Sitting here at my gate — waiting for my flight to board — I have been afforded the opportunity (thanks to an American Airlines flight delay) to reflect a bit on some recent and upcoming performances.
I am excited to be headed to St. Louis to play principal trumpet with the St. Louis Symphony this week. And with Wagner’s “Parsifal” and “Harmonium” by John Adams on the docket, there is certainly plenty of playing to be done. If you don’t know Harmonium, be sure to check it out. It’s a wonderful piece.
The airport has been a familiar place for me lately, given that I just returned a couple of days ago from giving a recital and master class at the Trumpet Festival of the Southeast. Brandon Craswell, at the University of Georgia, did a wonderful job hosting this festival, and it was a success in every way. As for me, I really enjoyed playing the recital, which featured a program of pieces that I had never performed before. Given the feedback I received, the program seemed to be a success, and I’m looking forward to repeating it in the near future. One piece I don’t know if I’ll get to repeat soon, though, is the Yves Chardon Sonata for Trumpet in D and Violoncello. I was very lucky that my dear friend (and Atlanta Symphony cellist) Jen Humphreys had the night off and was willing to make the trek out to Athens, Georgia to play at a trumpet festival (of all things)! I had a fantastic time playing this piece and the audience seemed to enjoy it a great deal. If you get the chance to program it, I highly recommend it.
For now, though, I think it is time that this delay comes to an end. I have enjoyed writing, but I think it is relatively important that I actually make it to St. Louis for rehearsal tomorrow. Fingers crossed…
It is that time of year again. Summer is screaming to a close and I find myself back at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for more challenging and inspiring music and music making. For me, this festival is always a welcome end to my summer because it provides a much needed recharge of the artistic batteries that can tend to fade in sweltering Miami summers, especially when the rest of life creeps in and demand your attention. In fact, this summer I went into a bit of a self-imposed online exile (if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you may have noticed), but now I am back in Santa Cruz, the weather is cool, rehearsals are underway, and I find myself back at one of my favorite Santa Cruz spots — Lulu Carpenter’s — enjoying a fabulous latte; I’m already feeling more energized.
Rehearsals for the festival are underway, with the first full orchestra rehearsal last night. This festival is Marin Alsop’s 20th anniversary as music director here and the festival promises to be extraordinary. Last night we began rehearsing pieces for the performance on Saturday night (Aug. 6). The bulk of the rehearsal was taken up with a piece that Marin discovered while conducting in Japan. The piece is by Shuko Mizuno — a composer that was unknown to me prior to this festival (here is a page with some info on Mizuno — and is fittingly titled “Summer”. It is a fascinating piece that captivates with an aggressive Neo-Romanticism: moments of great beauty are followed by passages of clamorous intensity. This piece is probably the most physical piece of the whole festival for me, which means that the tradition of starting this festival with a chop busting first rehearsal is alive and well.
This afternoon we tackle music from Friday night’s performance, which features music by Christopher Rouse, Mason Bates, James MacMillan, and Margaret Brouwer. It promises to be another demanding rehearsal, but I am really looking forward to hearing the music. As for now, it’s time to finish this latte and go warm up, I have a feeling my face will appreciate that.
I know the life of a performing artist appears glamorous at times — doing something you are passionate about in front of an adoring audience, traveling the world, being immersed in a creative art form, etc. — but appearances, as always, can be deceiving. I was reflecting on this very fact last night while trudging in the pouring rain across an acre-wide, flooded parking lot, wearing my black suit, no umbrella, and with a heel broken off of one shoe. The concert I had just completed had gone fine, but that was the only consolation from a night where I:
Started warming up and felt like playing the trumpet was the single most difficult thing ever undertaken by man.
Had the heel of my left shoe inexplicably fall off while walking backstage just prior to going on stage.
Played well, but felt like I was in a death-cage match against Attila the Hun.
Forgot to acknowledge the composer for the brass quintet we performed.
Came out of the hall to find monsoon conditions had once again arrived in South Florida…
… and realized my umbrella was in my car, which was about a half mile away across the aforementioned flooded parking lot.
I am very fortunate to have the life I do. I love music, my job, performing, collaborating with talented and creative people, and all of the great things that come along with it, but the sacrifices are immense and the glamour? Uh…. no. Not so much.
Continuing with my series of lists covering the 2010 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary music, I have compiled this list of favorite photos that I took while at the festival. There are certainly other photos (taken by others) that deserve to be in this list, but I don’t have the original files for those. If some of you CabFest musicians have photos to share with me, then I can make a separate list for those.
You will, no doubt, notice that many of the photos have nothing to do with music or the festival directly. IMHO, that is a defining characteristic of a successful festival: a setting that will attract the best musicians and give them a reprieve from their daily lives and whatever music they happen to be playing at the time. All the pics of the California Coast (below) were taken on our day off, and believe me — amidst the insanity of the music we play (and, as Daniel Barenboim used to say, “I mean that in the nicest possible way”) — we needed these peaceful surroundings to be able to recharge our batteries before tackling the programs for the second week of the festival. I hope you enjoy the pics as much as I enjoyed taking them.
10. Soif! -- One of THE places to be after a show. Great Wine. Great Food. What’s not to like? I think this is the only time I saw it during the day…
9. Santa Cruz Boardwalk – The Essence of Santa Cruz
8. California Coast – Where else would you find this scenery?
7. Up on a Rock — Taken from atop a lone rock, 30 meters in the air. Only in California…
6. The Cross at Mission San Juan Bautista — Sunset at the mission is stunning. Fantastic light.
5. Grey Day — Feeding my inner Ansel Adams.
4. San Juan Bautista Bells — The Bell Tower at the Beautiful Mission San Juan Bautista
3. John and Me — John Adams and me after the performance of City Noir at the Cabrillo Festival 8/14/2010
2. Jutting Rocks — Does it get any more dramatic than the California Coast? Love my Leica D-Lux4
1. The soloists. The composer. — The true value of any festival comes in the people you work with. When I look at the quality of the musicians in this picture, I know that the value of the Cabrillo Festival is as high as they come. (L to R: Craig Morris [tpt], Ava Ordman[trb], John Adams, Tim Mcallister[sax])
This morning I had coffee with Peter Maxwell Davies. Well, not the real Maxwell Davies, but with his music. Specifically, I had coffee with a brash 19 year old version of him who had the gall (thankfully) to write a compact hard driving Sonata that pushed the bounds of what is possible on the instrument, and has since become a staple of the solo trumpet repertoire.
Lately I have been giving a lot of thought to creating an effective recital program that will feature music from my yet to be released solo CD (exciting news on that coming very soon) while also including some of the high points of the trumpet repertoire. And whenever I think of programming pieces from the trumpet and piano rep, I quickly turn to that brash Sonata by the young Maxwell Davies, the piece he considers to be his opus 1. If you ask me, this piece makes a pretty impressive opus 1! Ironically, as much I have always liked this piece, I have never performed it. I guess there’s no time like the present…
My coffee time this morning was spent with the first movement, and in looking over the piano score I was struck by how unusual (yet critical) some of his choices are. For example, the piece has no time signature, but it is barred. Why? It would be no problem to notate time signatures throughout the piece. Perhaps this is my 21st century eyes looking at it, but why not notate the changing time signatures? The opening bars for instance would be: 4/4 (8/8), 2/4 (4/8), 9/16, 7/16, 2/8, 2/4 (4/8) etc. Perhaps when this was written it was not common practice to use time signatures like 7/16 and 9/16, or perhaps Maxwell Davies found a certain charm in the ambiguity created by omitting them. If the latter was the case, I’m not sure it worked, because I think the only way to actually count it is to break it down into some kind of meter, which means that the soloist then will have to simply supply the meters himself. Besides, it’s not like it can actually be ambiguous. After all, 9/16 is 9/16. It can only be what it is.
Another interesting aspect of the first movement is that he has chosen to have the 8th note get the beat, but he makes no notation to indicate that. He simply marks Allegro moderato at the top with no further indication. If you have never seen the score, it can be quite disarming at first sight. The page full of 16ths with no meter looks more like a black and white Jackson Pollock painting than you might like to admit — the complexity takes a while to process. If he had chosen, however, to have the quarter note to get the beat, then some of those above mentioned “meters” would not have seemed so daunting (if he was even concerned about that at all) and the piece would have had a distinctly friendlier appearance. The opening of the piece would then be rewritten to look like this: Bar 1 becomes two 4/4 bars of one whole note each, Bar 2 = 4/4 with a half note and half rest, bar 3 = 2/4, bar 4 = 9/8, bar 5 = 7/8 and so on… Now don’t get me wrong, I love the decision to give the 8th note the beat and have the 16th be the driving pulse for the piece; it just feels right. But I find this kind of decision making by composers — as they translate the music in their heads to the music on the page — a really fascinating process.
This piece would have a very different look and feel if notated differently. And I think the choice made by the composer to choose a specific notation has a noticeable impact on the way it sounds, even in cases like this where the actual content would be unaltered (all the notes and proportions would remain the same). Why, you may ask? The reason lies in the perception of the piece by the soloist. For instance, 16ths are faster than 8ths, more frantic, more motion and turbulence; 8ths are slower and less frantic, more stable. Of course, I have experienced many 8th note passages with a chip on their shoulder and a point to prove, bearing the turbulence of the world on their shoulders, but even in those cases, when the 16ths join in, that character gets heightened. If Maxwell Davies had chosen to notate the piece with the quarter getting the beat and the 8th notes providing the pulse, then this movement would have looked less frantic, less hair-raising, and it would have sounded that way in performance too. And if you know this movement, then you would understand that that would simply not do. Perhaps that is the rational for the missing meters as well. Maybe he wants to cause the soloist that feeling of disorientation leading to panic, an effort to bring out the frenzied, edgy nature of the movement, and indeed, the piece. Or alternatively, perhaps he wanted to create a sense of freedom on the part of the soloist, a feeling that we are no longer bound by earthly meters, but are free to roam the rhythmic heavens at a whim, in spite of the fact that we remain bound and tied to our rhythmic structure — like one of those hot air balloons at big tourist areas, ascending into the sky while remaining firmly fixed to the ground with a large offending rope or wire. It would be nice to ask him. Maybe a cup of coffee with the actual man, and not just his music, is in order.
But for now, while this exploration of musical notation and interpretation is a fascinating one, I’m afraid further discussion will have to wait. You see, my coffee is done, and I actually have to go and learn how to play this thing! For some reason, it is required that I know how to buzz my lips into a tiny metal cup in order to perform this piece. Go figure…
Given all this discussion, I think it is only appropriate that I include an audio example from the sonata. I have attached a clip of the opening of this movement performed by the inimitable Håkan Hardenberger with Roland Pontinen on piano. This recording is from his CD The Virtuoso Trumpet. If you don’t own this recording, check it out. It’s extraordinary. Perhaps now you will enjoy a morning coffee with Mr. Davies as well.
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