Juvenilia
We all have those pieces that we wrote when we were too young to
know better, or just too young to know anything. I like to think that I learned a great deal
in writing a few of my earlier pieces, but I would never let them out of the
house. Here are a few excerpts from
the catalog of the museum storeroom—all the good stuff is on display
elsewhere. I decided to simply
arrive at a cutoff date and declare everything prior to 1999 to be the product
of a mind too young and too naïve to really compose. My style in those days tended toward
excessively “tonal” (although I now understand what it truly means
to be tonal) or excessively dissonant, with hints of jazz and rock and whatever
else floated across my mind. These
early pieces are at best an indication of my musical development.
Deathmarch for unspecified instruments
(1992)
My first bonafide
composition. In the gifted program in high school,
which my guidance counselor talked me into to avoid study hall, I needed a
gift, so I decided I would be a filmmaker.
I adapted Piers Anthony’s novel On a Pale Horse into what I thought was a screenplay, and then got
sidetracked by the idea that I would need a score. This was the opening title. I immediately realized that I wanted to
compose, not direct, and so decided I was a composer. I mostly read books about classical music, began the great listening spree of those years (four
CDs a week every week from the public library, the limit at that time) and
wrote a few little exercises, egged on by Renee Goubeaux,
now a professional cellist in
Concerto for Trombone & Strings (1993-1994)
This three-movement piece was my high school senior thesis project
and my first large-scale composition.
For about a year prior I had had a great time calling myself a composer
and scribbling notes, but never really finishing anything or really much
knowing what I was doing. The
senior thesis began as a plan to write an opera, and then shrank with the
passing of time and with the realization that I would have more luck writing
something in a medium that had a chance of being performed. I remember thinking the piece was pretty
good when the school orchestra and I made a tape, but I pulled that tape out
not long ago and realized that it was absolutely awful. It was as if Mozart, Bach and Vivaldi
suddenly went insane (and not in a good way), then had their brains put into a
blender and combined into one monstrous composer. My trombone playing was not as hot as I
thought it was then either.
Ah… hindsight. I would
love to write another concerto one day to vindicate this one.
Six Sketches for soprano and winds (1994)
It was a slow summer after high school
graduation, so I wrote a piece for soprano with the instrumentation of my
fifth-grade band class (three clarinets, two trumpets and two trombones). Then I gathered up some of my youth
orchestra and high school friends for a reading and discovered that they
couldn’t sight-read worth a darn (especially the soprano; they’re
all good people, though). The
poetry included e.e. cummings’
since feeling is first, a setting I
later turned into an art song when I needed to learn one for voice class in my
first year of college and didn’t feel like looking for a good one.
Orchestral Sketches (1995)
Although my undergraduate major was
music education, I tried to compose now and then, thinking that if I kept at
it, I would somehow learn. I
hadn’t learned yet that writing for orchestra is a waste of time if you
don’t have a commission. I
worked intermittently that year on a sort of tone-poem that I didn’t
quite finish, and at a piece called Nocturne,
for which I did complete a full draft.
That was really the extent of it.
Voyage for trombone & piano (1996)
This piece was the main product of two
terms of composition study with Wes Flinn, then a
graduate student in compostion at the
Preludes to Brahms for clarinet, cello and piano (1996)
In the winter of 1996, I was at a loss
for a Christmas gift for my then-girlfriend, a clarinet player. So I wrote her this little piece, as a
companion for the Brahms A-minor trio, which she was planning to program for a
recital. I don’t think she
was particularly impressed, and the recital was cancelled, but I had completed
a piece of music that didn’t involve trombone, so I felt pretty good.
Rhapsody for trombone quartet (1997)
In the summer of 1997, I studied
composition with Joel Hoffmann, who helped me work through this piece. It’s another one that I should
pull out to find out whether it is any good. I remember it involving some serial
techniques and lots of mutes.
Passacaglia for wind ensemble (1998)
In idle moments at my first public
school teaching job, I began this strict twelve-tone piece for winds that never
got out of the sketching phase. I
began the year by staying after most days to compose, but gave up on that
schedule when I realized that the reason I was feeling nauseous all the time was
that I had a horrible, horrible job and that there was no way I could be good
at it under those conditions.
Naturally, I began to spend as little time at work as possible.
So, those are my early years. There are other projects on which I
worked fitfully during those years, along with more than a few arrangements of
whatever music struck my fancy. I
also spent a great deal of time writing, from long emails to multi-author
serial epic stories to deep and meaningful (ha!) love-letters (and
not-so-love-letters that were apparently misconstrued) to the scholarly work
asked of me in college. I still
think of composing and writing as similar activities, with similar processes
that I learned from some fantastic teachers in high school (here’s to
you, Ms. Miller and Dr. Allen).
