge. The most significant turning point came during my first semester of college when I was not admitted into the School of Music. My urge to create was all but killed (as I’ve written about before). I think this is why, over the last few years, my music has become increasingly personal to me. Call it a “coming of age” or “whatever,” but I think for the first time in my life, my music is beginning to “mean something,” at least on a more personal level. For those of you — particularly high school students about to enter college — who might share this creative urge and have your own hurdles and hedge mazes, I just wanted to share this short, personal narrative:

Right on time, as if it were part of some beautiful narrative design, I was thrown one of those magical sticks that just happens to find their way into people’s spokes, bucking them off of their bikes and into the thickets. My first amazing failure had hit; as an undergraduate, I was not admitted into the School of Music. And just like “that,” the thing I thought I had worked the hardest for, the thing I thought I was the most passionate about, the thing I thought I had committed the rest of my days to, seemed to have vanished out of sight all too easily.

The obvious answer seemed that, maybe, I was supposed to dedicate myself to something other than music and, maybe, I still am. I was young, full of mistakes, still lived at home, and while I had very supportive and mathematical parents, I was still encouraged—as many are—to study “something to fall back on.”

And so I fell, down the rabbit hole and into a dark room with a strange light flickering 24 times every second. From that point, I was silently declared a film major, but I was convinced that I was not there to make movies. It was a strange world, a world where I didn’t quite understand how I fit in, but it was a world where I could secretively keep some kind of creativity in my life.

The more movies I watched, the more little musical quarks popped out and off the screen. Instead of studying melodies and melodic development, I studied Joseph Campbell’s abstractions of the “hero’s journey” and character arc, countermelodies acting as supporting or contrasting characters to our heroic main themes. Instead of sonata allegro, rondo, and other tried-and-true musical forms, I studied fundamentals of story telling and the three-act blockbuster structure. Cliffhangers at the end of television shows rang loudly as V⁷ cadences, less the resolution. Instead of scales and modes, I studied how color and visual texture help to create mood and establish tone. Instead of musical motifs, I learned the importance of visual patterns. I was bombarded with these remarkable connections and suddenly had the realization that I was inadvertently getting a degree in music, although it says “film” on my diploma. Steve Jobs studied calligraphy in college, but his passion was computers; I studied cartoons.

I believe it’s easy to commit ourselves to the things that we want when the things we want are so comfortably right in front of us. But when the things we worked so hard for and became so impassioned with are suddenly out of reach, we must realize that maybe these things never left but perhaps are only playing hide-and-seek, masquerading with us in the thickets.

Normally I try to keep this blog focused on music and other creative projects and leave food blogging to the professionals, but last Monday, I had the distinct pleasure of finally learning how to make pierogies — a traditional Polish potato/cheese filled pasta dish — the Markowski way.  With my grandma supervising, my aunt as head chef, and myself as sous-chef, the three of us prepared several dozen pierogies over the course of about four hours or so. As I quickly learned, making homemade pierogies is a tedious process, so you better not just like pierogies, you better LOVE them. The purpose of this blog is to not only share this recipe with the Internet, but mostly, so I can remember how to make them in two weeks after I forget.

The first thing we made was the potato and cheese filling. According to grandma, we could double this recipe depending on how many pierogies we wanted to make, but since we were just feeding ourselves and a few close friends, we only used about 4 lbs of potatoes, which, in the grand scheme of pierogi-making, is apparently not a lot.

PIEROGI FILLING:
4 lbs potatoes, skinned and mashed
1 ½ lbs “Farmer Cheese”
4-5 slices of American cheese
Salt to taste

Optional: mix in fried onions

The oddest ingredient in the mix is the “Farmer Cheese” which, apparently, is relatively hard to find — at least in state not exactly known for its cheese (Arizona). My aunt actually brought this package from back home in Massachusetts.

When my grandma was growing up in New York City, my great grandma Markowski would always add in a few slices of American cheese, too. However, neither my grandma nor my aunt exactly know why — I wonder if it’s something she did after she emigrated here from Poland.

Once we had the fundamental potato/cheese filling, we split the batch in half and added fried onions to one half. I’m a big fan of adding fried onions. They give the pierogies a deliciously sweet and smokey flavor, especially if you fry them. Yum!

Once the filling was prepared, it was time to get our hands dirty. In a large mixing bowl, we added 2 ½ cups of flour, 1 egg, and 8 ounces of sour cream. (Try to stay away from “fat free” sour cream as the fat is one of the key ingredients that keeps the dough together. For this batch, we simply used a “light” sour cream.) Once everything was in the bowl, I dived right in with both hands, mixing everything together. We then spread some flour on an open countertop, took the dough out of the bowl, set it on the floured countertop and began kneading it, pressing it with the palms of both hands, folding it over onto itself, again and again. If the dough appears to be too dry at first, keep kneading it until it feels better. It probably just needs more love. Every batch of dough will be a little different, and we’re not mass producing Mrs. T’s here, so let’s not freak out if it isn’t perfect.

PIEROGI DOUGH:
2 ½ cups flour
1 egg
8 ounces of sour cream

It’s incredibly important that the dough not dry out. We only worked with about a dozen small balls of dough at a time so we kept the rest of it in the mixing bowl, loosely covered by a plate, until we were ready for it.

Now we were really ready to start making them! On the floured countertop, I would take a small dough ball, flatten it with my palm, and then flatten it again on each side using a rolling pin. Grandma remembered that my great grandma would also lightly pull at the outer edges of the flattened dough to help make an even bigger dough blanket. This wasn’t really necessary, however, since we used pretty big balls of dough to start with.

Then, I took a small spoon full of filling, folding the dough in half over it, and pinched the edges tightly. Be sure to seal the pierogies tightly so that they don’t fall apart when you boil them! Dust both sides with a bit more flour for appearance.

They just look super classy this way.

There’s also an old Polish legend that warns you never to count your pierogies as you make them, for fear that the pierogi spirits will also tear them fall apart in the boiling water. And after all this work, a mutilated pierogi would be tragic.

With all of the filling gone, and who-knows-how-many piegories on the kitchen counter, it was time to taste-test. In a large pot of salted, boiling water, we put our first few pierogies. After 2-3 minutes, they began to float towards the surface, where they continued to cook in that boiling water for another 5-6 minutes.

Meanwhile, we tucked the other pierogies in for a nap, in an attempt to avoid the dough from drying out.

Once they were done boiling, my aunt very lightly and quickly dipped them into a bath of cold water before moving them to a large dish that, as you can see, was lightly primed with butter. The butter helps them from sticking to one another, those friendly little devils.

While the pierogies are perfectly delicious to eat simply boiled — yum! — many people like to fry them in a little butter until lightly browned. This gives them a subtle crunch, which I preferred for the potato/cheese/fried onion ones. Seriously. PIEROGIES ARE AMAZING. Definitely worth the 4-hour prep.

Wow. You could play a drinking game with how many times I’ve typed the word “pierogi” or “pierogies” in this blog. In fact, please do. These are even better when complimented with beer.

Na zdrowie!

March was nothing short of a whirlwind of music. Over Spring Break, Christopher Charbonneau gave the world premiere performance of my three-movement piece for alto saxophone and piano (aptly titled 3 Sketches for Alto Saxophone and Piano) at the North American Saxophone Alliance’s biennial conference hosted at Arizona State University. If you haven’t heard this piece yet, the MIDI mockups are still online, but only for a short time. During the next few weeks, Chris will be woodshedding the sketches leading up to some exciting studio time where we will record the work live. So stay tuned for that! I expect it will be nothing short of fun and awesome and sexy.

And, as of Sunday afternoon, I finished the first draft to my newest work for wind band, called Elixir. The work is suitable for high school bands — I call it a true “grade 4″ work — and was commissioned for Scott Coulson, who recently retired as the director of bands for Poteet High School in Mesquite, Texas.

I’ve been lucky to have a short history with the amazing musicians at Poteet. In fact, the Poteet Pirate Band performed Shadow Rituals at TMEA back in 2008 and also used Instinctive Travels as a part of their 2010 marching show.

Knowing that this commission was intended as a gift for Scott and to celebrate his 24 years at Poteet, I like to think of Elixir as a musical “toast” to a long and healthy life — and a “cheers” to the 24 years of that epic journey. With that said, I’d like to officially share the MIDI mockup and sample PDF score with you. Enjoy!

One thing that I’ve noticed over the last several weeks has been the surprising number of high school and university bands who have invited me to Skype with them. It seems that Skype and other video conferencing services are becoming a great tool for schools to help enhance — and perhaps even revamp — the educational experience.

Last week, for the first time ever, I had the fascinating opportunity of Skyping with the Chancellor High School Symphonic Band as they prepared Shadow Rituals for an upcoming festival performance. I have no hesitation about Skyping with a group and talking about the music, in generalizations, but when I’m asked to actually clinic a musical performance via the Internet, my skepticism of new technology emerges.

This might get a little technical, so please excuse the geek inside me:

My biggest concern was the gray area known as internet audio quality. When one streams video and audio over the internet, the encoded quality is often set to be a variable bitrate (VBR). To oversimplify, what this means is that the audio encoding software (in this case, Skype) can choose to stream the audio (and video) at a lower or higher quality depending on how stable the internet connection is. All of this happens in real-time so if you’re listening to a 4-minute band piece, the quality of the audio can be a roller coaster.

In addition to audio streaming, a lot of video cameras have built in audio compressors. To oversimplify again, this means that when a band plays music really loudly, the volume on the camera is automatically going to lower so that the sound doesn’t clip and distort and sound like static. Likewise, when a band plays really softly, the compressor is going to turn the volume up. In a piece with lots of dynamic contrast like Shadow Rituals, a compressor can cause a roller coaster of differing volumes.

So after all that, what I hear on the other end of the Internet can sound something like this:
http://michaelmarkowski.com/music/mp3/shadow-rituals-skype.mp3

It actually sounds really cool, but it definitely makes it difficult for me to give any kind of quality critique.

Lucky for me, we anticipated these audio issues and Ryan Addair, the director and mastermind who arranged our Skype session, emailed me a high quality recording of his group a few days earlier. With this, I was able to listen more closely and take more accurate notes and have a much stronger idea of what to discuss when the band projected my face on the big screen a few days later.

And yes, Ryan’s band rocks this piece! They are going to have no problems giving an exciting performance come festival time.

From a teacher’s point-of-view, the interaction was “an experience that [the students] won’t forget.” Mr. Addair explains that after having already spent several weeks rehearsing the piece, it provided his students with a fresh perspective. ”When I say, ‘trombones, this part needs to have more power,’ it’s just me saying it. However, when the actual creator of the music, who wrote it with a specific sound in mind, says the same thing, that has a much greater impact on them.”

The experience has been more and more fascinating to me, too, the longer I reflect on it. While Skype may never be a perfect replacement for being somewhere, live and in-person, where I can share my passion in a way that no emoticon can accurately express, I definitely see how this simple miracle of technology can not only enhance the learning environment but, to some degree, also inspire.

But don’t take my word for it… here are some thoughts directly from Chancellor High School students:

“Being able to talk to the composer of the piece of music is a lot more effective than having another professional musician do a clinic with us.  And just meeting him, that was cool too.” —Julie Stoneham

“The influence and experience gained was invaluable, as was seeing the true inspiration behind the piece.” —Will Dickinson

“It was an honor and privilege to work with the man who wrote this incredible piece.” —Ross Roderick

And perhaps most importantly:

“He was hot.” —Tessa Bunting

I finally finished the first complete draft to all three movements of my latest piece, 3 Sketches for Alto Saxophone and Piano. I love band music, but it’s been absolutely a blast writing for a different instrumentation — not to mention that alto saxophone is the instrument I grew up playing in junior high and high school.

It all started with my friend and killer saxophonist, Christopher Charbonneau. With the North American Saxophone Alliance holding their biennial conference here at Arizona State University next month (during Spring Break, so you know it’s gonna be bumpin’), Chris pitched the idea that it would be cool to submit a recital proposal that would focus on saxophone literature being written by younger composers. Fantastically, his proposal was accepted! The music he will be performing will include a hip piece called Hedonistic Happenings for alto saxophone, electric guitar, and piano by his friend and composer (and current roommate), Seth David Gory, in addition to performing the world premiere of my 3 Sketches.

I’m super stoked about the piece. As a matter of fact, following the premiere, Chris and I plan to take the piece into a studio and get a really polished recording. But for now, I just wanted to tickle your earbuds with a MIDI mockup of Sketch #3. Enjoy!

The Kennedy Brothers just announced that their short film, Granted, has been accepted into the Phoenix Film Festival and will screen on Saturday, March 31, and Sunday, April 1. For more information about their film at the festival, you can visit the festival website here. The Kennedys have also released a brand new trailer for the short film which you can watch below! And oh yeah, if you didn’t know, I wrote the music! Enjoy!