Working on something new?

 

Something new in the works...?

Process (a #TBT)

Process (a #TBT)

It is always recommended for artists of all stripes to carry some kind of notepad or sketch pad with them at all times, for jotting down ideas on the go.

This is a page from my notepad/scheduler from April, 2010. You can see my classes for that day, that it was a sunny day, a reminder to bring life savers to my voice lesson the next day, and that I planned to watch Casablanca off Netflix that evening. (Old-school DVD style!) I also wrote down a few stanzas of poetry as the lines came to me, because I was sitting on the bus thinking about what a nice day it was. Later that day I edited the four stanzas into a poem, and a while later set them to music as a song.

So you never know when, in between grocery trips and bus rides on a sunny day, you might have an idea that can go somewhere with a little more work.

My Music Highlights of 2014

2014 has been a strong year for me in pursuing my goals as an emerging composer.

In March, I had the privilege of having one of my works-in-progress read by the professional string group from Moscow, Chamber Orchestra Kremlin. This was a tremendous experience, and I was much impressed by their playing skill. They inspired me to want to write more for orchestra.

In the spring I finished my first year as a graduate student in the Masters program at WOU, and continued working on new pieces, including a short work for guitar and winds called Cranes.

On Dec. 3, my first complete piece for full orchestra, Citations Musicales, was performed by the Western Oregon Symphony. It is a suite of three movements based on piano works by French composer Erik Satie. Working with the symphony was another excellent experience for me as a composer.

I did not perform much this year, but had the honor of singing in the Western Hemisphere Voices backing choir for influential songwriter Allen Toussaint’s show with Western Hemisphere Orchestra on Dec. 6.

I also sang this year with Vox Capitolio, a new choir being organized by a friend from WOU. We performed a program of Christmas classics at several local venues, finishing off with a well-received performance at the Zoo Lights in Portland on Dec. 23.

All in all, this has been a pretty great year for my music, and I look forward to 2015 when I will be completing my Master’s degree, putting on a recital of more of my latest works, and producing a recording project. I will continue to put my music forward for performance opportunities as I further hone my craft. So stay tuned for further developments from me, and I wish you all a happy and successful 2015!

And thanks for all the likes and shares! I appreciate knowing people are interested in what is going on with me and my music! Happy New Year!

My First Orchestra Work to be Performed This Week - Reflections

This coming Wednesday night (Dec. 3 @ 7:30pm) the Western Oregon Symphony will be performing one of my pieces, Citations Musicales, an arrangement I made of three Erik Satie piano pieces, transcribed and adapted for full orchestra. This has been a wonderful project for me, and it will be the first time a complete orchestra work of mine will be performed publicly. (Listen to a sample of the music on YouTube here.)

It is actually going to be the third time I have worked with an orchestra on a piece of mine. This past March, I had a reading session with the visiting strings-only group, Chamber Orchestra Kremlin, of two movements of a totally original composition titled Enkidu Suite (inspired by the Gilgamesh epic). The reading went really well — they are amazing players — but the piece is still a work-in-progress and not ready for public performance. Still, while working on that piece I was inspired to work on a piece for full orchestra, and came up with the plan of doing the Satie arrangement and began working on it almost a year ago. In June, The Western Oregon Symphony performed an early version of the first movement of Citations Musicales.

I find Satie’s style very evocative and striking. The Sarabande that I orchestrated is probably my favorite of his pieces, and I find it very charming and beautiful. Each of the three pieces I selected presented different challenges for how to use the orchestra to capture the essence of the music. i am sure with each one my technique has grown considerably.

Something else I am learning in this process is how much work is involved with seemingly simple tasks such as revising the score and parts when I decide on a change or find a mistake. I have done one relatively “minor” revision to the first movement, and made small changes or fixes to quite a few of the parts. (Just tonight we found a mistake in the cello part, and decided on a change in the timpani part!) I have no idea how much time total I have spent just revising parts and score, but any change always takes longer than I would anticipate. “Engraving” a music part involves not just the notes, but anything relating to the overall format that might change when you change a note. A change in a part also needs to be reflected in the conductor’s score, which has very different formatting requirements. So revisions are a detail-oriented and time-consuming task! When possible I try to maintain a file of my own notes on changes needed, so I can do as many in a batch as I can.

I am pleased to be presenting my piece, and thankful to the orchestra players and director Dr. Ike Nail for making this possible. I anticipate a great performance on Wednesday night, and I know this has been a great experience for me as a composer!

Reflections on my pride in my work in music so far

This month I’m preparing to start my second and final year as a masters student in music composition.

I’ve worked hard for the past several years to carve a niche for myself in music.

I love to make new music. I listen to recordings I’ve made, often with the invaluable help of friends and mentors at school, and I feel like I’ve done good work. I’ve created something of value that I can really appreciate and feel proud to share. I’ve added a little bit of light to the world, illuminating its beauty.

Some of my favorite pieces are not my most recent, but I’m still writing good music. My wish is that I write more and more, and find more and more ways to get out into the world with my positive energy and love of beauty.

I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who has helped me and collaborated with me along the way, and continues to support me in my work. I’ve learned so much, gained so much. I hope you feel similarly. Thank you!

Creating in a VISUAL Mode

Music events need posters to help in getting the word out, and one of the music-related jobs I've enjoyed is getting to design posters for concerts and other music-related events. I thought I would let folks on here know that I have a little "portfolio" set up on my Flickr account, here. Check it out!

Here are a couple of my favorites on there right now...




Something I enjoy is taking an image of a classic work of art and using it to represent a music event. Does art ever affect how you feel about music?

Sails

I have not shared on here for a couple of weeks, so here is an interesting rendition of Debussy's Prelude, Voiles, transcribed for violin and piano and performed by Grigory Feygin:


http://youtu.be/dWtKlnktFNY

Debussy's use of whole tone and pentatonic scales gives this piece a unique and evocative sense of space. Voiles is French for "sails." The original piano work is number two from Debussy's first book of Preludes, 1909–1910.

Two Events Next Week (June 2 & June 4)

I'm pleased to announce that I've managed to get two of my new pieces onto concert programs in the coming week:

* Spectrum! at Western Oregon University *

Monday, June 2, 2014 @ 7:30 p.m.

Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR

Smith Recital Hall

**FREE**

A new instrumental song of mine called Cranes will be performed as part of an all-new program of works by WOU composers. You can preview the song on my SoundCloud stream.

* Western Oregon Symphony previews Citations Musicales (“Musical Quotations”) *

Wednesday, June 4, 2014 @ 7:30 p.m.

Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR

Rice Auditorium

$3 general / $1 students & seniors (WOU students free w/ ID)

Early 20th-century French composer Erik Satie was an under-appreciated genius in his time. He is best-known for his piano character pieces, such as the early Gymnopedies, and later Sports et Divertissiments. The Western Oregon Symphony will debut a new arrangement by me of three of his piano works. This concert will include a preview of the first movement, based on a manuscript unpublished in Satie's lifetime.

To get updates on my concert schedule you can "Like" me on Facebook, and sign up for my email list.

Throwback Thursday: Playing with the band!

This was a fun experience. I've since played with a couple of other bands, in addition to some singing.

http://youtu.be/U2_MJ0KAqg4

Learning to Compose

In my website bio I have talked broadly about why I write music. Here I'd like to dig a little bit into how I see the process of becoming a composer in general, and a little bit on how I came into doing it.

My philosophy of what is involved with studying to become a music composer is that there are basically two parts. First, you learn the rules and process of how to take a musical idea that you already have in mind, to refine it and apply guidelines of how instruments work, how sounds work together, and how a piece of music hangs together as a form, and then write the idea down in a musical score.

For many years, this basic idea of knowing the mechanics of how to write down musical ideas somewhat escaped me. I started out playing violin when I was ten, and also tinkering on a piano keyboard. In a handful of years, I had learned about notes and the violin staff, major scales, and time signatures and other basic things, but after about eight years playing violin in school and in lessons, I hadn't learned anything about harmony or counterpoint, or very much about rhythm, or how to inform my ear to be able to notate on a piece of paper something I'd heard. After some frustrations with trying to write music without really knowing the mechanics of the writing down of music, I gave up and set composing aside and focused on other subjects. I mistakenly felt that what I needed to know couldn't be taught and wasn't available from teachers or books. I thought one had to be innately talented with knowing how to make a musical composition, and since it was not happening for me, I must not have what it takes to write music. And I was mistaken, but it took me several years to realize this.

The second part of becoming a composer is that you have to get intimately familiar with a lot of different musical expressions and works spanning the history of western music and world music, and this experiential familiarity rewires your brain to make it more accessible to forming novel musical ideas that will work and be interesting and emotionally expressive. There are of course many subparts to this learning, such as experimentation with and learning how to write a satisfying musical line, musical phrasing, associations of sound color and rhythm, etc. There are questions of what is appropriate in a given genre or context. There are musical styles that must be understood from the inside out, how they move, how musical time is subtly different in, say, a symphony versus a rock song versus a samba.

This part of the process I had not really given up on and was doing on my own somewhat as I collected and listened to music over many years. I knew what I liked, and I started to get a sense just from listening to music many times over as to how harmony and counterpoint worked. So, pushed by all this music in my head that I didn't know how to write down and share with people, I decided eventually to try again at writing music, and then I discovered there was something called "music theory" and there were books and classes on it, and when you went to college to study music they could teach you all these things that interested me intensely, so I started studying music and how to be a music composer.

So now what does one do, as a music composer, who knows something of how to write down music, how to fit the pieces together into something that will sound good, and also how to come up with musical ideas based on a notion of a feeling that you want to evoke? Often, for myself, I feel like writing music is an intellectual exercise or puzzle to solve: how can I use a particular scale to create a tango, for example. How can I write a jazz piece that uses only 6 notes? Is this idea even possible? So writing music is exploration, maybe like a treasure hunt as much as an equation to solve. But then also there is the emotional level, how music makes me feel and how it is a way to share something with other people, and help bring people together. I think music is beautiful for how it can unite people, even when it is not explicitly "beautiful." Music, when it works, (and even when it is very incomplete or only partially realized) is always powerful and creates a reaction. The contours and vibrations of music resonate in not just the human ear, but also the human heart, the brain, the bones, the other organs, and between people who are in the same place or even nowhere near together but listening to the same thing possibly at different times.

Finally, it is not at all easy to write music, but a lot of people recognize the power of music, and perhaps the challenge of the task is another aspect that makes it worthwhile to try.

Lovin' Blues

Lovin' Blues

I will love you, my dear
'til the oceans run dry.
I will love you, my dear
'til all the oceans run dry.
You know I'll go on loving you,
so why you makin' me cry?


(9/11/2013)

NEW: Mid-Willamette Valley Resources Page

I want to share a new resource I've created: a list of local music and arts-related organizations in the Salem area. So far I've found a nice variety of types of groups and places involving music and other arts. Please come visit my resources page and let me know if you have any suggestions or updates!

Mid-Willamette Valley Local Music and Arts Resources

"Virtual" choir that is actually a global social phenomenon

Contemporary choral composer Eric Whitacre has recently been collaborating with singers from all over the world through online social media to create what he calls "Virtual Choirs." When I first heard about this a year or two ago I was skeptical that someone could take recorded voices from so many people's computers and mix them together effectively to create "real" choral music.

Today I found that he's done a couple of talks with TED, and from watching them I came to realize the real point I was missing is not that they are creating "good music" with this digital voice mosaics, but that they are bringing together people from all over the globe, dozens of countries, political "enemies," people who will never meet in real life, and creating something beautiful together that is about the music – about what Boethius called musica humana – the harmony of human life and society.

The sound is pretty cool, but the idea is brilliant and beautiful.

Listen and watch Whitacre's TED Talk from 2011 here.
http://on.ted.com/Whitacre

Singer-Songwriter Concert Wednesday May 29

Upcoming concert announcement:

We've been working hard to prepare an evening of great new songs to share. We'll be performing one medley and a set of all-new songs written by members of the group, including a new song of mine called "Brave Little Boy." The concert is free and open to the public, so I hope you'll be able to come out and hear us!

* Singer-Songwriter / Guitar Ensemble Concert *
Wednesday, May 29, 2013 @ 7:30 p.m.Smith Recital Hall, Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR
**Free

Announcement: Amanda's Recital this Saturday!

I created a radio spot for Amanda's recital this coming Saturday night at 7:30 p.m., Smith Recital Hall.

You can listen to it on her ReverbNation page HERE.

Recital Success!

Thanks to everyone who came out for my recital on the 19th! We had a pretty good crowd and my performers did an amazing job. I hope everyone had a great time.

I'm still working to get the recordings from the recital together, so watch this space soon for some new sounds!

I have a new website!

I just launched a new site a few days ago, and am in the process of setting up shop here:

http://kaltwassermusic.com/

I still plan to use this blog site to share updates and poems, but my music activities will be promoted more through the new pages, where I have information on upcoming events, my bio, my music samples, and soon a page where you can actually buy something from me!

Listening to Beethoven

Listening to Beethoven

A young man presses the keys,
lightly steps a brass pedal,
and movement changes minutes to sunbeams
thrumming, moving, dancing lightly
like air over a cool mountain brook.
Carillon bells peal prayers of grotto monks.
Little bells ripple on a lake.
The smallest bells press tiny feet in soft grasses,
sweet blond hair flowing after.
Pulses race between flower petals
as soaring scents pollinate the breeze
returning with the stars and planets,
caressing like spring rain
tickling green moss.

The lifted door of the piano mirrors open faces
gathered to hear his play.


(2/11/13 & 3/5/13)

Colors

Colors

Some beauties, sweet and fleet,
like the happy bird on the branch by the window,
you cannot catch them.
To cage is to kill them.
Some beauties you have to let go.

The colors of a song are so bright
and soft, my dazzled eyes cannot see what
only my heart can feel.
The muse of the poet is kindly cool.
Her visits are passing.

Some lovers, warm and dear,
like the singing bird on the tree by the fence,
you cannot keep them.
To catch is to hurt them.
Some lovers you need to let go.

The years of a life are so bright
and swift, my thoughts cannot catch what
barely memories can hold.
The love of a friend is a godly grace.
His visits are treasure.


(5/3/2012)

String Quartet Excerpts

Here is a new excerpt from the last two movements of my string quartet I've been finishing up this summer.

I recently got the chance to play through the final movement with some friends, and will be working on getting the full piece performed at WOU this fall.