We will celebrate the release of the album on Wednesday, November 7, 2018, from 8:30 to 10:30 PM at New York City’s Tenri Cultural Institute, located at 43A West 13th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues). There will be CDs for sale, and  performances of two of the works from the recording by the artists who are featured on the album: E. M. am Flügel (1992), for piano solo, played by its dedicatee and my good friend, the composer and pianist extraordinaire Eric Moe; and Inquieto (attraverso il rumore) (2015), for violin and piano, performed by Curtis Macomber and Christopher Oldfather. After the performances, there will be refreshments, including wine and cheese. If you are or will be in the area, please come! If you’re on Facebook, please visit and like my composer page (Hayes Biggs, Composer). There also is an event page there for this release party, where you can let me know whether or not you can come. Please do let me know, so we may procure the appropriate quantity of food and libations!

The album’s title comes from Walt Whitman’s A Song for Occupations:

All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments,

It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza, nor that of the men’s chorus, nor that of the women’s chorus,

It is nearer and farther than they.

Here is a YouTube video of the first track on the album, Pan-fare, scored for a kind of motley jazz band on steroids, featuring solo steel pan, played here by Desiree Glazier-Nazro, with members of the Moravian Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra conducted by Petr Vronsky.

I hope you can join us on Wednesday, November 7 at Tenri!

The first performance of Through to (and Out of) the Other Side will take place on Sunday, October 28, 2018, 1:00 PM, at ISSUE Project Room, 22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn, NY.

For those in the Boston area, a second performance will take place on Saturday, November 3rd, 2018, 3:00 PM, at First Church Cambridge, 11 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA. Here is my program note for the piece.

I am grateful to Andrew Steinberg and The Megalopolis Saxophone Orchestra for giving me the opportunity to compose music for this excellent ensemble. In addition to them, the work also bears a dedication to N. Stanley Balch (1938-2018), for many years the director of the Central High School band in my  hometown of Helena-West Helena, Arkansas. Mr. Balch taught me some of the first lessons I learned about music for large ensembles, orchestration, and writing for woodwind and brass instruments, exposed me to a lot of modern music (in the realms of classical concert band music as well as jazz), and gave me a great deal of encouragement.

Through to (and Out of) the Other Side is in a single movement comprising several sections. The first is fast, syncopated and edgy, gradually morphing into a gigue-like rhythm. After a series of episodes this section gradually cycles back to the material of the opening, with siren-like wailing in the altissimo registers of the soprano and top two alto parts. A transition ensues, with some rock and jazz elements and a hint of bluesiness, interrupted from time to time by soft four-part harmonies marked “senza vibrato, ethereal, disembodied.” A very brief accelerando outburst yields to the heart of the work, a slow movement that is by turns lyrical and austere, with fairly large pauses interspersed, suggesting vast spaces. The opening sonority of this section is a simple simultaneous interval of a minor third (C to E-flat), which happens to be the opening sound of a haunting late work of Mozart, his Masonic Funeral Music. Not sure how this found its way in — it is not an exact quotation from Mozart’s piece — but somehow it did. After the climax of this section, a stark two-part chorale for the entire ensemble asserts itself, before the mood is swept away by the final section in waltz tempo. Besides the Mozart reference, another piece, coincidentally also in the key of C minor,  wormed its way into my thinking at the end of this work: the Waltz No. 2 from Shostakovich’s Suite for Variety Orchestra, familiar to anyone who has seen Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, where it accompanies the opening scene. Again, there is no direct quotation, and this reference, such as it is, is even less obvious than is the case with the Mozart. The overall trajectory of my piece seems to travel from a more upbeat, if rambunctious opening, through a much more introspective passage, ultimately returning to a mood similar to the opening, with perhaps more of a satirical cast.

If you’re in the NYC area on October 28, or the Boston area on November 3, please come. I’m hoping to be at both concerts.

Foremost among these was that of my mother-in-law Lois J. Orzel, on May 9, 2017. When I first showed up in Binghamton with Susan in 1996, Lois, along with my father-in-law George, welcomed me into the family more graciously than I ever could have hoped or imagined. Losing Lois has been a tremendous blow to us all.

A couple of months earlier, on March 10, 2017, Dr. Henry S. Lodge, my physician for nearly 25  years, the man who set me on a path to a healthier way of living and made me love exercising, quit this earthly plane much too soon.

On February 26, 2017 our beloved cat Fritz, as sweet, funny, and lovely a creature as has ever existed, succumbed to lymphoma. He was about 14 years old.

Fritz in his bed in the living room

On February 24, 2018, N. Stanley Balch, the band director for many years at Central High School in my hometown of Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, passed away at the age of 80. Though officially I was not a member of the band (I was a choir geek, not a band geek), Mr. Balch encouraged my musical pursuits, and in his little recording booth in the band room he had an interesting and varied library of LPs, from which he generously allowed me to borrow. In that collection I first encountered music by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, among many others, and bit by bit began to learn more about how instruments and orchestration work. There was, however, just a bit of a quid pro quo: when needed, I was pressed into service in the percussion section of the concert band, where I unsuccessfully attempted to impersonate an actual timpanist in pieces by W. Francis McBeth and Vincent Persichetti. Much more within my comfort zone, I also played the Fender Rhodes electric piano in the stage band.

In 1975, when I was a Freshman at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College), I met Ed Sharp, whose voice lessons I was accompanying in the studio of my voice teacher at the time, Diane McCullough Clark. Ed’s wife, Ann Sharp, whom I met soon after, was by day a school psychologist, but also a wonderful actress and singer, a lovely, kind, talented, and funny lady who over the years performed many leading roles at Theatre Memphis; she, alas, also left us much too soon, on June 9, 2018. She and Ed were dear friends of Tony Lee Garner, an important mentor from my Southwestern days, himself gone twenty years now, under whose direction Ed, Ann and I often sang. I’m grateful that I got to visit briefly with Ann in the summer of 2016.

And mere days ago, I, along with the rest of the contemporary music community, was greatly saddened to learn of the loss —again much too young — of a great composer, conductor, musical citizen, and friend, Oliver Knussen, on June 9, 2018. Olly, whom I had met at Tanglewood when I was a composition fellow there in 1981, was not only — hands down — one of the most brilliant musicians that I have ever met, with an encyclopedic knowledge of vast amounts of repertoire in a broad range of styles, he also was very kind and encouraging to me, and I’ll forever be grateful to him for pointing me toward much fascinating music that might otherwise have escaped my notice.

All of this loss in such a brief period has, to put it mildly, sucked. And of course, the fallout from the 2016 election that preceded these losses has only exacerbated the overall suckitude.

Even so, there still are plenty of things that manifestly have not sucked at all, in any way, shape or form, things that have been very positive indeed, to wit:

Susan and I will have been married for twenty years this coming January.

It has been almost 26 years since I began teaching at Manhattan School of Music, and I’m thankful to begin another year there in September.

I got to have all those people I just listed above in my life for a time, a pretty substantial amount of time for the most part, though, for the record, they all left too damn soon, as far as I’m concerned.

I have a recording consisting entirely of my music coming out in October. The company is PARMA Recordings LLC, and the label is Navona. It contains music encompassing the period from 1989 to 2015, including solo pieces, ensemble works, and choral music. I’ll have more to say about that later on, as the time draws nearer. Anyone reading this who will be in New York City or its environs is welcome to a release party at the lovely Tenri Cultural Center on the evening of Wednesday, November 7, 2018, from about 8:30 until 10:30. There will be food, libations, and a couple of live performances by people featured on the album.

I wrote three piano preludes that I like quite well, all based on lines from poems, that were commissioned by pianist and composer Thomas Stumpf; Thomas has premiered the first two and who will premiere the third one on October 7, 2018 at Tufts University, where he is on the faculty.

I have other projects going that I will talk about later on, including a new work for The Megalopolis Saxophone Orchestra, under the direction of Andrew Steinberg, who also played my solo tenor saxophone piece The Trill Is Gone for my recording.

I continue to enjoy greatly singing with and composing for C4. This past season I wrote a new piece for the women of C4, called who are you?, on a poem by Zsuzsanna Ardó, which was conducted by my friend and colleague Timothy Brown.

And then there’s this, with which I will leave you: The Orchestra of the League of Composers gave the second ever performance of my Symphonia brevis in Columbia University’s Miller Theatre on May 20 of this year. Louis Karchin did an outstanding job of preparing and conducting it, the players were stellar, and I was in the best possible company with three distinguished composer colleagues: Samuel Adler, this year celebrating his 90th birthday, John Harbison, 80 years old this year, and Du Yun. The four of us were interviewed on stage by another distinguished composer colleague, Robert Sirota. It was a fantastic evening of music, and I was delighted to be included.

Please enjoy, and I’ll look forward to updating you all, I hope on a more frequent basis!

Best,

Hayes

Please check out next week’s upcoming events on my Concerts page, including the March 4th premiere at Merkin Concert Hall by Rolf Schulte and Stephen Gosling of my new work for violin and piano, Inquieto (attraverso il rumore), as well as the first performances of Goe lovely Rose, written for C4’s Tenth Season, on March 1, 5, and 7.

March 4, 2014, was the 80th birthday of one of my most important teachers, Mario Davidovsky. It was celebrated in truly fine style that evening on a concert at New York City’s Merkin Concert Hall, featuring the Cygnus Ensemble (guitarists William Anderson and Oren Fader, cellist Susannah Chapman, flutist Tara Helen O’Connor, oboist James Austin Smith, and violinist Calvin Wiersma), along with soprano Elizabeth Farnum, conductor James Baker, pianist Aleck Karis, violinist Curtis Macomber, flutist Barry Crawford, violist Lois Martin, viola and cellist Christopher Finckel. William Anderson masterminded this project, and it was a superb program.

It is difficult for me to believe that it has been over 30 years since I met Mario. It was the summer of 1981; I had just completed the first year of my Master’s degree in composition at Southern Methodist University, and I had been accepted as a fellow in composition at Tanglewood, where Mario himself had been invited by Aaron Copland in 1958. My first encounter with Mario’s music took place in an electronic music course in which I had been enrolled at SMU during my first semester there in the fall of 1980. Part of the course curriculum consisted of listening to pieces that had by that time already become “classics” of the electronic repertoire, including seminal works of Stockhausen, Varèse, Berio, and of course, Davidovsky. I was especially taken with Synchronisms No. 5 for percussion and electronic sounds (1969), part of the innovative series of works Mario began writing in the 1960s combining live instrumentalists with tape, or “fixed media,” to use today’s terminology. For all the timbral variety and subtlety to be found in his deployment of the percussion ensemble itself, what was—and remains—remarkable is how elegantly and unobtrusively within it the electronic sounds are embedded. Another noteworthy aspect of the percussion writing is that it completely defeats the expectation one might have of constant loudness and bombast. The percussion writing is itself almost, one might say, lyrical at times.

For all the richness and complexity of his pitch language and the depth and originality of his sonic imagination, I recognized immediately that Mario was at his core a composer who relished vivid, superbly timed dramatic contrasts. It certainly was no surprise to discover that Beethoven was (and continues to be) one of his touchstones. Others I’ve heard him invoke over the years include—again, not surprisingly, once you know Mario’s music—J. S. Bach, Purcell and Haydn. All are rigorous in their construction, all are masters of dramatic pacing, and all have an astonishing knack for keeping listeners on their toes.

That summer at Tanglewood, I found Mario to be possessed of a formidable and penetrating intellect, but also very kind, down to earth and often very funny. This was my first real exposure to the larger musical world, and I was about as green as they come. I’d grown up in a small town in Arkansas, and Dallas, where I was based at the time, was the largest city I had yet lived in. I think Mario sensed my naïveté and awkwardness, and did his best to encourage me. The music I had produced up to that point was nothing like anything that I would have thought would interest him, but he listened carefully, took it on its own terms and, to my surprise, found things in it to admire. I looked forward to our lessons; Mario’s enthusiasm was palpable. As soon as he looked at whatever bit of music I brought in on a given day, he could, off the top of his head, come up with what seemed to be fifty plausible ways it could be continued or expanded. What I loved about this the most was that very often I would return the next week with my own fifty-first way of proceeding that I likely would not have discovered had it not been for his ability to home in on the possibilities inherent in my material.

Prior to that summer, I really only knew Mario as a composer of electronic works, some of the finest, most exquisitely made and most absorbing ones I had ever heard. On the strength of those alone—as well as my initial experience of his teaching that summer—I would have sought to go to New York to study with him at Columbia, which of course I ultimately did. This is saying something, as I really never saw myself as a composer who would pursue electronic music as a primary or even secondary medium. That has continued to be the case. Even so, the music of Mario’s I already knew was compelling enough that I was convinced I could learn a great deal from him. But I was soon to be even more bowled over than I already was. At Tanglewood one day he played for us a recording of a cantata, Scenes from Shir ha-Shirim (1975), a setting in Hebrew of passages from the Song of Songs, a text that had fascinated him since he was 17, and that he would continue to engage with over the decades. This is a very significant work for Mario, the first vocal work of his compositional maturity, and the first of his works to directly address his Jewish heritage. He would continue similar explorations of his religious tradition in later vocal works: Romancero (1983), the Biblical Songs (1990), Shulamit’s Dream (1993) and the recent Ladino Songs (2009).

I was mesmerized by Shir ha-Shirim, from the first electrifying unison D in the opening passage to the desolate, austere beauty of the final page. The work’s incipit was a kind of wild neo-Medieval-cum-ancient Middle Eastern synthesis, replete with ecstatic roulades in the vocal solo lines and two tenors wailing away in countertenor register. No trace of an oscillator or Klangumwandler (younger composers, ask your older colleagues/teachers about these ancient artifacts) to be found, just voices and an instrumental agglomeration that Mario himself later described as, at first blush, seeming more redolent of  a “Viennese café orchestra” than the parched desert landscape he was evoking. But evoke it he did, and, as different as it appeared on the surface from the electronic compositions, it was at the same time all of a piece with them, because he had been absorbing the lessons painstakingly learned in the tape studio and was now making conventional instruments do many of the same things: he was synthesizing, creating composite instruments by carefully calibrating attacks, dynamics, the envelopes of the sounds and other acoustic properties, extending the possibilities of what instruments can do—the very stuff of sound. At the other extreme, the final movement is about the voices themselves, and the last thing you hear in the entire piece is a lone soprano voice, every bit as magical as any of the dazzling, dizzying instrumental and timbral virtuosity of the opening. Of course, the cantata also shares with the Synchronisms (and his other vocal and purely instrumental works as well) the penchant for vivid dramatic contrasts that I mentioned earlier. What I realized when I heard the cantata was that, fundamentally, the animating impulse in so much of what he does, in whatever medium, is a lyrical and, yes, even a vocal one. This was borne out as I got to know him better over the years and heard him speak of the early counterpoint studies that were so crucial to his musical development, as well as his having sung Medieval and Renaissance music in a chorus as a student in Argentina. I came to realize over time, too, that the electronic music was itself lyrical, in the sense of there being a through line, no matter how it might be challenged or interrupted by a disjunct surface.

This summer Mario’s 80th birthday year has also been honored by the Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center, of which he is the Director and with which he has been associated for the past 46 years. By happy coincidence the Conference is celebrating its own 70th Anniversary this year as well. The Conference provides emerging composers with an intensive two weeks of composition seminars with a different guest composer each week. This year’s guest composers were Steven Mackey and Augusta Read Thomas. In addition, each of these young composers has the opportunity to hear one of his or her works thoroughly rehearsed, publicly performed and recorded by one of the hottest new music ensembles in the country, comprised of some of the finest new music specialists, drawn mostly from the New York City and Boston areas, led by the Conference’s superb Music Director, James Baker. Concurrently with the Conference, the Chamber Music Workshops are offered for amateur musicians who are given the opportunity to be coached by the excellent staff, many of whom are the same people who perform the new works. One of the best features of this arrangement is that the composers and the amateur chamber musicians get to know and interact with each other. The “ammies” attend the concerts and hear the young composition fellows and the guest composers discuss their music, and there is much informal contact as well, at meals and post-concert parties. Another point of connection between the composers and the amateur chamber musicians is the annual commission awarded by the Chamber Music Center to a Fellow for a new work specifically tailored for amateur players.

Having been a Fellow myself in 1987, I can readily attest to the boost in confidence that a young composer can receive from this experience. Since 1983 the Conference has been based at Wellesley College, and my wife Susan and I drove up a little over a week ago for a dinner and concert marking the two auspicious anniversaries. It was great to see so many friends and colleagues. There were terrific performances of some powerful and beautiful music by the late Lee Hyla, a former Fellow and guest composer at the Conference, as well as works by this year’s Fellows Andrew Watts and Diego Tedesco, the most recent commission for the amateur instrumentalists by Michael-Thomas Foumai, and Mario’s most recent electronic work, Synchronisms No. 12 for clarinet and electronic sounds (2006), consummately performed by Benjamin Fingland. As is customary on these concerts, some older music was also included: Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s Sonate tan aris quam aulis servientes and the magnificent Wedding Cantata of  J. S. Bach, Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, with sublime solo work by soprano Tony Arnold and oboist Peggy Pearson.

Mario’s dedicated leadership of the Conference is but another example of his generosity to his colleagues, particularly his younger ones, with whom he continues to engage as teacher and mentor. It is of course a cliché to say that he is kept young by his contact with younger composers, but it also is no less true for that. His enthusiasm for his interactions with them is undiminished, as is his passion for and seriousness about the art of music. I know of no one who can articulate more eloquently and—again—passionately than Mario the ethical responsibilities of the artist. I’m afraid that such notions are too often and easily viewed as being rather quaint these days, but he makes a compelling case for them to all who are fortunate enough to encounter him. A few years ago I had the opportunity to write liner notes about three of his major vocal works, including Scenes from Shir ha-Shirim, for a recording on the Bridge label, Mario Davidovsky: Three Cycles on Biblical Texts (Bridge 9112), and the following passage, I hope, will summarize some of what I have come to know and appreciate about Mario’s music, teaching and philosophical outlook:

One of Mario Davidovsky’s most strongly held convictions is that art has a greater purpose than entertainment or indulging in clever aesthetic games. He has spoken of the “transcendental, profound wish that someone is served.” In other words, he wishes to engage the listener in the deepest and most powerful way, and to give him or her something of real value.

By that standard Mario has served all of us who possess willing ears very well, and then some. As I write this, the Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center, 2014 Edition, has come to an end, with the final concert and party having taken place last night and, if things are still as they are when I was a Fellow, the last breakfast/brunch having been enjoyed and lingered over together this morning, before the participants who remain say their farewells and go their several ways. So let us say:

¡Viva Mario!

Here’s to many more years for him, his music and the Composers Conference!

We are doing two concerts this week of new works for chorus and string quartet, joined by the excellent young players of the Canite String Quartet.

Featured works include:

Tarik O’Regan: The Ecstasies Above (on Edgar Allen Poe’s Israfel); Michael Conley (C4): Dies Irae, from his Appalachian Requiem; Veronika Krausas, The Language of Birds (on poems of Lawrence Ferlinghetti); as well as world premieres by:

Mario Gullo (C4): It’s Not Real/Saw You Once/The Other Day; David Harris (C4 alum): Brief Hour; and Martha Sullivan (C4): Just.

It is shaping up to be an excellent and beautiful program, and I hope to see many of you there.

Thursday, March 6

The Meeting Room at Judson Memorial Church
55 Washington Square South (Directions)
8:00 PM

Saturday, March 8

Issue Project Room
22 Boerum Place (at Livingston Street), Brooklyn
8:00 PM

I had hoped to have this musical missive completed within what would at one time have been referred to as “the Octave of Epiphany.” In liturgyspeak, an octave refers to the first eight days of a solemn feast, while in music the term octave refers to the distance in a diatonic scale (such as major or minor) between, say, middle C and the next note above (or below) it that we also refer to as C. The “eightness” implied by the word octave has to do with the fact that there are eight notes in a diatonic scale, if you include the repetition of the first note of the scale at the end. (Sticking with C major for the moment, think of the eight white keys on the piano keyboard from C to C of which that scale is comprised). In the liturgical calendar, the Octave of Christmas extends from December 25-January 1. In a manner roughly analogous to that in which the first and last notes of the musical octave have the same letter name (e.g., C, or D, or B-flat), the first and last days of the liturgical octave fall on the same day of the week. From my smattering of reading on the subject, I have been able to garner that, in 1955, Epiphany, as observed in the Roman Catholic Church, was by papal decree rendered octaveless, and that, as of 1969, Christmas and Easter are the only remaining major feasts to continue the tradition of octaves. Even if there still were official recognition within the Church of the Octave of Epiphany, however, any possibility of my finishing the piece within that time frame was likely doomed from the start, particularly given what I set out to do.

In a departure from my usual practice, this greeting has turned out not to be a complete, self-contained piece. It is the ending of what I hope will eventually be a complete setting, in the original German, of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Mariä Verkündigung (The Annunication to Mary), from his cycle of poems concerning the life of the Blessed Virgin. Perhaps the best-known settings of these poems are the ones for soprano and piano that Paul Hindemith composed in 1923 and then revised extensively in 1948. I had thought, even as early as last year that I might try to write the entire setting, which I had begun in a condensed, quasi-piano/vocal score, intending to score it for chorus with chamber orchestra. I had had the idea for the tune that forms the basis of the canon of the last section for some years. Things were so hectic at Christmastime last year that I abandoned any thought of bringing the piece to a satisfactory close, and chose instead to set a verse of Henry Longfellow’s “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” for unaccompanied choir. This year, after struggling with it for several days, I decided simply to write what I knew would ultimately be the real ending of the piece, a setting of the very last line of the poem: “Dann sang der Engel seine Melodie” (“Then the angel sang his melody”). Further delaying things, I decided to abandon the piano/vocal score after a certain point, since I knew basically what the underlying harmonic progression was to be, and needed to imagine more fully the instrumental colors in order to continue.The excerpt is scored for a chorus that, by the conclusion, has split into six parts, as well as a nineteen-piece chamber orchestra. Another caveat for those reading the score: when I finally do get around to dealing with the rest of the poem, it is clear that, depending on the dimensions of the opening sections, the proportions of the music could very well change, resulting in a final section that is rather more expansive than the present one.

I love this poem because of the way Rilke brilliantly and sensitively captures what is so unnerving to Mary in her encounter with the angel. It isn’t the fact that an angel has entered her room that is so disturbing to her, but rather the profound intimacy of that meeting, in which the angel (traditionally presumed to be Gabriel), is presented as youthful and beautiful of countenance—as a handsome young man, basically. After he bends down before her, they look into each other’s eyes and are both startled by the enormity of it all.

I’m sorry to say that if you want to print out the pdf, you will need legal-sized paper, because it’s a full score. As a person of a certain age, I also regret to say that those of you who also fall into that demographic will find your reading glasses necessary.

Enjoy, and have a wonderful 2014!

From Mariae Verkündigung (ending, full score, second copy)