I was happy to have finished the first draft to my latest piece As Midnight on a Moonless Night before I flew to California for a short visit and performance of Dreamland at California State University, Fullerton. While Dr. Marc Dickey (who recently penned a wonderfully interpretive and equally analytical article on Shine for this year’s MBM Times Magazine) has been on sabbatical, I was introduced to fantastic young conductor, Dustin Barr, who took the reigns as interim director in addition to his fulltime gig as director of bands at Mt. San Antonio College. As you can see and hear by the short YouTube clip above, he made amazing music with the Fullerton Symphonic Band. I can’t wait for us to collaborate like that again! Seriously. Amazing conductor. Amazing guy.

Then it was off to Chicago for what was my fifth Midwest Clinic.

In the photo above, John Darling, Kevin Jedele, Christopher Tucker, and Jeff Gershman all pose for a patented “Markowski” photo. 2 years later and it’s still fun to make fun of. I guess.

It’s always good to catch up with friends and colleagues that I haven’t seen all year, and even though I’m no longer published with Manhattan Beach Music, it’s still good to catchup with the Manhattan Beach family of composers, like Joni Greene and Frank Ticheli. 

This was a particularly fantastic Midwest experience because I had the honor of having two — TWO! — remarkable performances of my music. The first was Turkey in the Straw performed by the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts Wind Symphony under the direction of Mr. Shawn Barat. As you can hear by the short video that I was able to sneak during their dress rehearsal, they gave an incredibly tight and eccentric performance — and T.i.t.S. has got to be that flavored, otherwise all the details and fragments just sound like, well, as YouTube aficionado Randomnessocity858 stated in a comment directed towards the Hong Kong Tak Ming Philharmonic Winds’ performance:

“sounds REALLY broken up, it was like listening to 10 seconds of random playing, then 3 seconds of melody, and then more random playing. Maybe a simpler arrangement would make it sound more solid? I know what Turkey in the Straw should sound like and this was disappointing since I was expecting an orchestra to make it sound epic, but instead there was just too much amelodic filler crammed in.”

Haters gonna hate.

You would think the awesomeness would end there, but no way. The next night, the Springdale Har-Ber Wind Symphony, under the direction of Mr. Jeremy Ford, gave an incredibly moving performance of Shine to a packed Midwest Clinic ballroom. Seriously, there had to have been a good 1,500 people in there, but then again, my eyes are often bigger than my stomach. Again, as you’ll hear from the short clip I snuck on my iPhone during their dress rehearsal, this band made some mad beautiful music.

It was a perfect Midwest Clinic this year. AND it even snowed on the last day. Definitely a win.

This week was an amazing week of traveling. The first stop was North Mesquite High School where their director, Jeff Jones, and the North Mesquite marching band has been preparing an “all Markowski” show called “Out There - Music from Beyond the Mark.” Like I mentioned in my last post, their show included music from Out There, Shine, Sitting, and Shadow Rituals, all fantastically arranged by composer/arranger Ryan Janus.

Over the last few years, I’ve gotten a lot better at knowing what to say about my own music in front of different ensembles, but when “points” and “moving your feet” and these things called “sets” are involved, I have to retrain myself a little bit. Marching bands are great (though I skipped out on this in high school), but I think it’s really easy to forget how musical they can actually be (which, I’m sure is no easy feat when 100+ pages of drill is involved).

In Texas, there are lots of marching band experts who know the game well, so my approach was to coach the students exactly as if they were performing their show indoors in a more concert-like setting. That is, I wanted to concentrate on more subtle aspects of the music that were not necessarily on the page, such as bigger phrasing ideas, blending, and knowing exactly what melody or idea to listen for. The group was incredibly receptive to my ideas, and I’m really anxious to see (and hear) how these ideas affect their next marching competition.

With less than 12 hours to sleep and repack in Arizona, I flew next to San José State University where Dr. Edward Harris and the San José State University Wind Ensemble were preparing to perform one of my newest compositions, Dreamland. Dr. Harris has programmed much of my music with his ensembles over the last few years, including performing Turkey in the Straw with the San José Wind Symphony, Tidal Forces with a San José Summer Music Camp, and has made a fantastic recording of Instinctive Travels which you can listen to here on my website. And now, he has done me a big favor to help produce a great new recording of Dreamland which I will post here soon!

The piece calls for a Fender Rhodes electric piano, as a timbre to pay homage to artist Gary Wilson, and while almost all synthesizers these days have a Rhodes patch, I totally dorked out at the sight of an actual Mark II Rhodes Stage Piano! Here’s to you, Gary!

It’s definitely been a big week. Walden even premiered the same night as the Dreamland performance so I will post that recording, too, as soon as Lawrence Stoffel at CSU Northridge sends it to me. It’s going to be hard for this next week to top the last.

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!

//

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

I just got back from a wonderful residency at Berryville High School in Berryville, Arkansas where the band, under the direction of a super duper guy by the name of Daniel Hodge (see endless trophies above), performed an incredibly exciting performance of Shadow Rituals. Berryville High is the only high school in the very small town (population ~5,000), and it turns out that they don’t even have a concert hall. Instead, they perform all their concerts in the Berryville Arena.

You might think, at first, that this is a bit of an odd set-up for a band concert, but to the contrary, I’m starting to think that more concerts should be held in venues like this (and not just pep band assemblies). But seriously, I’ve never attended a concert where I felt more comfortable or more welcomed and where the audience literally cheered after every piece.

And no, nobody sang the National Anthem.

Parents and students from neighboring schools packed the joint (this photo was still about 15 minutes prior to the concert). I don’t think that I’ve been to a school yet — especially a high school — where the community cared and supported music as much as they do in Berryville. And while they may not have a performance hall (yet), their band boosters with the help of the Carroll County Music Group work tirelessly to raise money to provide their students with other unique opportunities and I’m so grateful to have been a part of one, even if for only a day.

Holy cow. Somehow December seemed to slip right by me, and somewhere in there, I woke up and found myself at the Midwest Clinic in Chicago. Although it seemed somewhat lesser in attendance than last year, we still had plenty of people listening to new music at the Manhattan Beach music booth.

I was/am excited to hype two of my own new pieces: Tidal Forces and Shine. I’m still not exactly sure why there’s some kind of spooky astronaut on the cover of Shine (after all, nobody likes astronauts), but it’s not about the shiny covers, right? It’s about the music! The music!

On Thursday night, the Dekaney High School Wind Ensemble gave an amazing performance of Instinctive Travels under the direction of Trent Cooper (which, by the way, is not an easy piece). They also performed John Mackey’s piece Xerxes. I don’t think I’ve ever signed so many programs or taken so many pictures… these players were remarkably polite and professional. It was certainly a humbling performance.

That’s really all the news from Chicago this year other than, yeah, it was cold. I think it’s about time to wipe 2010 off the shoes and jump right into 2011. Here we go!