Kiwanis Park Pond at dawn; Tempe, Arizona

I’m excited to be on the verge of finishing a new piece for concert band called Walden. And of course, I want to share my first draft here on my blog. To begin, here are my program notes so far:

Much of the music I have written over the last several years has been a fast, frenetic dreamcatcher of rhythm and texture. While I love this fast-paced electrifying style, it was my friend, Robert Stumpf, who first preached simplicity and, over the years, has continued to urge me to write more lyrically. With Robert’s words still echoing in the back of my head, the idea only recently seemed exciting to explore.

I suddenly had the urge to chill out and write something more pastoral — something “simple.” In an effort to uphold this simplicity, I eventually found myself thinking of Henry David Thoreau’s writings. I even found myself wandering to a neighborhood lake in the late night/early mornings, before sunrise, perhaps in a feeble attempt to relate, even if for a moment, to the life Thoreau wrote so poetically about over 150 years ago. It seemed only appropriate, therefore, to name this piece after Thoreau’s own liquid sanctuary, Walden.

My ideal of Walden, however, isn’t necessarily only calm and tranquil, but is one that is full of life — one that moves with great harmonic and rhythmic motion. There have been other musical arrangements of the same name that are all very transparent and lightly orchestrated that perhaps romanticize the lake’s magical stillness. I hope my interpretation captures a contrasting lushness, vibrance, and animation, complex in the details, but not without a few nods to tranquility. This is how I picture my own Walden to be.

Here is a MIDI mockup and a sample score. As always, if you give it a listen, please email me and let me know what you think! I’m really stoked to hear this piece live.

Episode 2: Social Network. Tune in for more at Squishy Studios!

Tonight, at the very cool Phoenix FilmBar, was the incredibly successful premiere of the Voyage Trekkers web series, created by the very talented Nathan Blackwell. Tune in for more as Nathan and Squishy Studios release new webisodes over the next several Mondays. Also: become a fan on Facebook so that the new episodes are easy to find. Let’s give some well-deserved appreciation to these guys for making it happen!

I wish I had photos from the recording session for Granted, because it was super awesome and way more interesting to look at than my black and white cover mockup (pictured above) so I’ll try to describe it with words and sounds.

Last Wednesday night, as Phoenix lay quietly powdered with dust from the previous night’s headlining haboob (the dramatic music in this video really amps up the hype… come on guys, it’s just dust), me and eight other cats were anxious waiting, drinking a pregame Dos Equis in the front parking lot of Chaton Studios in Phoenix. A violin player, a clarinet player, a bari sax player, a vib player, a string bass player, a piano player, an engineer, his intern, and I all walk into the studio.

The place is gorgeous, certainly the biggest studio I’ve ever been in (but I haven’t been in many). Dan and Trevor set up microphones as Otto, our chief engineer and owner of Chaton, preps the Protools session. While that’s happening, the chamber group rehearses to the dance of my baton. Behind the bullet-proof glass behind me is the control room, where the directors of the film have just arrived and are anxious to watch the magic of their score come to life in sync with their movie.

It’s been a long process for an independent short film, spanning from principal photography last August to now, but the musicians in front of us seem to sweeten and breath new life (literally) to the project we have gotten to know quite intimately for the last several months. Then the red light turns on — it’s go time.

The most difficult part of the process (one of the very important take-aways from the evening) was the tremendous challenge of directing a group of musicians to an established and robotic click track. Because the music is scored for a film, there are several emotional cues which need to be almost perfectly in sync with the picture at a specific moment. The click track obviously helps us keep time so that these moments can be as close to their visual cues as possible, but as I was quick to learn, this was more difficult than it seemed.

For one, the click track has a number of tempo changes, which makes it easy to throw off the consistency of time that everyone has become accustomed to. The other challenge was that, since I was the only person wearing headphones containing the click mix, either I was listening to the click trying to keep time, or I was listening to the musicians trying to listen for mistakes. Like the pat-your-head, rub-your-belly test, it proved super difficult to do both at the same time for any length of time effectively. Something had to give.

And give it did. And taketh away it also did. But then giveth back again it would sometimes do. We often got off of the click by a beat which was, on the surface, not a terrible thing, but the consequence was that the tempo changes in the tempo track I was listening to were then also off by a beat. So, say, if I had a quick change from quarter note = 86 to 144, we had to stop and start over because now the timing was off.

The solution? Instead of trying to focus on the click or focus on the musicians, I had to, at certain times, not listen to either of them. Eventually, by some black magic, the two would reunite, and after two or three takes, the changes became increasingly more consistent. That is, my conducting got more consistent.

After only two hours, we had captured multiple takes of about 6 minutes of music. Thanks to our amazing musicians and amazing engineers, the session was butter. But don’t take my word for it. Take a listen!

Music from ‘Granted’ (2011)
http://www.michaelmarkowski.com/music/granted/granted-cue1-mix2.mp3

I won’t be working on any new band commissions until the fall, and with Dreamland ready to ship, I have some time this summer to collaborate on some different projects. One project that I’m currently writing some music for is a Star Trek-inspired parody webisode series called Voyage Trekkers. According to Nathan Blackwell, the creator and director of the series, the short 2 - 3 minute episodes will launch in late July, with a new episode every week.

The video above is a little behind-the-scenes teaser, starring leading man (and my leading roommate) Adam Rini as Captain Sunstrike. Enjoy~

As I mentioned in my last post about Dreamland, the revision part of my writing is super important to me. I’m not ashamed to make changes or cut things or rewrite and reorchestrate large sections of music even after a piece has been premiered. I want to get things as right as I possibly can before I really commit a new work to publication and never open it in Sibelius again.

That’s why my time in Illinois and Wisconsin was so important. I was lucky to have four different amazing high school programs to test the waters. One student and aspiring composer at New Trier High School also seemed to find value in watching me make changes on-the-spot — so much so that he wrote an essay on it for class. With his permission, I’ve posted it below:

REALIZING DREAMLAND
By Brandon Waldon, New Trier High School

One of the biggest pitfalls of composing a score is leaving too much to the interpretation of the musicians performing the work. This is probably obvious to virtually all composers. I, however, needed to fail miserably in this element of composition and witness someone succeed in it before I fully understood this point.

I was lucky enough to experience such a failure and witness such a success around the same time. First, the failure: earlier last month, I had the opportunity to write and record about five minutes of music for the final scene of a local independent short film. It was my job to not only write the music but also produce some semblance of a score for the other musicians to follow. I had about a four day work period in which the music would be written, the musicians (all members of my powerpop group Friendship Enterprise) would be rehearsed once, and the song would be recorded.

Though I miraculously managed to come up with a song that sounded awesome in my head at the time, I grossly underestimated the mechanical demands of composing the piece. I assumed that my hastily written and orchestrated score would be able to communicate the sense of style, balance, and tone to the musicians with whom I was working. I assumed that any apparent musical shortcomings would be rectified with a rehearsal in which I refrained from making critical reevaluations of my orchestration and compositional choices and simply let the musicians “figure it out.” I don’t know whether I thought that it was osmosis or telepathy that would make their interpretations align with my original musical vision, but I assumed that it would happen nonetheless. The results of these assumptions were disastrously evident in the final recording: harmonies overpowered melodies. Dynamics and articulations lacked context. It certainly sounded nothing like I had intended it to sound, yet listening to that final recording, I couldn’t help but recognize that it was really no one’s fault but my own that this song was a dud.

The epic failure of what I thought would be an awesome recording left me more confused than enlightened. I listened to the track knowing what had gone wrong but wondering how I might prevent myself from making the same mistakes in the future. It was around this time that Michael Markowski, a professional wind ensemble composer, visited New Trier’s Symphonic Wind Ensemble to rehearse his newest piece, Dreamland.

Evident throughout our time with Markowski was that he was primarily concerned with the cohesion and accuracy of the score rather than the interpretive capabilities of individual musicians or sections (as is often the case with a guest conductor who is primarily concerned with developing musicians rather than music). To Markowski, this advanced stage of composition appeared to be more scientific than artistic: How would he bring out the ideas he heard in his head onto the written page? How would he ensure that conductors and musicians understood his original artistic goals? How could he allow those performers to be musical in a way that will communicate his original intentions?

That band rehearsal also allowed for a bit of time for me talk one-on-one with Mr. Markowski. When I asked him what the most important element of the composing process was once he had orchestrated a work, he said that interactions with live musicians (such as his time with my wind ensemble) were inarguably the most valuable because it allowed him to reevaluate his orchestration ideas. For him, as with most composers, an expectation is that musicians will be musical and that conductors will help elicit this musicality. However, without an accurate and thorough score, as well as ample time to work with live musicians, other people will never be capable of accurately interpreting a composer’s original musical thought. It was no wonder, then, that Markowski had spent months working on Dreamland, or that he was in the process of a multi-school tour in which several different ensembles would read, interpret, and further the editing process of the final Dreamland score.

And there is evidence of such development, even in the forty minutes we were able to spend with Mr. Markowski. New Trier’s Symphonic Wind Ensemble made two recordings of Dreamland: one before Markowski’s arrival and one after the rehearsal that Markowski used to further edit his score. In both recordings, Symphonic Wind plays competently and musically as an advanced high school wind ensemble would be expected to do. However, the two recordings are remarkably different in character in the spots where it was evident that Markowski was not hearing his original ideas come to life.

Reviewing a heavily marked draft of the Dreamland score and the reference recordings we made as a wind ensemble, one spot that seems to stand out for me is around measure 80, where the character of the horn and trombone lines have been altered quite dramatically from one recording to the next. As one can hear in the final edition of Dreamland, these lines have a smoother, legato texture that brings new artistic direction to that section. We also completely removed horn and euphonium lines in the introduction, which adds clarity to what was before over-scored. The end result of Markowski’s efforts with Symphonic Wind was a piece that not only sounds more aurally cohesive but that undoubtedly fulfills Markowski’s original intentions more thoroughly.

I’m certain that Mr. Markowski made more changes to Dreamland, even after his time with our wind ensemble. His time and energy commitment to the piece is both evident and humbling to someone who is only beginning to learn the real demands of composing. I encourage young composers and songwriters of any style to check out Dreamland and other works by Markowski to experience the creative capabilities of a young professional composer who thoroughly understands that process.

Although it might be a little dramatic to call these learning opportunities “failures,” I find it comforting to know that making mistakes and trying new things is what helps us learn and helps us grow and helps us do it a little better the next time. That’s progress!

By the way, if you haven’t heard New Trier’s recording of Dreamland, you can listen to it here!

May has been a pleasantly busy month and the highlight of it all was definitely my recent trip to Illinois for the world premiere of a new work called Dreamland. The five-day trip was sort of a Midwest tour because I ended up working with four of the commissioning high schools, between Chicago and Madison, all in that short time. (Two words: cheese curds).

It was very helpful to spend an entire week on a piece that, until that point, I’d never heard live before. Usually, I end up making at least one significant revision to a new piece (because MIDI is often deceptive in certain areas) and the chance to work with four separate (really good!) high schools really showed me where the weaknesses and strengths were. It also gave me a good impression of how other bands might interpret some of my phrases and dynamic markings. Some shaping to certain phrases that I thought might be instinctive to the performers weren’t, perhaps, marked as clearly as I would have liked. Luckily, I can now go back and make these moments more effective so that future ensembles will have a better indication of the effects I’d like to achieve.

I think hearing your music performed live (and I’m sure 9 out of 10 composers agree) is one of the most important and educational experiences a younger composer can have. I’d much rather pay $20,000 in tuition to performers to rehearse, play, and record my music (and be helping out the musician’s economy!) than for the opportunity to just read about music in a book and listen to CDs (I can do that at libraries and libraries are free). The opportunity to be bold, make changes, and try new things in a rehearsal is exhilarating, and, (NEWS FLASH), composers often don’t get it 100% right the first time. I am certainly no stranger to the digital eraser.

The world premiere of Dreamland (I call it the “world premiere” because I was in attendance at the performance, although one of the other commissioning schools — Lake Zurich High School — gave the “first performance ever” two weeks earlier) was given by the St. Charles East High School, under the direction of Mr. Jim Kull who also organized the consortium to make the piece happen. I invite you to listen to their performance at the link below. I have also included a link to the original MIDI mockup so you can hear just how much the students at St. Charles East brought the piece to life in a way that no computer (I hope) ever will.

Enjoy!

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Dreamland (2011)
St. Charles East High School Wind Ensemble; Jim Kull, conductor
May 17, 2011
http://michaelmarkowski.com/music/dreamland/dreamland-stcharles.mp3

Dreamland (MIDI mockup)
http://www.michaelmarkowski.com/music/dreamland-demo-2011-03-21.mp3