First Drafts Are In!

I began this draft of my excerpts relaxing by a crackling fire in Mendocino, quietly pondering the premise of my newest work for the Berkeley Symphony.  I finished this draft cooped up in my office at home in San Jose: strung out on coffee, frantically scribbling, transcribing, editing, relishing in the triumph of my good ideas, second guessing them until they seem like terrible ideas…  This may well have been the best exercise not only for my compositional craft, but also in getting inside the head of my frustrated and tortured subject of my work: a man I call Theo.

Again, in an attempt to not give away too much about the piece until you are holding the program in your hands at the concert, I will give you a few teaser details about what I am very excited to share with everyone at the first Under Construction reading:

• The piece is a tone poem about Theo and his attempt to find relief from depression, anxiety, loneliness, and frustration.  Ultimately, his relief comes in the form of a long fall from the bluffs above a rocky beach.
• The musical language I employ in this work is completely new to me: complex harmony, a refreshingly new approach to counterpoint, and a challenging formal structure that includes an extended, slightly Inception-esqe, reality-slows-down section.
• The color palate I am working with is SO much larger than I have ever worked with!  I cannot wait to “audition” various orchestrations of the same passage in order to choose the best colors to represent the various parts of Theo’s journey.

After a meeting with Gabriela Frank, various consults with colleagues, consulting my list of composer-clients and favorite masterwork-composers (in order to steal their good ideas and steer clear of their bad ideas), plus all the scribbling/transcribing/editing mentioned above, I was able to create a musical offering that is sure to be a great experience for all of us.

I am equally excited to hear the music of my colleagues: Nils Bultmann and Evelyn Ficarra.  I had the privilege of printing the parts for our first reading and getting a sneak peek at their music.  I can surely say that the three of us have completely different styles of writing and approaches to composition.  But, the quality of music and the integrity of our craft, even in these stage-1-style excerpts, is certainly something we will be excited to showcase at our first reading.