…is something that many of us composers feel compelled to do.  The plus side is that you get your piece performed (usually), the opportunity to take home some cash (less frequently), and worst-case scenario, you at least get something to pad your résumé with.

For the uninitiated, the process of applying to competitions goes a little something like this:

1. You find out about the competition from some board, a friend, colleague, frenemy, or by reading some random poster on the wall of your music building.  It will usually give you a submission date some six months away.  You will take down the info, and put it in your calendar.  You will then forget about the competition until about three days before it is due, when you see the random entry and wonder what the hell was that you scribbled in.
2. Finally figuring out what you scribbled in, you will then proceed to comb through your work to see if you have any music that could qualify you to enter the competition.  Nine times out of ten, you don’t.  Three times out of ten, you give serious thought to composing something in those three days you have until the submission date.  You find whatever meets the demands of the competition most closely.
3. Once you’ve chosen the piece (or pieces) that you’re going to submit, you have to give your score a minor face lift, fixing glaring notation errors (No score on earth is without notation errors; look hard enough, and you’ll find them, just like allllll the germs multiplying on your skin, invisibly!  Quick, clean them!  Clean them!), and removing anything that might identify yourself as the composer.
4. This is generally the time where you start to look at the formatting requirements of the competition.  This is where competitions eliminate 85% of their entrants.  If your score is on tabloid, TOO BAD!  It has to be on letter.  Heartfelt dedication to the performers?  SCRAP IT.  Once you rid the score of your stink, your job is to fill in random information about the piece that usually never makes it onto the score to begin with.  How long is this piece?  Put that right under the title, but don’t use double-space.  Tell the percussionists every single mallet they’ll want to consider (and then disregard), along with what brand of drum head you prefer.  If you don’t comply with these, your score won’t get looked at.
5. You’re going to want to include something to listen to.  Most of the time, this piece that you’re submitting has never been performed, so you’re forced to tuck your tail between your legs and beg the gods of Garritan Performance Orchestra to bleep and blorp through your score.  You’ll end up putting something on the recording reading, “Electronic mock-up: I swear to God it sounds better on real instruments, and those are supposed to be glissandi in measure 47!  Oh, and percussion doesn’t play back.”
6. Gather all these materials together, and proceed to start putting them in a complicated series of sealed envelopes, nested in one another.  It helps if you have a unicorn to lick these envelopes.  The judges can tell.
7. Write a check for $35.  Just do it.  These things cost money, you know.  It’s probably to pay off  some Composer Mafia.
8. Put this sucker in the mail.  Remember to overnight it, because wherever you live, the competition is taking place on the opposite side of the country.
9. Wait.

Hey, it’s me, Jason.  I hadn’t heard from you in a while so…I just wanted to see what you were up to.  I didn’t know if you had lost my number or anything.  So…I had a really great time with you the other night…so, um…I was wondering if I can see you again sometime?  Uh…yeah, gimme a call.  My number hasn’t changed or anything…yeah, just wondering if you’re around.

…thinking about the emergent protest happening in New York City, Occupy Wall Street.  It all started with a colleague and sometime acquaintance of mine, Loren Loiacono (Twitter: @lorenlo), posting a link to Gawker’s article about the protest movement.  Of interest is the video of life in the camp in Zuccotti Park:

Right Here All Over (Occupy Wall St.) from Alex Mallis on Vimeo.

Those who know me know that I abhor politics, which might be one of the reasons that I haven’t been able to get my mind off of the subject (I really oughta be composing right now, but this seems to be all I can think about at the moment).  #OWS has been criticized for not being focused on a single issue, and for not aligning itself politically.  I have always found traditional politics to be a very sophisticated form of distraction for people: we’re so busy reading, watching, and listening to whatever political crisis is being pumped through the airwaves that we fail to see that the sides look eerily alike, and that their messages are generic enough to be repeated over and over without any real progress for one side or the other.  Rich people are the voices of both parties.  What’s interesting to see is that this movement is largely (although not totally) about separations in socioeconomic status.

As a classical musician, issues of class weigh heavily on me.  Classical music has always been associated with the wealthy, or at least with those of the uppermost class.  It had always been thought of as “intelligent” music, and not intended for “regular people.”  There has always been a popular music, in various forms, throughout the years, designed to be relatable/palatable  to the unwashed masses.

Anecdotally, I like to say that during the 1960s, popular music started to become, for lack of a better term, elevated (I also like to say that The Beatles ruined classical music, but that’s only when I’m feeling cynical).  Suddenly, the masses created meaningful music for themselves, which made for a dodgy situation for classical music.  Classical music, which had always been archaic, no longer had a premium on intelligence.  And classical music has struggled to find its position in the world ever since.

What strikes me as interesting that we think of the vast majority of popular music as corporate, meaning that it has “sold out,” or that it is designed to reap profit from the aforementioned unwashed masses.  It isn’t designed to be meaningful, it’s designed to fill the radio silence in between ads.  It keeps people shaking their ass in clubs, buying drinks, buying CDs, and it’s very good at its job.  I know hundreds of classical musicians who, although being surrounded with the “smartest” of music, still can’t resist the urge to dance to Ke$ha.  It’s a contradiction that many don’t think much about.

When I look at classical music being composed today, it’s music that is very far from corporate music.  It is small-batch, localized, and usually without a slick veneer of marketing.  Ironically, the classical composer working today resembles the protesters in Zuccotti Park much more than any music more widely available (and, ironically, much more than some of the music that they may be listening to during the breaks in protest).  As a group, we’re unfocused, apolitical (except those who aren’t!), and unable to be pigeonholed, packaged, marketed, or sold.  In this way, I feel a certain kind of solidarity with the people in the park, fighting the tendency toward homogeneity, and playing toward the sound byte, and the lowest common denominator.

What we need is a way to advocate for ourselves as a group, to show these people out there that we are making music that is like them; unique, complex, and not simply a repetition of our past incarnations.  In an unlikely twist, classical music has the potential and opportunity to be more relevant than it has been in at least a century.

…but I finally got the first half of my piece for bass clarinet and electronics, Air Reel, up and ready in mockup form!  I’ve plugged in the Finale playback of the bass clarinet, combined with the actual electronics.  Take a listen (I’ve made this into an mp3 for the sake of speed and bandwith!):

If that doesn’t work, try this link.

And here’s the score for the bass clarinet:

I could really (really REALLY) use some feedback.  Let me know what you think!

…to do some long-overdue composing on my latest piece, Air Reel for bass clarinet and fixed media, for bass clarinetist, basset hornist, and all-around badass Lisa Preimesberger.  I’m fully back in school, and have recently taken a job with a Big Awesome Fruit-Themed Computer Company (I’m not allowed to talk about them on the Internet, so that’s as specific as I’m going to get).  You can see the score below (it’s only the first four minutes, and not transposed).  I’ll update again soon with snippets of the electronics part!

As followers of my Twitter have heard me say, the piece is a mix of Hindustani Raga and Country Western song.  Which is funny, not so much because of the odd pairing, but because I’m the one doing the pairing.  My composition prof pointed out that both of these forms require a kind of patience that I don’t exhibit in my everyday life (I believe he called it “Yankee Impatience”).  I have found myself trying to slow down for this piece, which has been really really tough!  What’s nice about this piece (and with working with said composition prof, in general) is that I’m being forced to closely examine my thought process as I compose.

I like working with this guy.  We don’t agree on a lot of ideas; I have always made it a point to take lessons from composers whom I disagree with; I don’t need to pay thousands of dollars for pats on the back and gold stars.  I want someone who will see the perceived flat sides of my music that I can’t see.  He can usually say one thing in the start of the lesson that completely shifts the way I thought of whatever I’m working on.  It’s a good feeling, in its own frustrating way.  It’s what learning feels like, and it keeps me hungry.

My “Yankee Impatience” has me frustrated lately, particularly with the advancement of my career, overall.  Now that I’m firmly entrenched in the process of getting my PhD, I’m trying to turn my focus towards the next step in the process.  From here, it gets murky.  I’ve put up a website, I’ve made myself accessible via all sorts of social media, I blog every now and then.  This makes me just like the hundreds of other composers I’ve encountered on Twitter and Facebook.  All of us have found our way into the same river, and now we’re just swimming in circles.  At first, it was exciting!  We were all busy introducing ourselves, handing out business cards, following one another.  We had so much to do.  But now, it feels like we’re in a rut.  Where are all the people looking for a composer to take a chance on?  The more I look around, the more I see that people around me are all waiting for discovery, not waiting to discover.  Suddenly, this looks just as frustrating as not being known at all.  The only difference is that now all the unknowns know each other.  We all apply to the same festivals and competitions, chase the same leads, and even the winners and the chosen end up back in the same ol’ river, swimming with the rest of us.

I have been told that, after a certain amount of preparation, that all that’s left is luck.  That’s the part that kills me: there’s nothing I can do but wait and look appealing.  If I was patient, that might be the easy part, but…

…that into quoting people; it feels too fake, too Hallmark Greetings for me to draw any meaning from it.  Nonetheless, this quote has always inspired me, which is funny when you consider the quote:

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
— Chuck Close

…a little rocky in terms of, well, gainful employment.  As a result, the blog has been a little neglected in favor of days being spent hanging out on Craigslist and Monster.com, trying to figure out some kind of job situation.  It’s deeply concerning how lazy composing feels when you need to earn some money…well, lazy isn’t the right word.  Long story long, it’s difficult to sit down for hours and compose when you think that you really oughta be out pounding the pavement looking for a job.  I’m pretty sure that last statement is being narrated in my head by my relatives who questioned the idea of me going to school for composition to begin with.  It’s sad when doing what you love is tainted by the need to make money…rather, it’s sad that our society tends to monetize the value of things, and that valuable things that don’t make money are less valuable than, I dunno, hedge fund management (or whatever makes money these days…).

Still, I have had more than my fair share of time to compose, and compose I did.  I am putting the finishing touches on a piece for The Equinox Sextet, called Overbite.  If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve been putting chunks of it on here as they’ve come up.  I’m reticent about putting the finished score up on the internet for people to just take (I really need to learn how to create read-only PDFs…if anybody can tell me, please leave a comment!!!), but I’m happy to share the Finale Garritan playback of the piece (which leaves something to be desired, but it’s better than nothing.  Check it out:

Overbite has been a long time coming, for me.  Basically, I’ve been waiting for more than five years to write a piece like this.  At the end of my bachelor’s degree, I had written Say Nothing, a piece for fourteen saxophones (who also do a fair amount of speaking).  At the time,  I was obsessed with Berio’s Sinfonia.  For the uninitiated, you can listen to the famous third movement here:

At the core of my obsession was the philosophical question of the nature of quotation and reference in music.  It is a common slogan of the Postmodern Era that no music has ever been created from whole cloth, despite what any composer may have thought.  The idea is that musical ideas are always the love children of the melting pot of experiences known as the life of a composer, blended in the creative process into something “new,” or at least “new-ish.”

For me, the Sinfonia challenged an underlying value statement in the idea above: a musical composition, in its finished form, is homogeneous.  A piece, although it may be different in sections of itself, is still made up of itself throughout.  Acceptance of, and even dependence upon, this idea can be seen in the way that most people learn how to appreciate classical music:  form is taught in a way that emphasizes return to primary materials and ideas, and how those ideas are developed from beginning to end.  Pieces are praised for their motivic unity; there is no higher compliment for a piece than to demonstrate how Idea X, no matter how different it may sound, is really a masked form of Idea A.

A great example of how influences can combine in such a way is in Adams’ music.  In this, the third movement of Harmonielehre, we encounter music that owes a debt to his minimalist colleagues, but also has distinct Mahlerian and Ravellian influences.  All of these are melted down into an alloy; in its finished state, the end product can be separated into its constituent parts:

This is not the way that the third movement of the Sinfonia works.  It’s made up of quotations, entire chunks of, other pieces, patched together.  What’s more is that we don’t encounter them as a whole, but rather as pieces floating around an axle, which is the Scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony.  This axle is what provides us with the notion of “glue” for the movement, as well as provides us with a teleological function.  This is the most important component of the movement: it reigns in and contextualizes the disparate pieces.

Ever since I heard the Sinfonia (which explores this idea to greater and lesser degrees throughout the whole piece), I’ve wanted to explore this idea of how to construct a piece.  To me, classical music’s notion of purity doesn’t reflect the world that I occupy (or that any American occupies.  Culturally, Americans take pride in the synthesis of many different ways of life.  Homogeneity isn’t something that can happen in our world [unless you're from northern Idaho, I guess].  There is no such thing as a distinctly “American” culture, no matter what some Americans may think.).  I wanted to create a music that was clearly made up of other musical ideas; less of a melting pot, more of a salad bowl.

Unfortunately, this idea wasn’t popular with some of my profs.  And to an extent, I see where they were coming from: I can see a need to master basic Western ideas of form.  I was told that the ideas that I wanted to explore wouldn’t get me into a good doctoral program.  So I wrote what I was told would.  And I got into a graduate program: I got into a bunch of ‘em!  So I feel that, now that I’m not trying to impress anybody with my chops, it was time to actually use them to write something that I considered worthwhile.

For Overbite, I wanted to explore musical ideas that were more like the ones I had grown up with in drum corps, one of my “folk” musics (I use that term to describe the music that I grew up with.  When you grow up in suburbia, you don’t really have a “folk” culture, at least not one marked by any geographical or ethnographic borders.  You are essentially your own private tribe.  More on that some other time…).  In drum corps, music is taken from many different cultures, and rearranged and manipulated to suit the needs of a “show,” which is like a musical form.  This means that a piece is simultaneously being referenced, deconstructed, and recontextualized when it is played by a group.  Another American music does this even more adeptly: hip-hop.  Which brings me to my first major influence for Overbite, The Beastie Boys:

On top of that, this piece is also made up of its own set of references, the most prominent one being the opening riff from Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly:

Also in the piece are references to Schubert’s Gretchen Am Spinnrade, which is a piece that I have made reference to multiple times.  These pieces of mine then come to become active parts of the piece itself.  This idea of self-reference has its precedents in the Classical repertoire, for certain, but for me it came from a place out of drum corps, where corps continually reference their earlier shows and performances.  Consider this video of the Phantom Regiment in different performances over the years:

You’ll notice that in the finales of their shows, there are similar-yet-different musical and visual ideas that are expressed.  This is a level of communication that is underused in traditional classical music.

While we’re at it, I may as well include this show by The Cavaliers for its major influence on the writing of the piece.  Surprisingly though, although the piece is made up of Daugherty’s Niagara Falls, I don’t consider that piece to be influential.

While discussing this idea with Ken Ueno on twitter some time ago, he had asked me an important question: “Does the audience member have to get the reference in order for them to understand the piece?”  After taking some time to think about it, my answer is, “no.”  Ultimately, the references augment the experience, but the piece can only be expected to be encountered autonomously.  If one encountered an Eiffel Tower in which the girders where bent in such a way as to be made of Mona Lisas, the tower would still need to be able to stand.

Ultimately, I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish in Overbite, which on the surface is a piece about white people dancing, but underneath is a conduit of my own private musical culture.  It is music made of music, unapologetically.

Okay, folks.  Here’s another update on my latest page, Overbite.  Check out the score here:

And take a listen to the Finale-Playback-Thing Here:

I’d love to hear any feedback that you have; leave a comment!

…interview on Richard Zarou’s podcast, No Extra Notes. What a trip!

…of my Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano just around the corner (Tuesday at 3:00pm at San Francisco State University), I decided to take a final listen to the bleep-blorp-bleep playback of the Finale playback orchestra dealy.  I’m not sure what put me in the mood.  Aside from the mistakes in range in places (I apparently thought the piano had another octave at the top of its range…I think it was because I was too busy writing conceptually to think of what the actual notes should be at that point), and a misunderstanding of writing for stopped horn (which, considering I was once a horn player, is quite embarassing), I don’t think the piece is too bad.  I can always fix those mistakes up and the piece will float.  I’m thankful that Lydia Van Dreel, Sylvia Davanzo, and Sandy Holder have been so understanding, and willing to make fixes.  It’s been tough not being there to retranscribe the score alongside them.

I worry that people forget that part of the process of premiering new works is working out these sort of kinks.  I’ve got the feeling that most musicians think that all (good) music comes from some kind of virgin birth, absolutely perfect from its inception.  Experience has taught me that’s hardly ever the case.  I, for one, prefer this sort of give and take.  If there is a better way to play something for a performer, I want to hear it; the idea that I, GREAT COMPOSER dictate what will be done is a little bit not my style (don’t get me wrong, I have all the delusions of grandeur to be a GREAT COMPOSER).

I can’t help but feel anxious when I listen back to this piece, for a couple of reasons.  First, because the piece brings me back to a stressful time in my life.  Second, because of the language I used to write it.  The piece is very, very (VERY) traditional in a lot (A LOT) of places.  Now, us composers have been led to believe that we can write whatever we’d like, but the truth of the matter is that composers who ape music of the past are generally not taken as seriously as other composers.  This isn’t a tonal/atonal thing; that battle is safely over.  This is more of an “old” vs. “new” thing.  Music can sound overtly consonant, so long as it’s presented as being “new” in some way: that’s sort of how minimalism came to be recognized as an intellectual movement, as opposed to being relegated to a fetish of the sentimental.

In the Trio, I strove to create “new” music out of conspicuously “old” music.  I wasn’t interested in using the passing triad or inflection (a la Ligeti, or the minimalists, etc.), but larger chunks of tonal music patched together in unexpected ways.  I go back and forth as to whether I was able to create this, or if I simply indulged some overtly comfy, sentimental feelings.

Ultimately, I feel that if you’re going to use “old” music, it’s best to put it in as radically “new” a context as possible.  You know who does this really well?  Del Tredici, particularly in Vintage Alice. I listened to his music non-stop from 2007 to 2009, and it’s been a tremendous influence on me.  For some reading material, check out this New York Times review of Vintage Alice.  I disagree with the reviewer’s, um, review, entirely, but it at least gives some context to what Del Tredici faced during his career (not that it’s over…you know what I mean).

One thing that Del Tredici had going for him in Vintage Alice was that the pieces he was quoting were just that: quotes.  Quotation of anachronistic music is an entirely different intellectual device than outright composition in an anachronistic style.  People can recognize a quotation as a “foreign” element.  It doesn’t belong to the piece in the same way as if it came from the composer’s pen.  It took me a long time to recognize the difference.

I’m interested to see how the audience interprets my piece.  I’ve got my fingers crossed.

…stumbled upon this article in the Independent about Pierre Boulez the other day.  In it, author Michael Church pokes a stick at known iconoclast and curmudgeon Boulez.  As I read this article, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Why does this article feel so…I dunno, icky…to me?”

I think the reason I felt this way is that it feels so forced.  I mean, I get it.  Divisive opinions make for tasty news, especially in an area so stereotypically dry as classical music.  But seriously, Boulez (despite being an insanely good musician, composer, conductor) is 86.  His world-beating remarks made a lot more historical sense in his 30′s.  Nowadays, though, it feels a little bit more like an old man threatening to steal your baseball: don’t let Ol’ Man Boulez see you fetishizing the past in his yard, he’ll call the authorities!

I think that the problem with Modernist composers seem to have is that many have lived long enough to see their ideas become outdated.  The existence of their ideas in the general post-postmodern cloud of ideas, references, and referenced ideas, makes them stand out as woefully anachronistic.  Ironically, postmodernism seems to be fueled by woeful anachronism.  Perhaps Boulez is now guilty of fetishizing the past, himself.