Greetings from Victrola, my favorite WiFi coffee bar in Seattle…

I started my visit with an iced coffee. Tasty, but needed more milk. Having exhausted that, but still in need of their free WiFi, I’m now drinking a large chai. Good stuff, but having this much caffeine at this time of day is perhaps not the best idea. I’m getting pretty wired, and I need to be able to sleep tonight because I have to get up very early tomorrow. Ugh.

But I digress.

Seattle is lovely, as it was when I was here in October. It’s actually unusually mild today. (I spent the first half of my visit to Victrola sitting outside!)

I spent this morning at Eckstein Middle School, working with kids who are part of the Endangered Instruments Program (EIP). EIP is a great idea, and should be done nationwide. The idea is to teach middle school (and slightly older) kids to play instruments that aren’t as commonly played — ie, endangered. These are instruments like the bassoon, French horn, oboe, euphonium, and surprising to me, tuba and trombone. (Is there a shortage of trombone players? I know it sounds like I’m baiting a joke, but I swear I’m not.)

Part of my residency with the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra is two write a short piece for all of these endangered instrument students to play. Normally on their spring concert, they play in small groups — a bassoon quintet might play a piece, followed by a horn quartet, then an oboe trio, etc. I’m going to write a piece for all of them to play together. (Yes, that means a piece for an 80+ member ensemble consisting solely of oboes, bassoons, French horns, Euphoniums, trombones, and tubas. Think of it as an all-state middle school band with no clarinets or flutes or percussion or trumpets.) Today was a chance to hear a large group of them all at once, to get an idea of what I might be able to do.

Let me just say, if you’ve never heard 14 middle school-age oboe players play in unison — you must hear this. It was wonderful and almost exotic. To me, it sounded quite Turkish.

Tomorrow is a trip to another middle school to hear more endangered instruments. After that, I’m meeting with Lauren McLaren, the winner of the SYSO Young Composer Competition. I’m excited to finally get a chance to meet her and her family, and hear about the piece that she’s writing for the orchestra.

Right now, though, I’m going to to pull myself away from Victrola and get back to my B&B before I drink any more coffee.

In a few hours, I’m heading to the airport, on my way to Seattle. This will be the second week (of 28 total days this season) of my Music Alive! residency with the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra. As I did last time, I plan to regularly post blog entries while I’m there.

I’m not particularly excited about the cross-country flight. 6 hours is a long time to sit in coach. Fortunately, I have my iPod, loaded with over 40 GB of music (granted, most of it is crap, as my friends will tell you), and a copy of The Da Vinci Code. (How cliched am I?!)

If you’re reading this, and you have been to Seattle (or happen to live there), and you have any suggestions of fun activities, let me know. It looks like I’ll have a bit of free time while I’m out there.

More from the road…

The new piece, Sasparilla, is finally done. Completely done. (And yes, the link to Sasparilla actually takes you to the newly posted page about the piece, including a printable score sample.) Granted, there will be corrections, and scoring changes, but the piece is now basically behind me.
And I’m exhausted. I started thinking about the piece in early October, but I had a terribly hard time starting it. This was my first wind ensemble piece that wasn’t a transcription. (“Redline Tango” was an orchestra work first, and I made the wind version from that.)
AEJ and I came up with a bunch of ideas, ranging from Turkish-meets-Polka (called “Lawrence Welk of Arabia”) to a more serious piece to an all-out cowboy story to I don’t even remember what.

For those of you who have followed the blog for the past few months, you’ve seen the ideas come and go.

I finally committed to this polka-inspired cowboy thing, but found that it was difficult to write a funny piece that’s 9 minutes long. I’m a firm believer that a piece can be funny, but it still has to be constructed logically. I compared it to a spoken joke. The joke has to be good, and, just as importantly, it has to be told well. It needs both. Look at Steven Wright. That stuff’s funny, but his delivery is important, too.
Plus, if you “get the joke” in the first 30 seconds of a piece of music, and you have 8 minutes left to sit there listening to it, that’s no good. So it was a difficult piece to write — much harder than the final result would seem to indicate.

But I’m rambling. Such is a side effect of being completely mentally fried.

I like what John Corigliano said about his “funny Serious Music:”
“Some of my pieces I hope are somewhat silly and funny and not serious in that sense of the word. It doesn’t mean I don’t write them seriously, but they’re not always meant to have a threnody appeal. I don’t think of that as a goal for everything.”

As always, well put, Mr. C. I think I’ll just leave it with that.