The Musical Diary of Greg Scheer

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.

I was quite the musical entrepreneur, even in my college days. While an undergrad, I decided that I needed to compose something for a large ensemble, so I simply went to the conductor of the URI wind ensemble, Gene Pollart, and asked if he’d program something if I wrote it. He said Yes. Little did I realize what an unusual opportunity this was. (Thank you, Dr. Pollart!) The result was “Crying Bone,” a tone poem loosely based on the story some friends told me about their young daughter, who kept inexplicably bursting into tears. At their wits ends, they enlisted their other daughter in trying to find out what was going on. Eventually, she confided to her sister that “she had a crying bone (pointing to her ribs), and she couldn’t turn it off.”

It starts very quietly, so stick with it and don’t turn up the volume too high, because it will get a lot louder!

In 1998, I was at URI, studying with the quirky, yet incredible Dr. Geoffrey Gibbs, when I wrote a two movement string quartet entitled “The.” Why did I give it this title? Because it seemed like a fun idea to make it difficult to catalog.