Each of the past two summers I have been playing the two week new music immersion that is the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. The festival is located in Santa Cruz, California, and it offers a unique musical opportunity to simultaneously expose and be exposed to some of the best new music being written today. Every year the festival brings in the leading composers of our time and they collaborate with music director Marin Alsop and the orchestra to create concerts that focus solely on new music; there is no old musical warhorse being trotted around these grounds. If you want to hear Tchaik 5, or Beethoven 5, or Pictures at an Exhibition, you’ll have to find a different festival.

This year, I am especially excited about the festival because I am performing the U.S. Premier of Desolation Wilderness, a trumpet concerto written by the British composer, Joby Talbot. The concerto was written in 2006 for Alison Balsom and it features driving minimalist-style rhythms, soaring melodic lines, and lightning fast technical passages reminiscent of the great violin concertos; it is a welcome addition to the trumpet repertoire to be sure. If you don’t know Joby’s music, you should definitely check it out. He has done some extraordinary work. You can learn more about him by visiting www.jobytalbot.com.

Joby’s music is a perfect example of new music that bucks the trend of being difficult to listen to and academic. Indeed, my experiences the past couple of summers at the Cabrillo Festival have introduced me to a wide range of composers who write music that is strikingly beautiful and quite easy to listen to, while maintaining important aspects like originality, finely crafted orchestration, and a well organized formal structure. This new direction for modern music is exciting and necessary for the survival of classical music as an art form. Over the last 50-100 years the vast majority of composers have ignored their audiences and written music that most of the population would not choose to listen to. Artistically speaking, I have no problem with that. I truly believe a composer should write the music he/she most believes in, regardless of what people think. The problem comes when we want to be able to make a living writing or performing this type of music. For that, we need to be able to make money, and to make money we need the audience to care about our work; it’s that simple. If classical music is going to continue into the future as a living, thriving art form — and not as just an old museum relic — it will need to have new music that audiences care about, that people are excited to hear. New music is the music of our age; it needs to be the main attraction, and the main attraction has to be good!

For two short weeks in Santa Cruz that is exactly what is on offer, and I am happy to be a part of it. To see what is going on at the festival this year simply visit: www.cabrillomusic.org

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You know you aren’t sleeping well when you are on your second cup of coffee and it’s not even 6am! On the flip side, that lack of sleep allows me to catch up on things and to do something that has been put off for far too long: write on this blog.

Life has been unusually crazed over the last few months. I have been very busy at school, but unlike past years, I decided to take on a good deal of playing around town. Was this a mistake? It’s difficult to tell. I made a little money, chewed up pretty much all of my personal time, enjoyed time with some old friends (and some new ones), and did manage to find some meaningful musical experiences in the midst of it all.

Most of the playing I have been doing is not really reading material — so I won’t bore you with details of gigdom — but I am currently wrapping up a run with the Miami City Ballet that has been noteworthy. We premiered a new ballet with music by Elvis Costello (yes, that Elvis Costello) and choreography by Twyla Tharp. It has been an interesting experience to say the least. Opening night was a pretty extraordinary event drawing out many of Miami’s elite, including Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco and New World Symphonies. Curious about what kind of ballet music Elvis Costello would write? So was I. That is one of the main reasons I signed on to play this season with the ballet. In the end, however, my curiosity was not rewarded with music of any noteworthy quality. The music for this ballet, Nightspot, is mundane at best, random and disorganized at worst. Make no mistake, you won’t be confusing this with Stravinsky’s ballet scores! I have to say, though, that discussing piccolo trumpet parts with Elvis Costello has to be one of the more surreal moments of my musical career. Now, if I had only managed to ask him why someone so unqualified would be given such a huge commission…

One other bright spot in the playing I have been doing lately has been getting to work with Boston Brass trumpet player and good friend, Jose Sibaja. Jose lives here in Miami, but is very often out on the road, so I don’t usually get to play with him. This time, though, we were lucky enough to catch him at home between tours and managed to get him to do some work around town. Having him there made sure the trumpet section was damn good (great pitch, great ears, incredible player. What’s not to like?) but most of all, it meant that we had perhaps a bit too much fun on the job. Why didn’t I ever have that much fun in any of my full time orchestra positions? Hmmm…

YouTube’s tagline is “Broadcast Yourself”, and though I’m not exactly broadcasting myself, I am being broadcast, so I suppose that counts for something. My good friend, colleague, and wonderful composer/conductor Thom Sleeper has put up video of a live performance of me playing his Concerto for Trumpet (with Thom conducting) on YouTube. This performance was done at the Beijing Modern Music Festival and you can find it by simply searching for “Craig Morris Trumpet” on YouTube. The camera work is a little “inspired”, but other than that it isn’t half-bad. There is also a new release on Naxos of me performing this same Concerto with the Frost School of Music Wind Ensemble that has just recently been released. Let me know how it sounds, because, believe it or not, I haven’t heard it yet!

Brahms has been occupying my thoughts recently as I try to wrestle his Eb Major Sonata, originally for clarinet (or viola) and piano, into form for my first solo CD.

Preparing this music can have a very humbling effect as I try to get it to sound as clearly and beautifully as it was written. I am constantly amazed at the level of refinement and note shape control that this music demands; the kinds of things that come so easily on the clarinet, which are littered throughout this piece, have a way of making the well-meaning trumpet player sound like a total ass. Sometimes I feel like I am walking on egg shells as I try to keep my “softs” soft enough and my “louds” refined enough.

In trying to feel as at home as possible with this repertoire, I have been reading correspondence between Clara Schumann and Brahms. The letters I have read thus far are moving and insightful, but one little line that I read yesterday really opened my mind and gave at least some validity to my idea of transcribing some of the most sacred chamber music repertoire on the planet for trumpet and piano.

This letter, written by Brahms to Clara in late October of 1854 (just think, a mere 153 years ago!) concludes with the following paragraphs:

How long I have waited for news of you, and with what anxiety!
Could you not telegraph me a little greeting every morning? I should be electrified for the whole day, and how beautifully I should play. I will not tolerate being without you any longer.
Why did you not allow me to learn the flute so that I could have accompanied you on your journeys?

And then the line that caught my eye, reduced my guilt over tinkering with the sacred, and opened up my imagination for how I could play this piece:

Then I should have arranged the andante of the Sonata in F minor for flute, guitar, and timpani, and I should have made it a serenade.

Timpani?! I do not think I would have ever had the courage to re-arrange a Brahms Sonata for timpani and any other instrument, but clearly Brahms himself had no such scruples. It is worth remembering, when preparing music by musical masters, that they themselves may be much more risqué and flexible about their own music than we would ever expect them to be, and that perhaps the limits we feel in our interpretation might just be of our own making, or that of our teacher’s.

Last night, after reading this letter, I sat down and ran through the Brahms, only this time I played it as if he himself had just re-arranged it for trumpet — something I have done often before, but never with the belief that it could actually have been possible. Now, knowing that Brahms himself would rearrange one of his own Sonatas (and even include timpani in the arrangement), I knew it was. I let the fortes soar; I kept the pianos in the low register singing and soulful; I didn’t force the trumpet to sound like a clarinet or a viola in any way. I played it like a true trumpet piece and it worked.

So what does this mean for us performing musicians? In short it means this:

Play what you want to play and do it with belief, sincerity, and conviction. Through this process you will likely find that you have discovered the true spirit of a piece of music, a spirit that could be discovered in no other way.

But for crying out loud, don’t arrange a Brahms Sonata for a trio and include timpani as one of the instruments, that would simply be ludicrous.

I have been extremely busy lately with things that seem to be mostly designed to keep me… well, busy. Don’t ever doubt busy work, it really does exactly what it says it will do. In the process of doing this work, however, I came across an old review from my time in the San Francisco Symphony. This was a review of a concert during my first season with that orchestra that featured Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony on the first half and the Brahms Second Piano Concerto on the second half. The review was glowing regarding the Shostakovich, which was fortunate for me since I was playing principal on that piece, but the Brahms incurred the wrath of Joshua Kosman, the classical music reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle (where do these guys come from anyway?). His discussion of the second half opened with the following phrase:

After intermission, though, things went bad in a hurry, as pianist Vladimir Feltsman conspired with the orchestra to stomp on Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto.

I have always gotten a kick out of that particular piece of journalistic bravado. I’m sure all involved parties enjoyed their stomping conspiracy, but sadly I was left out of that particular round, maybe next time.

By the way, where is it that we get to write about someone who conspires to stomp on some of the best classical musicians in the world on a weekly basis? Oh yeah, that’s right… That can be done right here!

I tried looking for a bio for Joshua Kosman online, but I couldn’t find one anywhere. The closest thing I found was a page that mentioned that he had received his Master’s Degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Master’s in what? It didn’t say. I wonder how much real music training one has to go through before you are qualified to shred world class musicians in major publications? It’s ironic that the ones getting criticized are the musicians who have dedicated their lives into creating a product, rather than the critics who essentially spend their lives destroying one.