What is so wonderful about for me about my poetic “thought music” is that while it can have specific meaning for me, it doesn’t have to have a specific meaning for anyone else.

— poet Elisabeth T. Eliassen

My new choral work Waiting… is built around a hand-picked group of poems by Bay Area poet Elisabeth T. Eliassen, who is not only singing in the upcoming premiere, but has been very supportive and accessible during my process of composing the piece.

Owing to the unique aspects of this particular collaboration, we thought it would be interesting and edifying, to say nothing of fun, to share a bit of our ongoing email discussion about the creative process as it relates to music and poetry.

You can read the piece here, on Elisabeth’s blog Songs of a Soul Journey, where a great deal more of her work can also be read.

The Sanford Dole Ensemble will give the premiere performance Waiting…, for chorus, string quartet and piano, at the San Francisco Conservatory on February 4th at 8:00pm.  Tickets will be available at the door or directly from the Sanford Dole Ensemble for $30.

Update: (1/31/12) Elisabeth has posted an additional installment of our conversation.  You can read that here.

This “All New, All Local” program also includes new works by San Francisco composers David Conte and Peter Scott Lewis, as well as Sanford Dole himself. All of the pieces use various combinations of chorus, strings, piano and percussion.

Like my earlier large choral work Cycle of Friends, Waiting…, is imagined in the tradition of my favorite non-liturgical choral masterpieces, ranging from Brahms to Vaughan-Williams to John Adams.  The text is chosen from among the beautiful works of Bay Area poet Elisabeth Eliassen.

Unlike most such choral works and song cycles, where the work is organized around a sequence of poems,  Waiting… is cast in one movement, and is based on one large poem with a few smaller poems nested among the stanzas.  The work is dominated by Elisabeth’s masterful poem, “Come again”, whose relentless use of the word “waiting” in stanza after stanza provides something like a dramatic framework, taking us from urgency to desperation to resolution.

The stanzas of “Come again” are set in a fast-paced, narrative style, occasionally exposing my musical theater roots, whereas the other poems are treated in more relaxed settings.  Here’s an excerpt from “Come again”.

Waiting,
beyond waiting, there is nothing waiting,
and no one shall come down from on high, waiting,
as one might be, for a sign that we are ready and waiting,
for, lacking such an offer, still for some reply we are waiting
for something, from what we suppose to be a heavenly realm, waiting
for a new and familiar face to appear, waiting
to be acknowledged, to be loved, to be led.

The smaller poems are set as little diversions from the narrative drive, forming a kind of sub-plot and bringing about a sense of contrast and commentary.

Hear an Excerpt

One of these smaller poems, “Roll the Tide”, is set as a kind of a cappella spiritual. It was performed as an excerpt last year at the Kodály Summer Institute at Holy Names University, conducted by László Matos, and that performance can be heard below.

Download audio file ()

—Roll the tide,
o roll the tide over,
roll the tide over me,
and so hide my tears
in folds of your timelessly flowing,
salty blanket of turbulence
and music.

—Roll the tide
and rock me to a watery sleep,
rock and roll me
until my cares
have worn to sand,
and lay me bare and free
in the bosom of your shore.

The poetry excerpts “Roll the tide” and “Come again”,  the latter from the book Songs of a Soul Journey (2002), are by Elisabeth T. Eliassen, and appear here with the poet’s permission. More of her work can be found on her blog, also called Songs of a Soul Journey.

The intervals of the augmented fourth and diminished fifth indeed sound the same when played out of context on a piano, but they are not the same interval, they are not both the same thing as a tritone, and the tritone is not an inversion of itself.

The word tritone can be broken down to something like “three tones.”  A major second, or whole step, is a tone. In music theory nerd circles, a major third, which is the combination of two whole tones, can be referred to at times as a ditone. So, the word tritone follows this pattern: three whole tones.

Now, is this an augmented fourth, a diminished fifth, or both?

I find it helpful to consider the visual layout of the piano keyboard. There’s no better representation of the arrangement of half steps and whole steps that is the diatonic scale. The two half steps that occur, mi-fa and ti-do, are plainly seen among the white keys. You will notice that the only occurrence of more than two sequential whole steps is between fa and ti, or F and B in C major.

The three whole tones make it kosher to call this a tritone. The four notes from F to B, inclusive, make it an interval of a fourth — an augmented fourth. In order to be a diminished fifth there would have to be five notes from the lower note to the upper one, inclusive. In C major, our white  keys show us that this occurs between B and F.

So, we can correctly refer to the augmented fourth as a tritone, but not a diminished fifth. It’s easy to think the two are the same thing, because they sound the same when plonked on a piano with no context, but intervals have no meaning without context.

The presence of these half steps — mi-fa and ti-do — is what gives our diatonic system balance and drama, and these two intervals behave differently in light of that.  The diminished fifth resolves inward — ti up to do and fa down to mi, while the tritone, or augmented fourth, resolves outward. In other words, these two intervals are as different from each other as, say, a major third and a minor sixth.

David Newman is an accomplished baritone soloist and teacher of voice and musicianship at James Madison University, who apparently knows a thing or two about songwriting as well.  His songs are on YouTube and they speak for themselves. If you are at all concerned with getting students to hear harmonic progressions and intervals, you will be thoroughly entertained by these.

This one is particularly ingenious. Only a solfège nerd would notice this, but most of the syllables in this song correspond to solfège syllables, and they indeed fall where they should melodically.

Sophie lay on my sofa
eating raw dough and drinking tea

…can be heard as

So Fi Le on my So Fa
eating Ra Do and drinking Ti.

(Of course, being Hungarian-trained, I would prefer “LO” instead of “LE” for the lowered “LA”, but that’s neither here nor there.) Go ahead. Listen again, and you’ll see that every syllable lands where it should in the scale.

Here are a few more of these. Again, you’ll notice that anytime there’s a reference in the lyrics to a chord, syllable or interval, it is reflected accurately in the music. Click the links to invoke the video in a popup.

• The Intervals in Inversion Song
• Second Inversions Song
• SO-TI-RE-FA Dominant 7 Song

Now, are these just fun and super clever, or do you think they can really help reinforce a student’s absorption of these concepts?  I’m really asking. Please comment!

More of these can be heard on David’s YouTube channel.

One very nice feature is the use of a full-screen perusal score viewer that I hope will make it easy for people to make buying decisions, and the shopping cart process is as elegant as any I’ve seen.

Composers: The More the Merrier

If you are a self-publishing composer and would like to make your scores available via this site, or if you would like a similar site of your own, please get in touch. It can be accomplished very easily.

See the site in action here.

The solution, it turns out, is a very nifty iPhone app that can be had for $3.99.  NumPad is a multi-purpose number pad that connects to your computer via the iPhone’s WiFi connection.  It can be set to work as a standard number pad with, you know, numbers, or as seen here it can be set to control Sibelius.  You can get to the various toolbox thingies (or whatever they’re called) by swiping left or right).

I find that it’s very fast and responsive when my WiFi connection is functioning properly, but I imagine performance will vary according to your setting.  In any case, I was thrilled to find this solution, and thought I’d pass it along to readers and future Googlers.

Oh, and guess what: It’s similarly compatible with Finale.

Now, for posterity, Mark has synchronized the video with the recording of Karla and Regina’s live performance that evening and made it available for sharing.

The annual You Are Hear festival at San Francisco International Airport presented us with an opportunity to play this out. Today members of San Francisco’s Magik*Magik Orchestra performed beautiful quartets by Alexis Alrich, Dan Becker, Belinda Reynolds and Clark Suprynowicz and myself in a little enclave overlooking the security line in Terminal One.  Right between some busy escalators and a busy elevator.

You would think that as a composer I would find this setting intolerable for a performance of my music, but I loved it.   I loved the informality of it, and I loved the look on the face of the harried-looking woman clutching her People Magazine while she figured out what was going on after getting off the elevator.  I even loved the security announcements that repeatedly upstaged my very nuanced and contemplative piece.

The ambient noise and the bell on the elevator and the calls for Kim Anderson to pick up the white courtesy phone all became part of the music.  And, there was the added element of theater as I watched passers-by react in different ways to the incongruity of a string quartet playing next to the escalator leading to TGI Friday’s.  Most people were in a hurry and didn’t react at all.  Many paused and smiled briefly, and some stopped, transfixed, and sat on the floor.

I wonder how many of these folks would ever take time out of their life and buy tickets for a chamber music concert.

Here is part of my string quartet City Walks as performed by members of the Magik*Magik Orchestra today at San Francisco International Airport’s You Are Hear festival.

Project Encore addresses a very real problem that faces composers, even successful ones, of all genres of music: Performers and organizations can generate a lot of energy and marketing hay by commissioning new works, but there’s little to motivate them to see that these new works have a future.  Conductors are hounded from every direction by publishers and composers (guilty!) looking for second performances, but they usually have an idea or a particular need to fill, so where do they go to sort through all that and find what will suit their immediate goals?

There is an article on the Vocal Area Network, a web site serving the New York area choral community, that elaborates on this problem and describes more thoroughly how Project Encore aims to mitigate it. Read the article here.

Disclosure:  I’m honored to say that my own Cycle of Friends (1996) for soprano, chorus and chamber orchestra was chosen to be among the works included in the Project Encore database.  It was commissioned and premiered in 1996 and still awaits its future.

As previously mentioned here, Joseph Castaldo was my undergraduate composition teacher for four years. He and Seán Deibler were both tremendous personal and musical influences on me. As I also mentioned here in the past, Seán passed away last year, and this Choral Arts concert is being presented in his memory.

If you can spare 7 minutes, please watch the video below, where you can hear some excerpts of the work, and find out something about the two special musicians who brought it about in 1990.

The concerts are on March 13, 2010 at 8 pm (Paoli, PA) and March 14 at 6 pm (Philadelphia Cathedral). Visit www.ChoralArts.com for details.