Explore Your CSO Experience

“With the new ‘EyePhone,’ you can watch, listen, ignore your friends, stalk your ex… even check your email while getting hit by a train….” – “Attack of the Killer App,” Futurama

While the 1979 release of the Sony Walkman was revolutionary, it was merely the first salvo in the personal media barrage.  Now, thirty-one years later, the ubiquitous iPod has created a society of individuals that thrive on personalized soundtracks for their day-to-day existence.

I’m an infamous late-adopter of new technology, and I dug in with both heels and resisted the iPod when it first came out.  I clearly remember a discussion I had with a proselytizing Apple disciple, who outlined a fairly solid rubric of benefits to iPod ownership.  I wasn’t sold, but could see the value in such a device.

Eventually, I was thrust into the world of MP3 players by my sister, who was sweet enough to give me one in April 2007 as a college graduation present.  Before long, I was thoroughly on the bandwagon.

In March 2009, my iPod was accidentally dropped for the last time, and decided to quit functioning.  I was devastated, and couldn’t afford to replace it at the time, so I hoisted out my CD wallets – three cases of 200 CDs each – and tailored my daily music the old-fashioned way.

Now, as I sit here listening to Leon Redbone on my new iPod – a 160 GB classic, half full already after uploading my tunes this weekend – I am filled with contemplative musings on the pros and cons of the personal music revolution.  My eighteen-month hiatus from the iPod, it seems, has changed the way I listen.

There is something charming about the physicality of a CD.  Holding a disc in your hand, complete with album art and lyrics, is both nostalgic and aesthetically appealing to a certain demographic (myself included).  This was the primary defense in my aforementioned discussion with the Apple zombie; he acquiesced to the fact, but since then Apple has gone to great lengths to include album art, including cover art on iTunes and on the screen of the latest iPod generations.  While this isn’t a problem that should be considered fixed – I still want my back cover, liner notes, and lyrics – it’s one step closer to my biggest beef with the digital music innovation.

The other downside to the iPod is that it has practically ruined the album as a cohesive work of art, and acted as an enabler for an entire generation of Attention Deficit Disorder listeners.  With your entire record collection literally at your fingertips, the temptation is far too great to skip from song-to-song on multiple albums, or – even worse – to skip to your favorite parts of a song.  For centuries we had attention spans and were content to sit through entire symphonies; now, we’re pained to endure a full three-minute pop song.

The counter to this particular complaint is that it puts more pressure on the artist to be consistent: if people don’t like every single track on your record, they simply don’t have to listen to it (or, in the age of à la carte iTunes purchases, they simply don’t have to purchase the unappealing tracks).

Still, even with these iQualms, I must say that I am very glad to have my iPod back.  It cuts down unspeakably on car clutter, doesn’t skip while walking or running, and is always ready with a song appropriate to my mood.  I personally think that, in the right hands, iPods are a boon to classical music – while I may not want to start the day with Haydn, I may well wish to end it that way, and I’m much more likely to quickly thumb my way to the “Surprise” Symphony than to drag it out of a cumbersome CD wallet.

Like any young technology, the impact of iPods and their ilk is just now being understood.  While I miss the old guard – the days of record stores, of holding a CD – it is still apparent that the personalization and ease of use inherent in digital music will prove beneficial to all musicians, both amateurs and veterans.

“It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears.
It’s a world of hopes, and a world of fears.
There’s so much that we share, that it’s time we’re aware,
It’s a small world after all.” – Old Tibetan proverb

No, just kidding.  Everyone knows those lyrics.

Last week I was stupefied to learn that the Cobb Symphony Orchestra had hired University of Wisconsin alumnus Grant Harville as Assistant Conductor and Creative Director of their organization.  While Grant and I barely dodged being enrolled concurrently – he finished his undergrad just before I matriculated, and enrolled in his Doctoral Studies soon after I graduated – as a member of the UW tuba studio, I ran into him quite a few times at parties, recitals, and other events.  The tuba studio in Madison is something of an extended family.

The more I began meditating on this coincidence, however, the more I realized how relatively unremarkable it was for a musician to experience this sort of “small world” phenomenon.  The truth of the matter is that the music community is so intimate and tightly networked that these serendipitous occurrences are rather commonplace.  When you play in a new orchestra, you immediately become familiar with dozens of new individuals; those musicians became familiar with dozens of musicians in other ensembles that they’ve performed in.  It’s exponential, really.

However, a handful of events have really caught my attention over the years as being especially coincidental.  Two years ago, I began working with ukulele virtuoso Mike “Chappy” Wagner whenever he toured through the southeast.  The gig was a blind referral from a friend of mine, and I immediately hit it off with Mike and began talking about other tubists he had used in his travels.

“Whenever I’m in New York City, I often use this guy named ‘Tuba Joe,’” Mike said as we set up for the performance.  “But I’ve contacted this student up there, I think I’m going to try working with him some, too.”

I momentarily stopped pulling my horn out of its gig bag.  “Do you recall his name?” I inquired.

Mike hesitated as he tried to recall.  “Mike Marinski?  Matt something?”

“Matthew Muszynski?” I ventured with a grin.  It was indeed Matt – a close, close friend of mine from the Madison tuba studio.

Moments like this tend to swirl around Matt and me.  Last year in Helen, Georgia, I met the tuba player from a polka band who turned out to be none other than Claude Kashnig, a UW graduate who taught lessons to Matt in high school.  Compounding the coincidence was the amazing fact that he owned my old tuba teacher’s (David Mills’s) college professor’s (Connie Weldon’s) Marzan BBb tuba.

My personal list of these sorts of moments is exhausting, and I’ve probably forgotten twice as many as I remember.  They simply are so commonplace, especially in academia where so many great teachers tend to serve on the same faculty.

The aftershocks of other “small world” moments haven’t been entirely experienced until years after the fact.  When I first met my horn-playing girlfriend, I learned that she had seen the Bands of America National Honors Band perform in 2003 in Indianapolis – the year that I had been principal tubist.*

Perhaps the oddest “small world” experience that my musical travels have brought me was my 2004 venture to Denver, Colorado.  While not shared with another musician, the encounter was still brought about by my involvement in classical music.

The principal tuba position had opened up in the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, and after the audition I literally wandered into a restaurant that simply looked appealing – no recommendation or anything of the like.  I was seated at a (presumably) random table beside two older ladies, with whom I later struck up a conversation.  Over the course of our discourse, it was revealed that one of the ladies was the sister of my old high school’s newest coach.  1500 miles away, two people closely connected to “Denver of the East” (NC) happened to meet in “Denver of the West.”

Every single encounter I’ve had has been incredibly fascinating, and reminds me that we are all intimately connected.  Urban legend has it that any two people in the world can be connected in six links or less, and after performing for nearly fourteen years, I thoroughly believe such a statistic. 

Music unites us, and draws us together in some incredible ways.

*This summer, she and I learned of another, non-musical coincidence: my grandfather was a Doctor in Patton’s 10th Armored Division in the Battle of the Bulge.  Her grandfather served in the same division in the same battle… as a Medic.  No doubt they had met each other!

“And a bridge they remained even while singing the most startlingly chromatic of the mad prince’s compositions. Through the uneven phrases of the madrigals, the music pursued its course, never sticking to the same key for two bars together. In Gesualdo, that fantastic character out of a Webster melodrama, psychological disintegration had exaggerated, had pushed to the extreme limit, a tendency inherent in modal as opposed to fully tonal music. The resulting works sounded as though they might have been written by the later Schoenberg.” – Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Often times, the criteria for a composer’s inclusion in the Western canon is whether-or-not they are deemed avant garde.  While Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov are certainly two of the great masters of melody and the orchestral repertoire, you may be surprised to learn that they are frequently overlooked in collegiate Music History 101 curricula; unlike some of their contemporaries, composers such as these two were looking into the past for inspiration rather than pushing the barriers of convention.*

Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are the sacred triptych upon which classical music has built its church.  They are revered because they were pioneers, and were at the forefront of their discipline, ushering in the next stylistic period.

Carlo Gesualdo did not usher in the next stylistic period.  He was too early.

Gesualdo’s heavily-chromatic madrigals introduced harmonic functions the like of which would not be heard again until just before Schoenberg began dissolving tonality… two hundred years later.

In the late Renaissance, Carlo Gesualdo, Count of Conza, Prince of Venosa, and relative of Pope Pius IV,** began writing music in the popular style of the day, the Italian madrigal.  Madrigals, harmonized a capella compositions, were the vogue in Italy in part because of their close pairing of music with the text, known as madrigalisms, or word-painting.  For example, it was common for composers to set the word “mountain” to a leaping figure, or “river” to a series of running eighth notes – the goal was to emulate the words through the music.

Where's Gesualdo?

Gesualdo took these madrigalisms to the extreme.  With his subject matter often dealing with intense emotional extremes, the nobleman broke the constraints of contemporary music theory to impart the full depth of feeling within his text.  In his madrigal Io parto, the emotionally torn narrator cadences in drastically separated keys: G major, C# major, Bb major, and E major.  This use of harmonic areas separated by tritone was incredibly brazen in an era when Diabolus in Musica was still an entrenched theoretical value.***  Notably, when these cadences combine, they form a fully diminished seventh chord – in the 17^th century, before music theory was even codified.

These madrigals were also highly chromatic in a manner that would not be seen again until the Romantic era; it was not uncommon for Gesualdo to employ all twelve tones within a phrase, or to place disparate chords alongside one another (the opening of Moro, lasso, for example, pits C# major against A minor).

Some have claimed that the prodigious harmonies exhibited in Gesualdo’s compositions were an attempted form of catharsis or atonement for his sins.   The unseemly murder of the composer’s wife and her lover at Gesualdo’s own hand, as well as several other rumored killings, would have certainly colored his work; although a nobleman and thus blessed with immunity, the reports were nonetheless widespread, creating a stigma he lived with thereafter.

Whether or not his musical decisions were fueled by this homicidal history, Carlo Gesualdo’s music certainly stands apart from all other Renaissance compositions.  As Schoenberg would later push tonality to its limits and usher in a new era of musical liberation, Gesualdo pushed modality to its limits: there were simply few places to go after his contributions had been made.  The following stylistic period, the Baroque, would see the first standardized tonal music theory, and it is hard to imagine Carlo Gesualdo’s madrigals not having been a driving force in the new direction music was taking.

*While many of my musicologist colleagues and I would disagree with this statement, it nonetheless is the view espoused by professors when trying to cram the whole of Western music into one or two semesters of study.

**Pope Pius IV was Gesualdo’s mother’s uncle.

***In the Renaissance, there were very strict rules for the use of tritones, regarded at the time as harmonically unstable.

The reputation of the Cobb Symphony Orchestra continues to expand.  Recently, Executive Director Bob Sanna and Music Director Michael Alexander were interviewed on the High Velocity Radio Show.  Listen here!

When most folks attend a symphony concert, the music often inspires them to feel strong emotions.  Many people feel a sense of awe, majesty, and triumph in Ravel’s orchestration of The Great Gate of Kiev from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition; similarly, some are made uneasy when hearing Schoenberg’s seminal chamber composition Pierrot Lunaire.

While such sensations are not uncommon, some individuals walk away with an experience that is much more intense: when the orchestra begins to play, people known as synesthetes actually perceive colors.

Synesthesia is a neurological condition wherein the brain accepts stimuli from one sense and reinterprets it, providing a concurrent sensation in another avenue of cognition.  Simply put, certain sights/sounds/smells/tastes/feels invoke a specifically matched sight/sound/smell/taste/feel in a synesthete.  The condition most frequently manifests itself with letters – individuals may see every “R” as orange, or every “O” as blue.*

Some, however, are aural synesthetes.  These individuals experience colors or specific emotions according to keys, pitches, and chord qualities.**  Among the ranks of aural synesthetes are some of popular music’s superstars, including Stevie Wonder, Eddie Van Halen, and Billy Joel.

The realm of art music has also had its share of synesthetes.  More contemporary composers and performers such Michael Torke, Brooks Kerr, Hélène Grimaud, Leonard Bernstein, Jean Sibelius, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, and Amy Beach all are/were synesthetes.  One of Beach’s biographers remarked:

Amy’s mother encouraged her to relate melodies to the colors blue, pink, or purple, but before long Amy had a wider range of colors, which she associated with certain major keys. Thus C was white, F# black, E yellow, G red, A green, Ab blue, Db violet or purple, and Eb pink. Until the end of her life she associated these colors with those keys.

Ligeti experienced color changes according chord quality in addition to key:

I am inclined to synaesthetic perception. I associate sounds with colours and shapes. Like Rimbaud, I feel that all letters have a colour.” “Major chords are red or pink, minor chords are somewhere between green and brown. I do not have perfect pitch, so when I say that C minor has a rusty red-brown colour and D minor is brown this does not come from the pitch but from the letters C and D. I think it must go back to my childhood. I find, for instance, that numbers also have colours; 1 is steely grey, 2 is orange, 5 is green. At some point these associations must have got fixed, perhaps I saw the green number 5 on a stamp or on a shop sign. But there must be some collective associations too. For most people the sound of a trumpet is probably yellow although I find it red because of its shrillness …

The most famous synesthetes in the western music canon, however, were Franz Liszt and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.  Similar to Beach, keys evoked colors in Rimsky-Korsakov’s ears.  Similarly, Liszt would entreat his orchestra to play “… a little bluer,” “… deep violet,” or “Not so rose!”

As expected with individuals coming from diverse backgrounds, synesthetes do not all agree on the same color palette.  Rimsky-Korsakov and Liszt actually had an infamous disagreement about the hues of different keys; their contemporary Alexander Scriabin attempted to codify his synesthesia with a science, but to no avail.

Timbre, the “shape” of a sound, can also induce a synesthetic reaction.  Duke Ellington experienced varying colors (and textures) according to pitch, instrument, and even musician:

I hear a note by one of the fellows in the band and it’s one color. I hear the same note played by someone else and it’s a different color. When I hear sustained musical tones, I see just about the same colors that you do, but I see them in textures. If Harry Carney is playing, D is dark blue burlap. If Johnny Hodges is playing, G becomes light blue satin.

The only thing aural synesthetes agree upon are the same things that non-synesthetes agree upon: low notes are dark, high notes light, soft notes dim, loud notes bright.

There has been renewed interest in the psychological world regarding the root causes of synesthesia.  By uncovering how synesthetes’ minds work, researchers hope to more deeply understand the basic cognitive functions of the human mind.

*A violinist colleague of mine had this form of synesthesia, and didn’t realize that it wasn’t a shared human experience until her late teens.  Sceptical, I asked her to color-code my name letter-by-letter; her response was incredibly quick and consistent, with the “u”s and “h”s being identical.

**That someone experiences an emotion during music isn’t remarkable; what is remarkable about emotional reactions from aural synesthetes is the consistency of emotion.  If, for example, a synesthete connotates a major-minor seven chord as “sad,” it always sounds sad, even within a happy-go-lucky pop song.

“I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Shiny and new” doesn’t last very long in the twenty-first century. With the recent American release of pop sensation’s Lady Gaga’s remix CD, it seems that our society has stepped through the looking glass and emerged as an insatiable beast that wants the same thing again… and again….

Everything in our society gets lifted and remade anew. Remember television hawker Vince’s commercial for the Slap-Chop(tm)? Well, there’s a Slap-Chop(tm) autotune remix on YouTube. Go figure.

However, you may be surprised to discover that this habit – fashioning something new out of something old – is not a new fad unique to present culture. In truth, western music has been “remixing the classics” ever since its inception.

As far back as the very origins of polyphony (multiple-voiced music), existing melodies have been used and reused in composer’s works. Beginning in 900 AD, when composers were nigh exclusively in the employ of the Church, an existing melody – known as a cantus firmus, or “fixed song” – would be employed as the structural backbone for a new work.

The practice originated in the dark ages, coming to full bloom in the renaissance when entire masses would be constructed around a cantus firmus, a single line of the choral texture taken from an existing chant (or, as the humanists began to infiltrate the Holy See, even secular song).

The methods by which the cantus firmus was incorporated into masses were incredibly varied, from direct quotations to isorhythm, where the original melody would be preserved, albeit with its existing note values lengthened to span entire movements.

Although it survived through the Baroque and Classical periods, the habit of “remixing” melodies didn’t return to true prominence until the Romantic era, when the notion of reaching into the past for creative material embodied the philosophical ethos of the generation’s composers. Romantics, who were consumed by nostalgia and an affinity for nature, turned to the earlier work of their predecessors, contemporaries – and themselves – for musical fuel.

Although the requisite space for an extensive list of examples isn’t feasible here, one of the more interesting “remixes” an be found in Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A major. Nicknamed “The Trout Quintet,” the piece derives its alias from the fourth movement, which is a theme-and-variations setting of Schubert’s own Die Forelle, “The Trout,” a lied (German art song) composed two years prior. In addition to “The Trout Quintet,” Schubert would “remix” his own compositions on several other occassions.

The last century saw its share of borrowed inspiration as well. From Gustav mahler’s use of the French folk song Frère Jacques in Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major to jazz musicians’ affinity for chord progression contrafact, the habit of “remixing” in art music is as prevalent as in the popular scene. While it may seem on first glance that the need for constant reshaping and remaking of songs is a modern development, the truth is that composers have been doing it for years. It seems that, in truth, our tastes haven’t changed – just our attention spans.

10:16 AM – Good morning!  After doing some thinking the past few days, I’ve resolved I want the composition’s form to be as follows: A (initial melody), B, A1 (same chord changes as A, but different melody), C (“bridge”), solos, B, A1, A1.  The back half of that may change; interestingly, this new form changes my first “verse” (A) into an intro, B (originally conceived as a chorus) into the “verse,” and A1 into the “chorus.”  I’m really excited about this altered form – my compositions are usually simple binary forms, so this is a big departure for me!

10:19 AM – Always good to listen to your work after a few days with new ears.  I smoothed out a few transitions – nothing fancy, just changing the contour, or direction, of some of the lines a bit.

10:22 AM – Until just now, the B section was only tuba and saxes.  Now, the trombone doubles the melody of this section (previously only heard in the tenor sax).  Since the melody repeats once, I added trumpet backgrounds to the latter half of the B section.

10:25 AM – Time to get something down for the A1 section.  I’ve copied the saxes and tuba from the A section, but need a new melody in the trumpets and bone.  Going to listen and sing a little bit.

10:32 AM – I’ve got a relatively solid idea for an A1 section melody.  It’s more or less the same figure repeated several times, but every other time the figure is delayed by an eighth-rest.  You’ll hear what I mean when I upload the final product at the end of this post!

10:39 AM – Melody is completed and harmonized.  While I was working with the trombone, I also took out the doubling that I had written in for the first half of the B section.  Now, half is just saxes, half is everyone.

10:41 AM – Came to the realization that the horn soli transition I had written simply doesn’t work where it was written.  Thus, I’m switching things up a bit, since I do still want to use it somewhere else.

11:01 AM – Looking at chord changes for bridges, now.  Here’s hoping it goes well…

11:22 AM – Good news and bad news – while I didn’t work out a bridge, I did figure out a way to make the horn soli function as a sort of bridge for the tune.  I also discovered the basis for the next thing I want to write while I was messing around on the piano (my elbow actually hit a chord that I loved!).  It’ll be a slow tune, and this little moment of serendipity I just had is a Godsend, since slow tunes are always notoriously difficult for me to get down on paper.

11:24 AM – Now that the soli is fixed, it’s all pretty much autopilot from here.  What lies ahead are simply decisions (form, what backgrounds to choose for the solo sections, etc), and not really anything that I have to conjure out of thin air.

11:42 AM – Finished.  As mentioned above, once all the material is created, everything gets easier, and it’s only a matter of wrapping things up.

I’m rather proud of what I’ve accomplished. Listen to my brass band song – which remains untitled – here: Untitled tune. Please bear in mind that MIDI usually sounds awful (for some reason, the saxophones are WAY too present on this sound file), and that real musicians, playing with feeling and style, along with the addition of percussion, will make this sound more like music and less like a video game.

Thanks for indulging me these past few days – I think this was an interesting series of posts, and I learned a lot about myself, composing, and writing about music.

Check back next week for a new post – this time, a bit more traditional.

Breakdown of form: Intro – A (00:16) – B (00:51) – A1 (1:09) – soli break (1:26) – solo section (1:31; repeated multiple times) – A1 (2:05) – B (2:22) – A1 (2:39)

12:30 PM – A bit of a late start today – I slept in.  The camp I was teaching went really well, but the hours were pretty late.  Back in the saddle!

12:35 PM – Playing around on the keyboard yielded a nice turnaround, the material preceding the melody’s repeat.  The truth of the matter involving chord progressions is if it sounds nice in the bass, and is parsimonious – that is to say, adjacent chords retain many of the same pitches – it turns out sounding alright.

12:37 PM – Borrowing ideas from the marching band camp I just worked on.  The kids are playing an arrangement of Maynard Ferguson’s Pagliacci, and I’ve been dying to cannibalize it ever since I heard it.  Not verbatim by any stretch of the imagination, just using the same stress of beats.

12:47 PM – The progression of the turnaround is working, but I’m over thinking the end of the melody.  Time to go old school: lissen’ and sang.

12:50 PM – Singing yielded a get end to the melody… that doesn’t quite jive with what immediately precedes it in the trumpet.  I’m going to try reverse engineer it and make things dovetail a bit better.

1:04 PM – Slow going.  The end seems to stagnate – not enough rhythmic acceleration.  I’m going to use some of the previously-established rhythmic material to curb this, as well as give the piece some unification… I’ll write again in ten minutes.

1:14 PM – A little bit better.  Still stressing over the ending.  I had the melody employ some (but not all, that’s an important consideration) of the rhythmic material from the bassline, and that’s helped a bit… but nothing written for the end yet that seems to do justice to what’s come before.

1:18 PM – That’s a bingo! (LINK)  Duh, Josh.  If you want the melody to have the sense of finality but not cessation, you don’t end it on the root.  End it on the third.  Part of what I love about September is that you can imagine it going on for days; I want to evoke that same feeling, and using the chord third as the melody’s last pitch will help with that… now to address the fact that the second trumpet has no material thus far, but that should be easy – harmony and chord padding (long notes that support the melody).

1:27 PM – Interesting problem.  I want the second trumpet to provide background harmony start on the “and” of one and three.  However, the trombone has the same pitch I intended for the second trumpet on the downbeat of one: ergo, in execution, it will sound like he was meant to enter with the trombone and simply missed his entrance.  Avoiding issues like this one of the foremost problems I have as a writer.

1:33 PM – I’ve compromised by simply adding the second trumpet as harmony for the first, as opposed to general “ensemble” support.  This means that the second trumpet part will be (roughly) in rhythmic unison with the melody, yet playing different pitches.

1:34 PM – By using a call-and-response technique throughout the verse, having everyone play together at the end of the melody will provide a nice contrast.  The trombone will double the melody in the first trumpet… still hammering out harmony for the second.

1:45 PM – Finished with the verse.  Really happy with the finished product, even if it was such a pain to get from my brain to the page.  This has been taking a bit longer than usual, and I’m a hair fried.  I’ll move on to the chorus after a short break.

2:26 PM – Okay, maybe not so short of a break.  Starting on the chorus now – I have some changes in mind, I just need to build a bassline for them that changes the feel a bit.

2:37 PM – Got a good bassline.  90% inspiration this time, only 10% perspiration.  Melody time!

2:50 PM – Simpler is almost always better with melodies.  This one I came up with (for the saxes in the chorus) consists of five notes.  Five notes. That’s it.  I need to remember to not get “too note-y”.

2:53 PM – Adding the bari sax to the tenor in harmony, to make everything sound fuller.  Going much better than earlier!

3:00 PM – I feel like, two years after starting to write, I’m finally utilizing baritone saxophone in its proper element: supporting the tenor, but, more importantly, also supporting the tuba.  Doubling, taking over – this is what the bari was meant to do in this ensemble.  I currently have bari doubling me on one of my cooler licks, and I think it’s going to sound great.

3:25 PM – I tried a new transition method.  For me, transitions are always one of the hardest things about writing… trying to make two contrasting ideas sound like they go together is fiendishly difficult for me.  In this composition, I’m writing a highly technical horn four measure group horn soli that will help “blur the lines” between the chorus and the verse.  I think it’s going to work, even if I only have the first, third and fourth measures down thus far.

3:30 PM – Utilizing call and response once more to fill in measure three of the transition.  It’s going to unison for the entire ensemble up until the last five notes, which will elide into a prep chord that will take us back again.

3:37 – Stopping for the day.  I need to answer some bigger questions about the form of the piece – it doesn’t need to get too long and rambling, but I do want to add a bridge to the proceedings.  Still, I’m very happy with what I have thus far. 

Thanks for indulging me in this experiment.  Check back later this week for the final installment, and to catch a listen to the finished product!

Cobb Symphony Orchestra Attracts Outstanding Executive Director

In yet another step toward achieving its vision of becoming a leading role model for community symphonies nationally, the Cobb Symphony Orchestra has recruited a highly experienced executive for its top leadership post.  Bob Sanna founded and has chaired the New York Philharmonic Free Concert Committee of Long Island for ten consecutive years. The concert is Long Island’s largest public event.  He has also won dozens of national and international creative and media awards, and most recently served as President and Creative Director for Sanna Mattson MacLeod, Inc., a full-service advertising agency based in New York City.

“When the search committee first met, we laid out a wish list of characteristics of the perfect Executive Director,” says Todd Youngblood, Board of Trustees Chair.  “Bob fits that description and, in fact, exceeds it in all kinds of ways.  I’m really excited about the enthusiasm and skills he brings to us.”

Mr. Sanna notes, “The level of musical excellence displayed by the CSO is remarkable.  The whole organization is filled with energetic, passionate people, and I can’t wait to dive in and try to help continue its expanding service to our community.”

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Arts Critic Pierre Ruhe takes notice!  Read more.

“Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.”  Thomas Alva Edison

As a composer, I frequently am asked: “How do you write a song?  Where do you even start?”  The answer I give is usually a long and involved ramble through my creative process, and usually leaves people none the wiser.

Enter the blog entries for today and twice more next week: a compositional logbook of sorts.  In the following paragraphs, I will provide a detailed, time-stamped account of my frustrations, inspirations… and perspirations.

While sometimes tunes do come at me through the ether, as if writ on high – the last one did – well over half of my compositions are labors of love, the process of filtering an existing composition’s style through my own sensibilities.  Over the past few months, I’ve actually written little – partially due to writer’s block, partially due to general business.  After all, my band just finished it’s first CD – what is the rush to try and get more material out the door?

I live in the future.  I’m already thinking about the next album, and I want it to be better.

I teach band camp from 1:45-10pm, so I should have most of the morning to get the basics finished.

9:22 AM – Down stairs, showered, dressed, awake.  Good morning, muse!

9:23 AM – This is probably going to turn out to be a little more “vocal” in style than most of my compositions, meaning, instead of being a binary form (A and B themes), it’ll have more of a verse/chorus/bridge/solo section feel.  Like most songs, it will be built around a sousaphone vamp – although I want the song to begin and end without sousa.  I’ve been wanting to write a tune with a group soli at the beginning, so perhaps today is that day – in the meantime, however, the main body of the composition needs to be worked out.

9:26 AM – Playing around with some chord changes.  As usual, I’m sifting through some of my favorite songs by some of my favorite artists for inspiration….

9:30 AM – Earth, Wind, & Fire has been on my mind lately, as my father reintroduced me to the funk band over the past weekend.  I had remembered liking them, but not this much…!

9:32 AM – Seeing as I love the feeling of forward motion in September, I’m going to use that song’s chord changes as a jumping off spot for my composition.  First matter of business: change the key.  September’s in F#, and I’ve never heard a New Orleans brass band tune in any sharp key….

9:33 AM – Ladies and gentlemen, we have a VI7-v7-i groove in C minor!  Next step is devising a sousaphone “hook” – a catchy bassline that will get folks’ feet moving.  I’m going to go through some older tunes and get myself inspired.  Seems like I have to relearn what constitutes a good, funky bassline every time I start composing!

9:37 AM – Ugh.  As a tubist, this is the part I over think the most.  However, I do know that I want an opening octave, and the second half of the phrase to begin on the “and” of beat one.  This will not only impart some forward momentum, but is also a hallmark of funk lines.

9:39 AM – “Hello Finale, my old friend… I’ve come to compose on you again….”

9:46 AM – I finally has a suitable bassline.  Believe me when I say that it is a labor of love getting to this point.  I have a tendency to over intellectualize this process, and thankfully it gets much more intuitive after this point.

9:50 AM – Played the bassline on my keyboard, recorded it on the computer.  Now to loop it while I listen and grab some breakfast.

9:56 AM – Great.  Caught on the telephone for an interview about the upcoming CD release.  But!  But!  I got a melody recorded down just prior to talking.

10:25 AM – Off the phone, getting ready to plug the melody into Finale.  Creating a melody, for me at least, always comes from somewhere outside of me.  It was said that Haydn was such a masterful composer that he “prayed for a good melody,” because after that all the technical aspects would fall in line.  Although I am certainly no Haydn, I understand that sentiment well.

10:37 AM – Finale is being ornery.  Grrrr….

10:41 AM – Tweaking the melody and bassline a little bit.  I feel that my upbringing as a tuba player (oompah) in the classical tradition has made me quite fond non-syncopated rhythms.  This, of course, would be a disaster in this setting.  NOLA brass bands can quickly devolve into polka if this remains unattended.

10:53 AM – It’s always interesting trying to decide what to do with a baritone saxophone.  You want it to be low, and paraphrase the bass without muddying the proverbial waters.

11:02 AM – Finished the bari part for the “verse,” now playing with the melody some more.  For me, compositions are never finished, they escape.

11:13 AM – Added backgrounds for the saxes.  Really liking keeping the bari on the third of every chord, the tenor on the sevenths.  Awfully tasty.  Everyone has a part in the “verse!”  However, since I stuck the saxes on backgrounds for the first part, they need to be utilized in a better capacity later – not only for the sake of the piece, but for mine as well.  They’ll come after me if they don’t get a chance to shine!

11:24 AM – Switched around the voicing – I have the trombone entering first.  The opening figure is similar to the opening trumpet figure of an arrangement we play, and I don’t want to risk any sameness.  Added harmony to the call and response figures of the trumpets.

11:27 AM – Relatively satisfied with what I have so far. Saturday I’ll write the B section and its transition, as well as the bridge… hopefully.