Gregory Wanamaker

composer

In Transit features a virtuoso performance of my Sonata deus sax machina by Timothy McAllister and Kathryn Goodson.

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11.04.07

Busy couple of months around here. I heard a few performances of some new and some not so new works. Corridors was premiered on October 16 at the Crane School of Music. My family and I also put together a little benefit for the victims of the Ica Earthquake that hit Peru in August. Proceeds went to the Peru Relief Fund by the Red Cross. Thank you to the Crane Symphony Orchestra, saxophonist Patrick Murphy, soprano Jill Pearon and the Crane Latin Ensemble for their wonderful performances. I should add that the Crane Symphony Orchestra performed my Motet and ¡Yo no tengo soledad! splendidly.

November 1 marked the release of Washington DC area saxophonist Noah Getz’s Crosscurrents for Albany Records. This cd includes a very creative interpretation of my Sonata deus sax machina. Noah will be performing the piece this spring as well. See my calendar page for more details. For those interested parties, feel free to compare this performance with Tim McAllister’s on his album In Transit on the Innova label. It’s also available via iTunes.

I am also anxiously awaiting the release of Tim’s recording with clarinet virtuoso Robert Spring of my Duo Sonata for Summit Records. It will be released concurrently on both their cd’s this winter.

Of course, I have quite a few projects in the hopper. Keep listening for details!

08.22.07

Corridors, a continuous set of free variations for flute, viola and harp will be premiered on September 19 at the Crane School of Music, Potsdam, NY. Completed at the beginning of August, Corridors was composed specifically for this recital as a companion piece to the great Debussy Sonata and Arnold Bax's work for the same instrumentation. Interesting to me (and maybe to at least one of y’all) is a really nice little set by Carlos Chavez simply titled “Trio” for Flute, Viola and Harp that I ran across while studying chamber scores with harp. Chaves’ work is in four movements and is actually a beautiful set of transcriptions of short piano works by Debussy and de Falla. Was I stealing or borrowing other composers' materials? No, it’s just that harp is a painful instrument to compose for. Anyway, I enjoy listening to music I haven't heard before as much as I enjoy writing music I haven't written before. Of course, we should all assume that I have no intention of writing any music by other composers... What a silly couple of sentences.

I heard reports that Lynn McGrath’s premiere of Little Left Toe at the Niksic Guitar Festival in Montenegro on July 20 went swimmingly and that all of the English speakers who found the piece humorous laughed and everyone else did not.

Washington DC area saxophonist Noah Getz finished production of his new cd for Albany Records that includes my Sonata deus sax machina. Scheduled for release this fall, this recording also features pianist Jeffrey Chappell. They will be performing the piece this fall and spring as well. See my calendar page for more details.

Clarinet virtuoso Robert Spring and my good friend, saxophonist Tim McAllister, finished recording my Duo Sonata in Phoenix, AZ on May 16. This recording will be released concurrently by Summit Records on both of their discs this fall and winter. Keep an eye and ear out for more details.

06.22.07

It’s a busy summer. I have completed a couple of shorter works and am currently working on a couple of larger works - more on those as they are completed. I am also looking forward to Lynn McGrath’s premiere of Little Left Toe at the Niksic Guitar Festival in Montenegro on July 20.

There are also a couple of exciting recordings in the final stages of production. Washington DC area saxophonist Noah Getz is finishing the mastering of his new cd for Albany Records that includes my Sonata deus sax machina. Scheduled for release this fall, this recording also features pianist Jeffrey Chappell. They will be performing the piece this fall and spring as well see my calendar page for more details.

Clarinet virtuoso Robert Spring and my good friend, saxophonist Tim McAllister, finished recording my Duo Sonata in Phoenix, AZ on May 16. This recording will be released concurrently by Summit Records on both of their discs this fall and winter. Keep an eye and ear out for more details.

In the “on a totally different note department,” I am very impressed with Paul McCartney’s new album as well as his handling of the marketing. An amazing instinctive musician, Sir Paul has embraced a number of important marketing tools allowed him by Starbuck’s new label that the failed EMI refused to give in to. The result is some great marketing on sites like YouTube and virtually giving away a couple of tracks in their entirety to sell his album. Paul’s recent presence in advertising in places like Apple’s website, iTunes, and Amazon - to name a few - has shown him as a progressive marketer of his music and his personality. At 65, that’s no small feat, particularly when saddled for most of his career with the ever-conservative EMI and Capital Records who only promote using the same old interview tactics and very long lead times. Well done, Paul.

04.04.07

As I’ve been working on a number of new projects, I can’t help but think about how I reconcile my complete musical past with my musical present while examining what the future may hold for the works I write - the potential life of the music I will leave behind when I am...well...gone. While I am first and foremost a composer, I am also a teacher who encourages my students to find a balance between their current voice with the music they are studying in pursuit of an undergraduate degree in composition from The Crane School of Music.

Often, my new students enter happy with their completed works which are soundly based on a number of contemporary popular idioms that they like - typically pop and jazz in addition to John Williamsy film music. In addition to weekly composition assignments, I require my students to listen to specific works composed within the past hundred years or so to simply expose them to musical languages different than their own. Works which I find important and/or influential to me that most entering students have yet to hear even peripherally. Some students easily reject anything different than what they like now simply because they don’t immediately understand certain harmonic sounds, structures or even complete languages of contemporary classical works I admittedly impose on them to help them find something different to influence them. As I enjoy listening to new things, I try to keep an open mind to the new sounds I hear around me. Therefore, this list of works has recently grown to include non-Western musics and some types of jazz as well.

I struggled with these same issues when I was a student, too, and I spent a considerable time back then forcing myself to reject the rock and pop influences that drew me in to become a professional musician/composer. None of my teachers told me to reject any of the music I already loved, but I felt at the time that the constant forceful encouragement to work my way through works like Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire or Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was a tacit nudge to get away from the poppy, newagey stuff I was writing prior to my undergraduate studies. Whether that nudge was real or imagined, it did force-then-allow me to explore sounds and structures I had neither heard nor imagined before.

The earliest and most memorable example of this actually occured at the tender age of 16 while I was at a boarding school in Pennsylvania where I had joined the small Jazz Band as a self-taught bass player. I took a course in Jazz Composition with the ensemble’s director Anthony Branker, a composer and trumpet player. One day he exposed me to the free jazz of Ornette Coleman. While I was a bit shocked with the unpredictability of the sounds, Mr. Branker explained that the music was completely improvised over the simplest of structures (virtually nothing). That hit me like a ton of bricks. “Is this really possible?” I thought. Music from nothing created on the spot. To this day, I remember this as the most important musical lesson I ever experienced. Improvisation can be the catalyst for the most wonderful musical ideas. A couple of years later, before entering college, I discovered the music and writings of John Cage on my own. While philosophically different, I drew a strong connection between chance and “unintentional sounds” and free improvisation.

These concepts continue to influence the way I begin, continue, and finish every work I write. In addition, I have also completely outgrown my self-imposed need to reject my beloved rock and pop music. While I am not sure that any of these elements are actually perceivable to first- or last-time listeners of any of my recent music, they are there in spirit simply because I opened my mind to the different and the new. Thanks, Mr. Branker and all of my other teachers.

On a totally different note, I found today that my TubaSuite received a very nice review by renowned tubist and pedagogue Phillip Sinder in the Guide to the Tuba Repertoire: The New Tuba Source Book - An impressive and rewarding unaccompanied work. Dig it!

01.09.07

A much belated Happy New Year! I don’t really have much to report about myself as I am in the thick of quite a few projects. However, I did return from New York where I saw Tan Dun's The First Emperor. A beautiful piece and a spectacular production. I read a few reviews, including Tommasini’s in the New York Times, before going and was interested particularly in a few of his negative comments. Stating the the score is an “enormous disappointment” because of very long, slow vocal lines throughout the work that, according to Tommasini, recall Puccini’s Turandot and take away from the “better” moments that sound like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Interestingly, Tommasini's review of The First Emperor repeats this complaint with monotonous regularity for paragraphs. To Tommasini's credit, he claims to have played through a piano/vocal score of - I assume parts of - the piece. But he states that “because Mr. Tan integrates Chinese folk elements into the music, the vocal lines continually move by wide and sometimes awkward leaps to unusual notes.” Mr. Tommasini seems to be criticizing the quality of the work based on his perceived difficulty of this work for the performers and his assessment of a musical language he knows nothing about.

I do have my own criticisms of Tan Dun’s work, but they are based on something more simple. I felt that the problem with the vocal writing had little to do with the “long, arching and slow” lines. Rather, I thought that if there was a problem, it was with the language of the text and/or its rhythmic setting. I suspect, though, that this is not entirely the fault of Mr. Tan and his collaborator Ha Jin. It is simply impractical to write a Chinese libretto for a largely Western cast - and more likely (in the minds of those who have the say-so) - the Met and its Audience. I think that there were rhythmic problems with the setting of the English text simply because the music was so Chinese. Hence, at times the vocal lines were awkward to listen to - and therefore, sing. It had nothing to do with ”wide and sometimes awkward leaps to unusual notes,” Mr. Tommasini. Although you had a vocal score in front of you, I heard a very natural pitch sequence and contour thoughout the work. I detected little that was vocally awkward melodically. Perhaps it is because as a composer, I like to give all musicians some credit in their ability to learn and hear a new piece of music. Indeed, I would like to give Tan Dun his deserved accolades for writing the music he hears and the entire cast - particularly Placido Domingo, Elizabeth Futral, and Paul Groves - for singing this difficult work naturally and seemingly effortlessly. However, I listened to the orchestra as well, and therefore did not focus on the vocal lines themselves. Rather, they were part of the overall texture. All music - and any artform - is based on a big picture. An opera is not exclusively about vocal lines - listening to Wagner, Verdi, and Puccini illustrates this.

I am generally impatient with bad music - in fact, some of the tripe that comes from many of the tone-deaf composers allowed to write today really bugs me. But I will never understand critics who arrogantly take issue with a musical language based on their own tastes or, perhaps, their failed experiences as a performer. I mean no disrespect, Mr. Tommisini, but based on your review, I don't think we heard the same piece.

ADDENDUM - January 11, 2006: Tommasini is still at it! Check out today's article by Tommasini in the New York Times.

Something else really cool that happened while I was in NYC was that I hung out with my very first composition student Matthew Kajcienski. Check out his company website.

©2010 Gregrory Wanamaker, All Rights Reserved.