One of the excursions she invited me on was in the Black Forest. There I met a young woman who happened to attend a church that happened to have a sister church in East Germany.
Category: Art Music
That au pair made good on her offer and invited me to her house in Steiermark when I had semester breaks in Salzburg. Then she began doing missions with Operation Mobilization. Once again, I was invited along for the ride. (If you’re getting any ideas–her intentions were purely evangelistic, and she eventually married her mission partner.)
So how does a young man from Narragansett, Rhode Island have a cantata premiered in East Germany?
First, he spends a year studying in Salzburg, Austria. No. Wait. First, he meets an au pair in Narragansett who is kind of enough to help him practice his German and dumb enough to say “If you ever get to Austria, I’d love to see you.”
The next 8 posts are movements from a cantata based on Psalm 113 that premiered at the 100 year anniversary of the Hermsdorfer Kirche in the former East Germany. To make sure you don’t lose interest, I’ll tell a little bit of the the story with each post.
Inspired by Bach, I wrote a series of instrumental and vocal “Inventions.” Some of the instrumental inventions ended up getting rolled into other compositions, but I haven’t done much with the vocal inventions. Vocal Invention #1 is based entirely on a phrase I read in a newspaper article about a local art gallery: “‘People,’ she said, ‘want, and need to have their souls fed'” Here it is simply played back through the Professional Composer software that I used before I began my long and frustrating relationship with Finale.
If you know the infamous PDQ Bach, then you know the geeky delight of classical music insider jokes. I decided to try my hand at creating a fictional composer, as Peter Schickele did with PDQ Bach. My composer’s name was Yang Gonzalez Bergermeister Heinz, the song of a Chinese naval officer and a Bolivian tin heiress. When young Yang made his way to America, he looked for a great librettist with whom he could collaborate. He didn’t find a librettist, but he did find a poem published on a plastic produce bag, and he immediately got to work composing music for this riveting new text. The result? Warning. A masterpiece of Sturm und Wrong.
Categories
Spring Cleaning: Time, a song cycle
Today’s selection finds Greg getting down with his bad classical self. Time is a song cycle for soprano, guitar and cello using the poems of Emily Dickinson.
In the last of the three movements, you’ll notice an odd percussive sound coming from the guitar and cello. I got the idea from a song called “Land of the Glass Pinecones” in which the guitarist hit his strings with a drum stick. (Actually, when I saw it live, he did it with a beer bottle.) My composition teacher told me that no string player would ever hit their strings with a drum stick, chopstick or beer bottle. It took a little convincing, but I got them to do it (with pencils, if I remember correctly), and it sounded pretty cool.
Probably my favorite of the three movements, this third movement is just plain fun. It’s sort of a peg-leg polka–dancing, but always landing slightly off-kilter. When the piece was premiered, the quintet got off, and the leader of the group was kind enough to stop the performance and tell the audience that they wanted to make sure the composer got a good recording, so they would start again.
If I remember correctly, movement 2 of the Brass Quintet was the first movement I composed. It may have started as a piano piece and then morphed into a brass piece by necessity (i.e. the clock was ticking on a semester project), but it’s all a dim memory now.
By the way, did I tell you that it won an award? The piece was chosen to be played at the University of New Hampshire’s Horn Festival. That may seem awfully…narrow, but it was a pretty big deal to an undergraduate composer.
This was one of the first serious pieces I composed–multi-movement, multi-instrument, boring title–it had it all. Here’s movement #1, which is, more or less, a prelude and fugue.