every piece at this point starts with a commission
I don't really write anything just for fun at this point and have them for a
long time and that's primarily because I just umbilicals
they're very emotionally taxing and just intellectually taxing and by the time
I'm done with them I'm just fried and so then I will take several weeks or longer
off in between pieces I'm not one of those composers who writes every day no
matter what I work on the piece I work on the piece every day while I'm writing
it but when it's done I don't write I need a break to do other things just
kind of decompress and reset and get new ideas and think about what the next
piece will be once that I know what the Commission is or that Commission you
know I get the Commission and I don't write it then you know I'm generally
booked out about two years in advance and so once like a commission bench of
that piece rolls around like 18 months later is when I really start writing it
you know the process depends on how difficult the piece is going to be if
it's has something to do with a request from the commissioning Ensemble or
director or whatever to make it about a whether it's a closer or an opener or
they want a ballad or they want me they tell me what the length is and then
those things all go into play with determining what the piece will be I
think I figure out what the structure will be before I write the piece in
general I want the structure ahead of time otherwise I just sit there and I'm
just kind of making some up and noodling and hoping I get an the right duration
of music but the structure is critical especially the longer the piece is you
know I'm writing a three-minute piece I can generally just kind of sit down and
over the course of a few weeks write a three-minute piece but if you're writing
a seven or ten or thirty minute piece I know I need to know before I put a
single note down what the whole shape is going to be something I learned from
John colleano in grad school he says if you're composer you should think like an
architect you should think about how does like if you're an architect you're
gonna make a building you don't start by picking out a really cool lamp that's
the last thing you do what you do is like what's the purpose of this building
how big does it need to be to meet that purpose what's it made of to support
that size of structure or they're steel beams involved things like that and then
you do the building and then the last thing you do is you're picking out the
furniture he's like the notes are the furniture so figure out what the whole
piece is for before you ever do any of the notes and so I
try to do that and get a really clear idea at least of what they made what the
title is at least with what I'm trying to do in
the piece and then I just think about that often for a couple weeks before any
notes even come the notes themselves I don't have any idea where they come from
if the idea is good enough with a structure or a title or something like
that the notes will just kind of end up in my head and I don't know how that
happens but I definitely do have to take that time between the pieces or the
notes I get in my head are too closely related to the piece
that I just finished I think every piece that you write back-to-back you know if
they're gonna sound related and I think it's okay if they sound like cousins but
if they sound like you know brother and sister or something or you know then
it's too close so I that I need that separation of time so that I get these
ideas out of my head before I start to think about what a new tune might be or
something and generally I do try to make the ideas for the pieces overall
different enough that I'm not going to think of the same kind of melodic
material for two different pieces that I write back-to-back because I would not
generally write like two concertos back to back or to middle school pieces back
to back you know I I try to do like maybe a middle school piece and then a
large collegiate level piece and then maybe a chamber piece or something just
to completely change my palate before resetting and doing other band piece
figure out the instrumentation often I will if it's gonna be something weird I
will know that before I start the piece often so that I'm thinking of melodic
material that works well with that like I have a piece called the frozen
cathedral that has bass flute and alto flute and a lot of surround percussion
that to make it sound like the audience is surrounded by like twinkling you know
snow they say ice and that I knew before I started writing the piece like I'm
gonna use these instruments so let's come up with a tune that works
well on bass flute and then if you're gonna write something for bass flute
which is really the quietest acoustic instrument there is
it's barely louder than an air conditioner in the room you need to like
score the chords with it in a really careful way to make it so that you can
hear the bass flute and it's an in terment so quiet that you really need to
lean in as an audience member to hear it and I thought that was a really cool way
to approach the overall idea of the piece make it so quiet the beginning
that you have to lean in and then by the end I have the surround percussion
playing as loudly as they possibly can and you know all the brass is playing
your triple Forte and sustain chords and chorale things and I thought it would be
really fun to just explore how massive of a dynamic range you could have in a
single piece and basically have it arch from barely audible to deafeningly loud
because either of those would be boring I think a piece that's just loud or just
quiet is not all that exciting it's like having that push and pull of dynamics
and harmony and things that's fun I have a piece of a lightning field that pepper
sells and that one the idea for the piece came originally from one
instrument that I got is a gag gift from a friend of mine named David Rakowski
who's a composer and every year he gets me some really silly gift a couple years
ago he got me a thunder tooth which I'd never seen before but it's you know it's
basically it's a tube this big that's made of cardboard and has a spring
hanging off the bottom and you shake it and it sounds like thunder and Remo
percussion made these things probably with like throwaway materials and I got
it out of the box and the spring made this crazy noise and the cat freaked out
then I was like oh there's a piece there and so I wrote this piece
lighting field around the idea of having this handheld Thunder that you could do
and I decide to put the put the players around the audience because I hadn't
seen a high school piece that used antiphonal percussion like that or
middle school high school piece so I thought it'd be fun to surround the
audience with these instruments that are just kind of throw away $7 things and
the whole piece came from just one civil instrument and sometimes that's like the
genesis for a whole