DanielSonenberg.com

Mother nature finally cooperated, and maestro David Rakowski made it out to Gorham to talk shop with my composers. Said composers did a fine job with the USM Spring Composers Showcase last night, with Davy R. and also his accomplice Beth Wiemann in attendance. We had a March, an aleatoric piece about flying saucers (with special guest narrator Paul Haley), a desperation scene from an opera-in-progress (a genre I know all too well), a rock anthem, a spikey atonal piece with deep bass voice, and a multi-movement affair that culminated in the clangorous splendor of handbells dispersed throughout the hall. The USM Composers Ensemble (still shopping for a better name) celebrated its fourth semester of existence. Then today, four of our young composers had 45 mintues (each) of private time with Davy, who also gave a rather spellbinding 90 minute presentation of his own work. It was all good enough to spend some of this glorious Saturday indoors (somehow, since my last several posts, Spring has arrived). And, as I observed to Davy over lunch, it’s a lot easier teaching composition lessons when you get someone else to teach them. Too bad Davy can’t come back every week, so I can spend my time outside throwing Frisbees into the wind.

Hello my friends. I know I've left it quiet here. Something about this time of year for a professor, or a student for that matter. And something about this particular year – this spring – even more so. Things really are winding up, but whether I, or any of us, will have the momentum to push through to the very end is still open to debate. The weather came and tried to sweep Maine to the dark ages. Trees were uprooted, power lost, hair has gone unwashed for near a week in some cases. And some people I see are just plain dizzy, not knowing whether they’re coming or going and happy about it just the same. I could fill this space with facts and figures about my many recent adventures in this world, but my back aches and I’m in too comfy a rocking chair for such exertion. I’m home and on power-save mode. It seems I’m stuck that way here.

Our eating has gone to hell. Meals are never prepared anymore. I hit Tim Horton’s twice a week on the way to school. I’m back on coffee. Even my running routine – generally the most sacred of rituals – is hanging on the precipice. I’m falling apart I tell you. Alex too. We come home from days out and about in the world and just fumble around the apartment, picking up objects and moving them uninterestedly from one room to the next, occasionally stopping to gaze in the refrigerator or out the window. Items of clothing – just about all mine – adorn most surfaces in our sprawling apartment. There are my running shoes, I notice with guilt. Papers everywhere – some look important.

Sometime in the future the sun will come out, winter in Maine will finally end, classes and rehearsals and concerts will all be over and thought – THOUGHT – will return. I remember it fondly.

It's often difficult to choose a category for these posts. My software makes me decide on one, which with my rambling sensibility doesn't always work out so well.

I'd like to start here: I am such a nerd. I'm playing fantasy baseball in a league comprised entirely of music theorists. It's hard to imagine what could be geekier - and I suppose I should take it as a point of pride that since the season began I've been firmly lodged in last place. My old friend Fred once told me "when you catch yourself playing fantasy baseball, that's the beginning of the end." He may have been right. In fantasy baseball you choose (or are given) a roster of players drawn from all the teams in the major leagues - it's your job to "manage" them. This involves setting the line-up, and also doing stuff like trading players, or grabbing them off the waiver wires. The joy of it is that you get to know players from throughout the leagues, and you stop being so your-team centric. I suppose I kind of needed this to get back into the flow of baseball. Somehow the last few seasons haven't excited me so much - it's so hard to care about the regular season these days, with the endless playoffs and the wonderful inequity that insures my team will almost always make the playoffs. Just a bit hard to care all that much - especially surrounded by all these humorless Red Sox fans. So now I'm making roster moves and juggling players I've never heard of. People like Geoff Jenkins, and Cory Patterson. My team can't hit its way out of a paper bag, so I've decided to go all Steinbrenner and I'm firing people left and right. Dropping players, making radical, panic decisions. It feels good. I'll let you know how things go.

In other news, I saw the Boston Symphony for the first time the other night. They played Bartok's second piano concerto, Ligeti's Atmospheres, Wagner's Lohengrin prelude, and Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. And it may well have been the best orchestra concert I've ever heard. Those folks are tight as a drum and play with passion - the likes of which I have to say I've never seen in all my New York trips to the symphony. It felt great to leave a classical concert buzzing with excitement. And even though we really went to hear the Bartok and the Ligeti, it was the Tchaikovsky that really stole the show. Sure - that was the "hit," what most people probably turned out for (programmed last, because orchestra organizers know that as soon as you program anything post-1900 on the second half of the program, you're asking for empty seats) - but it really cracked.

I wish more people cared about classical music. When I say "classical" I don't really mean classical, but I suppose "art music," or "concert music," or something. Living outside of New York City I'm gaining a new understanding of how low people's tolerance for and interest in challenging musical experiences is. People are far more willing to confront difficult books, or difficult art, than they are to grapple with tough music. I don't really know why this is - maybe because people have such emotional attachments to the music they love, the songs that make them feel nostalgic or comfortable or just outright happy. Me too - I love feeling that way, and there's a lot of music that takes me there. But I also want music that throws a wrench into my daily life - that spins my head, makes me feel strange, lost, worried and shaken. I want music to be sweet, but also harsh, mellifluous but also jarringly dissonant, angular, rhythmic, clangorous. There's room in my life for a LOT of different kinds of sound, and it frustrates me how closed so many people are - even people who are musical, people I respect. Here in Portland contemporary art music just isn't on anyone's radar. Some people actually titter a bit when I mention I'm a composer - the word sounds so pretentious, and they aren't aware such people exist. When I get my hair cut and mention that I'm a composer and a professor of music at the university, and also play in a band, it's only this last fact that garners any interest, or comprehension really. And I have friends, family members even, who ask me if I've played guitar lately, or written any songs, and what's going on with the band - the implication being "when are you going to quit this completely bizarre opera crap and come back to the real world. We always thought you were talented." We composers have been accepting responsibility for this general disconnect between art music and "the people," tending to blame it all on "the excesses of the 1960s" - a time that for art music was filled with total serialism and dissonance and that kind of stuff. But I'm tired of that logic. I blame everyone. You. Me. Short attention spans and laziness. Cripes I know I sound like a curmudgeon or an art snob or something here, but come on everybody do your part. Go listen to something that makes you work a bit. Extend yourself a bit - go someplace strange. And listen three times before you cast judgment. Hug a composer today, okay? Or send a whitefish. Something.

We Northerners don't celebrate the vernal season like the rest of you - here's how we found our car, this lovely April 5th.

Okay - as promised, here's a first taste of some of the recent opera activity. This is a staged piano/vocal performance of Act 1 Scene 2 of the opera from the Manhattan School of Music. In this scene, the Elder Barber, who has just been ranting and raving about the great Josh Gibson (who no-one else seems to remember), describes Gibson’s legendary homerun completely out of Yankee Stadium. As he narrates, Gibson and Broadway Connie Rector pantomime the baseball events on the stage, and an old-time radio announcer calls the play by play and “color commentary.” The credits are in the video, but I’ll double up and mention the music director (and co-pianist) Steven Osgood, and the brilliant stage direction of Seret Scott here. I hope you enjoy it – and let me know what you think!

(I will still be posting excerpts from the orchestral performance in Maine – so stay tuned.)

Well it seems SOME people are a little quicker out of the gate than I am. Here I've been promising you opera footage for weeks - WEEKS - and a scant three days after the performance, Washington Musica Viva has posted my Six Small PIeces for Clarinet and Piano on YouTube already. I am humbled. - And I have to add, how totally thrilling and strange to be able to witness this performance from afar. This piece is about 10 years old, but I still have a real soft spot for it, and I'm so happy that it's getting some more exposure.

Enjoy - and I promise to have some opera up soon!
Carl Banner, piano
Ben Redwine, clarinet
Nos. 1-3

Nos. 4-6