Premiere performance of "Money is the Devil" for Intonarumori Ensemble in Italy, 9/28/23

Money is the Devil was composed in 2015, during a particularly challenging time in my life. I was “underemployed,” working very part-time, between jobs, and struggling financially. In addition, my mother had passed away in late 2014 and my father was navigating serious health issues of his own. My family and I weren’t sure if he had pancreatitis or pancreatic cancer (it turned out to be pancreatitis, still not a great situation). The title of the piece references the panic and frustration I experienced during this period of my life; I had initially titled the work “CASH,” a sarcastic response to these struggles.

One of the highlights of this period was working with Luciano Chessa at the Cleveland Museum of Art in January 2015. I performed in his intonarumouri ensemble at a concert at the CMA, and I loved working with these instruments and creating a wide variety of wonderful sounds.

Here is a nice article about the performance, published by Cleveland Classical.

I had also studied the work of Luigi Russolo and was quite familiar with the aesthetics of these instruments and their potential. Russolo invented and created an ensemble of intonarumori in the years before WWI and presented concerts of “noise-music” with these instruments. He wrote a manifesto titled The Art of Noise which advocates for the use of all sounds as musical material, not just those relegated to traditional musical ensembles like the symphony orchestra. This aesthetic rings through loud and clear in the design of the intonarumori, and I fully embraced this sonic palette in my piece.

I captured short videos of each of the instruments during rehearsals for the CMA performance, thinking I might write a piece for this ensemble. Thankfully I managed to find several of these samples, they are short examples of these amazing instruments. I revisited my old files from 2015 and managed to find several videos, which I’ve shared as part of this blog post. These intonarumori sound amazing!

This experience inspired me to write an original work for the full intonarumouri ensemble. I studied each instrument by capturing sample videos of their sounds and construction, and used these to help formulate the sound world for this piece. Luciano’s ensemble will premiere this work on September 28 2023, and I am very grateful to him for his support and willingness to perform my music!

Click HERE for an instagram link about the performance (on September 28) and HERE for the webpage listing for the concert, as part of the TO LISTEN TO festival of contemporary music, presented by the School of Electronic Music of the Conservatory of Music in Turin, Italy.

Last, i wanted to say thank you to the social media team for the TO LISTEN TO music festival for promoting my music and the premiere of Money is the Devil. :)

(First video - Silbiatore; second video - Gogliatore Basso)

What am I working on now? A piece inspired by cicadas

In contrast to my first post, I thought I would show some of my most recent work, as a contrast to my early works. My newer pieces are mostly graphic scores, hand copied onto very large sheets of vellum, normally 24 x 36 inches (but sometimes larger, as needed).

My newest piece is a graphic score inspired by the cicada invasion of Cuyahoga Valley National Park in 2016. I had never heard anything like it, it sounded like a giant car engine was constantly running somewhere in the distance. They were “Brood X” cicadas that emerge from the ground once every 17 years. They were EVERYWHERE - crawling all over everything, flying around in large groups, landing in your hair and on your shirt, in your car, you name it…thankfully these cicadas are harmless, they just look really freaky because they’re dark brown or black with bright red eyes. Here’s a fun article about the cicada emergence in Columbus, OH in 2021: https://patch.com/ohio/across-oh/billions-17-year-cicadas-will-emerge-ohio-2021

I found the sound to be rather arresting and fascinating. The sounds of the cicadas and the experiences of hearing them implanted themselves in my creative garden, only to re-emerge as a new piece earlier this year (see what I did there?). Thankfully it didn’t take 17 years to crawl out of the dirt (only five this time). The work highlights the trajectory of the lifecycle of the cicadas, from hatching and emergence from underground, to spreading their wings and taking flight, to buzzing in the trees, feeding, mating, planting eggs, then dying while the nymphs hatch from eggs, fall to the ground, burrow hibernate for another 17 years. The overall arc of the score captures this rise and fall visually, including the emergence from and return to the ground at the end.

I sneak a few extra techniques in the score to augment the sound world inhabited by the music. Composed for string orchestra, the musicians are also required to play ratchets at the climax of the piece. They could be any ratchets - toy ratchets, gregors, anything similar - but the climax is a wall of ratchet noise.

Progress so far on the new score. Performers start at the bottom left, work their way up to the top right hand corner of the page, then fall to the bottom right hand corner at the final gesture.

I use a 3-line staff at points…it looks like two of the lines are missing, and in fact they are. This tells string players the general range of the motives to be played but not exact pitch, giving an undulating effect of “rising up en masse” without having string players perform the exact same ideas. They’re close to each other but not the same pitches, rhythms, etc. I also intend for musicians to read from the score in groups of 4 or 5 people, with multiple copies used on stage during performance.

3 line staves, the second and fourth lines are “missing,” the intent is to write motifs within these larger spaces so that string players perform in the same general registers but not the exact same pitches.

I give players some choice as to when and what to play, hence the need for the graphic score. But I also like the fact that this visually illustrates the meaning of the piece, not only for the performers but for the audience. One of my goals is to show a collection of these graphic scores in an art gallery exhibition someday; the exhibit would feature performances of said works on view as well.

I’m not quite finished with it yet, I’m hoping to complete it by the end of summer and have it performed in the near future. Fingers crossed!

Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet and life changes - 1992-3

I decided to start my blog about what I consider my first “presentable” piece, my Clarinet Quintet from my first year in graduate school (and slightly before that). I had graduated from Ithaca College in 1992 with a BM in composition, and wrote four years’ worth of mostly crappy music that will never see the light of day. But I felt differently about this piece, even after sketching the first movement or so when I was living in Ithaca post-graduation, working graveyard shift at Kinko’s Copies in Collegetown, and being generally confused about life.

The first movement is inspired in part by the pipe organ and Olivier Messiaen, a composer whose work I admire to this day. I had taken a year of pipe organ lessons during college, and this experience informed my approach to orchestrating the first movement, treating the ensemble like a pipe organ registration. The end result is…somewhat successful in hindsight but the melodic line in the music is strong. Link for listening below.

I was accepted into the graduate composition program at the Cleveland Institute of Music in the spring of 1993, getting the call from Donald Erb sometime in March. One of my former teachers, Peter Rothbart at Ithaca, told me that he “was the best composition teacher” he had ever studied with. I took Peter’s advice, auditioning for Dr. Erb on Valentine’s Day 1993 in Cleveland. I now live here, have been married for almost 25 years, and have two wonderful children who are now adults (or close to it). I have to agree with Peter’s assessment, Dr. Erb was an amazing teacher and I still miss him, every day.

I moved to Cleveland two months later, toward the end of May 1993. I first took residence in a house with three other people on E. 115 Street in Cleveland, and transferred to the Kinko’s in University Circle, which was within walking distance of my home. I didn’t have a license at that time, but one of my housemates (Molly Tripp) would eventually teach me how to drive. I got my license using her car, and am grateful for her generosity to this day! I wrote her a simple piano piece to say thanks, I hope she didn’t burn the manuscript. :)

During the summer of 1993 I began sketches for the second movement of this piece, amongst the chaos of moving to a new city, switching jobs, and being overwhelmed by the city environment as a whole. I grew up in a rural environment then attended college in a small town, so living in a big city with no car was a huge adjustment. My coworkers at Kinko’s would constantly rib me about being a hick.

The second movement is inspired somewhat by the music of King Crimson, in particular the song “21st Century Schizoid Man.” I borrowed parts of the song and subtly wove them into the second movement. I kept the character established in the opening Prelude while upping the tempo and letting the rhythm in the musical content shine.

I remember bringing the first two movements to Dr. Erb during lessons, and he really didn’t say much about them. But we did talk about maybe one or two more movements for the piece, and I began those in earnest in my first semester of graduate school in fall 1993. I was also working full-time at Kinko’s as a weekend shift supervisor. This really took a toll on me, as a full class schedule plus working 45 - 50 hours a week became unmanageable very quickly. I stepped away from my supervisor duties halfway through my first semester, even though it would completely upend my finances. But one very good thing that came out of my working at Kinko’s was that I met my future wife Deby there. She was one of my fellow co-workers and we started dating towards the end of my first semester of graduate school. She’s not a musician, she’s the sane and practical member of the household (true story). I’m so thankful that I have a life partner who puts up with my quirky personality!

Movements three and four were finished towards the end of the first semester, with the final movement being an homage to Bartok. I use the strumming viola idea that he used in some of his string quartets as the nucleus for the final movement. But I also use the Finale as a recapitulation, incorporating moments from the first three movements into the piece, over a pulsating texture. The third movement is a cadenza for the clarinet, with the strings chasing the clarinet player as he shows off. Harmonies in the third movement are consistent with those in the previous sections of the piece.

The performance here was recorded in February 1994, on a New Music Ensemble concert presented at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Ben Freimuth was the clarinet soloist and he absolutely crushes it! I had never worked with a musician who so thoroughly nailed a piece that I had composed, it was such a treat to work with him. Unfortunately I don’t have the names of the other musicians who performed on the concert. I know Dave Mergan was the cellist but I lost the recital program. I’d love to get the names of the other musicians, so if you are reading this and you happen to know the answer, feel free to email me via the Contact portion of the website or find me on Facebook!