Category Archives: composing

New@Noon 2: Can’t Help It

Tufts Composers presented their second concert of music by Tufts faculty and student composers on Friday, November 13, 2020 at noon

The concert, focusing on “spontaneous Sounds that necessitate response,” was streamed live from Distler Hall through Tufts Music YouTube channel.

Featuring John McDonald, piano; Julia Moss, viola; Katianna Nardone, violin;
Nate Shaffer, piano; Stephany Svorinić, voice and electronics.

Watch New@Noon 2: Can’t Help It.

Program

Caleb Martin-Rosenthal: Courses (2020)

Leia Levi: Monsoon (2020)
Bird Sounds—Close—Song—Monsoon

Stephany Svorinić: Justine Takes a Walk (2020)
A Hawk Assails a Squirrel at a Nearby Cemetery While Justine is on a Walk

Her reflection:
I am the squirrel.
If nature comes for me, then I can’t run.
I am the hawk.
If I am sent to do it, then it’s done.
I’m taken and sent.
What’s over has begun.
I’m the squirrel and the hawk.
I’m one.
[Justine Buckley]

C. Martin-Rosenthal: Blue Light (2020)

Joseph Rondeau: Swerve (Another Accident; Piano Poem No. 9 from Ten Piano Poems) (2020)

Katianna Nardone: Springtime in November (2020)

Max Luo: Largo And Waltz, Op. 15 (2020)

Nate Shaffer: Two or Three moments for piano (2020)
These short(er) pieces were written with an imagined piano, then revised in the midst of a real one.

N. Shaffer: Trace (2020)
Sometimes, they leave a big trace: an outline of – you

Brought to you by Peter Atkinson, Granoff Music Center Studio Manager, and the Musical Events Technical Staff. Publicity and Programs by Anna Griffis, Event Direction by Jeffrey Rawitsch, Granoff Music Center Manager

New@Noon #1: Add Or Remove A Stone: [Building and Re-Building Your Own Sonic Cairn]

Tufts Composers presented a concert of music by Tufts faculty and student composers on Friday, October 30, 2020 at 12:00 pm, featuring “vertically-organized” music by Tufts student and faculty composers suggested by cairn-building.

Featuring Asher Cohen, vibes; Iverson Eliopoulos, cello; Samuel Golub, guitar; Annie D. Kim, violin; John McDonald, piano; Julia Moss, viola; Doug Poppe, electric bass, voice, production; Nate Shaffer, marimba and electronics.

Watch New@Noon #1: Add or Remove a Stone

Program

Caleb Martin-Rosenthal: Cairn Song (2020) for piano

Niki Glenister: Zesty (2020) for viola, marimba, and piano

Claire X. Freeman: Crisscross (2020) for violin, cello, and vibraphone
Lost and found, but not necessarily in that order. A cairn of unbalanced stones that together hold, a lightless path that leads you home. (C.X.F.)

Samuel Golub: Sam’s Journey of the Cairn (2020) for solo guitar
Inspired by the harmonic stylings of the contemporary Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu, this piece takes a literal interpretation of stacking rocks to form a cairn. One ever-present theme represents the base of the cairn and each chord is supported by this theme. As the rock stack grows, it becomes more unstable until it collapses and is restructured…This is the journey of the cairn. (S.G.)

Jacquelyn Hazle: Kenosis (2020) for mixed quartet
Kenosis, meaning “self-emptying” in Greek, explores the inspiration of a cairn and stacked musical structures through timbre and texture. The music begins with a single, strong unison attack that is “emptied”, then unfolds and reveals itself as the music progresses. Like Stonehenge, a great pyramid, or a simple garden cairn, its true sum is more than a series of stacked stones (or tones) and the total number of rocks. The music portrays the appreciation of a thing in observing both the smaller pieces that make it up and the object as a whole, especially in temporality. (J.H.)

Doug Poppe: Annelise (2020)
Annelise wasn’t written as a cairn piece per se, but I think it works well as one, with the imagery of a shaky tower of stones complementing the instability and nervousness of the song. I hope I don’t mess up! Just kidding, the song will be played as a pre-recorded track.

The wind in the courtyard is wrapped in the trees
The kids in the schoolyard all catch the disease
The sun isn’t racing across the blue sky
And time isn’t waiting but passing you by
Play on my team
Annelise, Annelise
To lie at a distance from farness away
Surpassing the difference and seeing the same
The ships in the dockyard are lost out at sea
The kids in the schoolyard learn days of the week
Play on my team
Annelise, Annelise
(D.P.)

Aaron Wong: Underpinnings (2019) for piano

Andrew Daetz: What’s Left Behind Never Stays the Same (2020) for piano
What’s Left Behind Never Stays the Same chronicles the arc of a journey away from home, what-ever “home” may mean. A broad, stable chord opens the piece, gradually fading in volume until it essentially disappears. As the piece unfolds, the home chord continues to return, but the top notes successively tumble down to the bottom, like the gradual collapse of an unsteady cairn. This symbol-izes the idea that when one sacrifices something comfortable for a new opportunity—perhaps this means giving up a relationship for a job or leaving childhood friends to go to school far away—the things left behind will continue to evolve and shift on their own. Relationships may change, or they may crumble altogether in ways which cannot be restored. There is no turning back the clock. (A.D.)

Nate Shaffer: Process for Marimba and Room 21 (2020) for video recording & live marimba
The product and the process are one. Time is an illusion, albeit a persistent one. What did you do with your time? What do you think you did? Who are they? Who plays the music? (N.S.)

 

Tufts Composers PractiCast #2: Keyboard Aphorisms

This week’s PractiCast #2 was livestreamed from Distler Hall on September 17, 2020.

A Production of Music 119: Composition Practicum, it featured a musical dialogue with Samuel Graber-Hahn & John McDonald.

Performed on piano by John McDonald

Watch PractiCast #2

Program

Some Fives (2020) by Samuel Graber-Hahn

Musical security comes and goes. – Walk; sketch. Discover a place. – Movement, stasis. Which is which? – Fall into place. Without force. (Text by J. McDonald)

High Fives, Op. 661, No. 48 (2020) by  John McDonald

Consider how same not same. – Use pick-ups; move on. – Hoodwinked; sick; time to compose. – Wait. Wait again. Keep waiting. – Consider how different not different. (Text by J. McDonald)

Nocturne (2020) by Samuel Graber-Hahn

Thank-You Fours, Op. 661, No. 46 (2020) by John McDonald

Let the back breathe. – No purpose in it. – Charily accumulated, patient mind. – Weeks, months, years, decades (puttering, procrastinating, preparing, piú puttering). (Text by J. McDonald)

Tufts Composers PractiCast #1: Raptae

The first Tufts Composers PractiCast for Fall 2020 was streamed live from Distler Hall (Granoff Music Center) on Thursday, 3:15-3:50 pm PMA on September 10, 2020.

A production of Music 119: Composition, this concert featured Raptae (2017/2020) by Jacquelyn Hazle, performed by John McDonald on piano.

Watch PractiCast #1

Raptae (2017/2020),  Jacquelyn Hazle

I. Heat of the Moment
II. Check-out
III. Fight, Flight
IV. Silence Scream
V. Déjà vu

Raptae is a multi-movement work originally written in 2017 and revised in 2020. It is a programmatic piece whose narrative is represented by the recurring use of B-natural and covertly followed through the five movements that make up a series of experiences. These experiences are responses to an event: the recurring B-natural. [J.H.]

Music In The Time Of Covid-2019

I was interviewed by the Tufts Daily on the Music Department’s response to COVID-2019 strictures.

Excerpts from the article by  AND 
September 8, 2020

Arts-related departments adapt to COVID-19 restrictions

..However, in the case of Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Studies John McDonald’s two upper-level composition classes this fall, transitioning to Zoom has included a number of other difficulties.

“You can’t play ensemble music if someone is in a different location,” McDonald said, which is something that becomes an obstacle when, as McDonald puts it, “one of the things that’s important for composers is to hear their music performed.”

With restrictions put in place as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the two concert series that McDonald had previously developed for composers to showcase their music, the Tufts Composers Concert Series and the New at Noon concerts, are now impossible. Instead, McDonald is planning what he calls a Tufts Composers PractiCast as well as a few New at Noon concerts as a way to broadcast what the composers in his courses are writing.

Given the recent university announcement that the performance of all wind and brass instruments, as well as singing, will not be permitted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, these concerts will only include strings (orchestral and plucked), percussion and keyboard instruments, according to McDonald.

In addition to adapting to COVID-19 restrictions, McDonald is taking this opportunity to use these limitations as creatively as possible.

“I’ve been fond of talking about how composers thrive on limits, so this is a time of crazy limitations, and limitations that you don’t expect,” McDonald explained.

Therefore, McDonald is using these limitations as a framework for some of his projects — ideas he’s been thinking about include antiphonal music (music performed with a wide space between players), asynchronous music, an unseen performer and humming projects as a way to use the bounds of COVID-19 as inspiration for new projects.

“I’m developing themes that kind of work for the time period, I suppose you could say,” McDonald said. “That’s how my mind has taken off creatively, and I love that. I love thinking it through.”

Because many of the new restrictions have caused the music department faculty to rethink their lesson plans this semester, both [Frank] Lehman and McDonald stressed the importance of taking this opportunity to also create a more inclusive curriculum with regard to anti-racist discourse.

“We can use at least some of this energy and turn it into making a more just curriculum too since we’re already revising everything that’s been on our minds,” Lehman said.

McDonald expressed a similar sentiment — that when it comes to adapting to the pandemic or to the issues of race representation, especially in academia, the only way is to keep going forward.

“We need to keep working on it constantly. Keep reinventing, keep refreshing, keep revitalizing, keep trying to understand what needs to be done and what can be done, so those two things — it could be the pandemic, and it could be the anti-racist curriculum, very different subjects, but a similar kind of thinking where you don’t go back. You’re not going to turn around,” McDonald said.

Read full article here

For Music-Making In Difficult Days, Perhaps…

September 1, 2020 [or: March 172, 2020]

Dear Tufts Music Students,

Having just digested an email from winds and brass-playing Tufts students concerned about returning to school in a week without the permission to play their instruments on campus, I found myself sprouting a few ideas given the fact that, at least at the beginning of the Fall 2020 semester, singing and the playing of wind and brass instruments on campus has been determined too risky to permit for the time being.

Have ANY of us been able to call sufficiently upon our considerable creative energies and resources as we contend with Covid-19 strictures? Are we trying too desperately to solve problems that will pass or at least alter or ease their dangerous components, but not please us by subsiding when we want them to? Are we looking too directly at these problems instead of to the side of, around, or behind them?

Regarding the currently forbidden singing, wind, and brass playing, what alternatives can we pursue while sticking somewhat closely to our customary patterns, our inspiring teachers, or our “proven methods” when our vocal or instrumental outlets are “off limits?” What musical acts can we study when we can’t sing or play?

First off, PLEASE keep studying with your teacher or with a new teacher. Don’t forego the brilliance of your instructors; since they are here to work with you, and to think about and practice their art, please consider sticking with a set of lessons or an ensemble through these difficult days. They might still prove productive.

I’m reminded of a time when I advised a music major who played the ocarina, an instrument for which they sought private instruction for credit. We could not find a teacher anywhere in the Boston area who felt qualified to teach ocarina. Then I thought about something my secondary-school mentor William Appling regularly suggested: study with someone who plays a different instrument from yours. With this in mind, I asked our classical saxophone instructor Philipp Staudlin if he could see himself teaching someone the ocarina? He complied with enthusiasm, and the music major presented a novel, full-length senior recital on the ocarina.

Consider this story I recently wrote up as part of the early-life story of composer TJ Anderson, Jr., former Tufts Music Department Chair and Austin Fletcher Professor of Music Emeritus:

In the early 1940s, TJ Jr attended public grammar schools in DC and Cincinnati, continuing the developing practice of staying out all night to hear jazz bands. Listening to live music emerged as a primary learning tool for Anderson, and in 1941 he formed his own jazz group in junior high school in Cincinnati, where he also sang in an Episcopal Church choir and continued violin studies with Charles Keys. When Andy returned to professional life in Coatesville, resuming his role as Principal of the James Adams School after thirteen years teaching at Howard University, TJ Jr attended Coatesville High School and soon (circa 1945) auditioned on baritone sax for the Veterans Jazz Band (Veterans Hospital, Coatesville); he passed the audition using the method of practicing with a broomstick (in the absence of the baritone sax itself). He credits his ability to read music as the essential reason he passed the audition, calling it “a good experience.”

Thinking of Anderson’s youthful resourcefulness and the broomstick-as-bari sax, the possibilities below came to mind. Perhaps they’ll give you an idea or two to make up for yourself and perhaps pursue with your teacher?

If you’re a singer: could you work on Melodramas (spoken word with instrumental accompaniment; Schubert wrote some; Satie’s Sports et Divertissements can be performed as spoken word and piano; there are lots more); make studies of diction/declamation or rhythm in the vocal repertory you’re learning?

In NME (Tufts New Music Ensemble) rehearsals—ask NME Director Donald Berman—we’ve spent many rehearsal hours playing instruments we’ve never tried and don’t know how to negotiate. We would often just switch instruments deliberately. Perhaps this is a time to pick up a new “axe?” Might you think about how an instrument that is not yours breathes differently from yours, practice that, and devise ways it could positively change breath support and/or other ways you might re-approach your own instrument when you can get back to it?

However you might ordinarily function as a musician, make up some listening activities for yourself, some of which you might be able to do with others. The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer has written many fascinating text-based musical etudes that involve truly experimental listening. I’ve sent some of them around recently. A Sound Education: 100 Exercises in Listening and Soundmaking (1992) is my favorite. Try taking a piece of paper and “playing it.” Could you get a good “flute tone” out of it?

Learn your repertory as if it were unpitched percussion music? I’m considering making up a project for the composers studying this semester to write for the student in Advanced Musicianship (Music 116)—pieces involving clapping, beating, and rhythmical spoken word?

Could you study and internalize the rhythm and phrasing of instrumental or vocal parts you need to learn?

In re-thinking the physical moves necessary to play your trombone slide, could you mime it? Imagine the music as you read the part; study the score and other instrumental parts if there are any.

Devise techniques of silent mental practice? According to his memoirs, Artur Rubinstein learned César Franck’s Symphonic Variations on a train on his way to the concert. As there was no piano on the train, he practised passages in his lap. 

***

I apologize if what I’ve written here comes off like a manifesto or as something similarly heavy-handed. I don’t mean to be like that. These don’t replace the joy of playing and getting better at the skills you seek, but they may deepen the enterprise for the time being.

On campus or off, the limits that have been imposed are stringent for many of us, but if they mitigate the psychological and physical tolls of getting sick or the fear of falling ill, so be it (I admit a fear of teaching in person because I’m in a vulnerable age-zone, but I’m going to try). These factors have created real hardships and continue to do so.

Much is lost at the moment, but not all of it. If we do something usefully different now—even if it feels somewhat disappointing—but think ahead to where the activity might lead later, how will it feed our long-term aspirations?

Thanks for reading. The Tufts Music Department faculty is with you all the way. We will always try to fill our days and yours with the most elevating music-making we can find together.

John McDonald, Composer and Pianist
Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Music Studies

Tufts University

On Tufts Composing and Composers’ Concerts

I was happy to see two Tufts music composing programs that I teach featured, apropos the concert held at Distler Hall on October 16, 2019, in an article  written by Sam Heyman for the Tufts Daily (October 17, 2019): ‘How to Fall Slowly’ showcases student compositions

The programs mentioned are Contemporary Composition (MUS-0118) and Composition Practicum (MUS-0119) for graduate and undergraduate students with performance experience and musical fluency.

“Contemporary Composition is a seminar course which blends composition projects with lectures, musical analysis, visits from guest musicians and more. Composition Practicum takes a more collaborative approach, asking students to share their compositions with classmates and provide feedback on one another’s works.”

Sam interviewed two students, whose works were played in the concert, about the impact the programs have had on them.

For graduate student and experienced musician Bo Konigsmark, they are an opportunity to hone existing skills and cultivate areas of expertise, “the liberated creative environment at Tufts sets it apart from other programs … It’s a judgement free zone. You can bring forth your music, and however you do it … if it’s real and you are showing that you have a genuine, you know, pursuit and purpose in what you’re getting after, then nobody cares if it’s tonal or not tonal … I think in a lot of other places it’s like, ‘This is the system, and you will write this way, and if you do not, we will cringe.’ You don’t get that at Tufts.”

On the other hand, these programs helped introduce undergraduate Sam Graber-Hahn to composing. “I thought I would be pretty bad at composing, … but [Professor McDonald] is just a very encouraging guy and helped me a lot … He’s very good at noticing how you’re restricting yourself and broadening that … So he’ll give you lots of ideas for how to vary things and make stuff more expressive.”

Both remarked at how varied the student compositions turn out, and how it helps them learn. The Tufts Composers concerts give students a space to hear their work performed in public by professionals as well as their peers. “You’ve got world-class performers playing student music … [and] all your friends are [at the concert] listening to their music, and you get to talk to each other about what you’ve written.”

Sam Graber-Hahn especially credited the composition program and the concert series with renewing is interest in classical music “…  if it weren’t for the [Tufts] Composers concerts, I would be doing no classical music and very little violin.”

Tufts Composers: Extra Extra Read All about it

2019-fall-tufts-composers

Tufts Composers Concert Series is an outgrowth of two composition courses: Music 118 and 119, Contemporary Composition (Seminar) and Composition Practicum. These advanced, project-based courses open to both graduate and undergraduate students assume musical fluency, familiarity with forms of notation, and a practical level of performance experience in a variety of styles and techniques.

If your interest is to create your own musical work, and/or to play new music by your peers and colleagues, then please consider Tufts Composers as your possible outlet. Our Fall 2019 concert schedule appears below. Contact Professor and Composer/Pianist John McDonald for more information. john.mcdonald@tufts.edu

Fall 2019 Tufts Composers Events: All at Distler Hall, 20 Talbot Avenue, Medford, MA 02155

Tuesday September 24, 2019 at 8 pm, — Guest Ensemble!
Ludovico Ensemble: Rhythm and Myth (Music by J Aylward; M Salkind-Pearl; J Werntz)

Wednesday October 16, 2019 at 8 pm
How to Fall Slowly. Ease into Autumn with a varied program of new works by Tufts Composers— students, faculty, and alumni. With music by Samuel Graber-Hahn, Jacquelyn Hazle, Mark Bolan Konigsmark, guest composer Ryan Vigil (Tufts MA 2004), and others.

Friday October 25, 2019 at 12 pm
New @ Noon #1: How To Finish. How do pieces of music end? Whimpers? Screams? Static? Tufts Composers provide possible answers with new chamber works.

Monday November 4, 2019 at 8 pm
Nova November. Undergraduate and graduate Tufts Composers start a new month with some novel musical audacity.

Friday November 15, 2019 at 12 pm
New @ Noon #2: How To Let Things Fall Apart. And not put them back together. Music by Tufts Composers highlighting unexpected approaches to structure

Tuesday December 3, 2019 at 8 pm
ROBERT BLACK, Guest Artist and Double Bass Virtuoso, presents Insomniac Do’s and Don’t’s, a recital featuring Philip Glass’s The Not Doings of an Insomniac, commissioned by Black. Betwixt each of its 7 parts, Black recites poetry by Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, David Byrne, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, and Arthur Russell. Featuring several works made for Black by Tufts Composers alongside an improvised dialogue with guest bassist Andrew Blickendorfer.

Aphorisms For Composers – September 2019

September 4, 2019

As you hurry to complete work under pressure, consider that “the corn still grows overnight” as you sleep. Let the pace set itself naturally when possible…(pushing too hard inhibits growth) (paraphrasing Thoreau’s Walden, Chapter 4; 04.09.19)

Are we “awash in electronic hallucination?” (quoting Chris Hedges [born 1956; journalist])

Aphorisms For Composers – August 2019

August 26, 2019

Weed, walk, work

August 6 , 2019

NINE-TWOS
David Dovetails Domenico: Dynamic Deliberations. Downhearted Douceur. Despite Despondency: DETERMINED DASH. (August 26, 2019: program note for piano composition written as a tribute to composer David Macbride [1952-2018]; Domenico is Domenico Scarlatti [1685-1757])

August 22, 2019

More often than hoped, works in progress don’t progress. Stay calm.

Composers are content providers; yet provisions can be rough. User unfriendly?

August 19-20, 2019

REASONS FOR HAVING WRITTEN THINGS

It came out.

Didn’t hear it when playing or listening to things by others; thus had to supply it.

The hands fell there, went from there.

The atmosphere of the day yielded something; impulse can’t be further clarified.

Thought about people—wonderful performers, other composers, wonderful non-musicians—and writing something made otherwise silent or poorly-worded sentiments appear more fully expressed.

Someone asked.

A striking phrase in some else’s music takes hold; you re-shape it, and in so doing it gets out of control and lo(!) behold(!) a new piece has formed.

Pen was attracted to paper.

It couldn’t be helped.

Failed to quit.

August 19, 2019

‘Finished’ barely exists in composers’ vocabularies.

August 18, 2019

Why would you actually want to find what you’re looking for? Keep things provisional. Keep looking.

August 2-14, 2019

MORE FOURS
String fiber, porous boundaries. (August 14, 2019)
Composer resigns, music flows? ( August 13, 2019 )
Work safe, compose dangerously. ( August 7, 2019 )
Aged cheddar; aged composer. ( August 6, 2019 )
As though we know. ( August 2, 2019 )

August 2, 1019

Can there be TOO MUCH professional sheen to your scores? Can a piece be TOO well-crafted? When are mistakes advantages, rough edges more human and touching, and foibles welcome?