I’m off to Seattle today.  I think I have alluded to, but not explained, the wonderful situation I am walking into.  It’s a situation every composer should be afforded on a regular basis, so I’m going to describe it in the hopes that my description might spur other organizations to imitate it.

I’ve been commissioned by Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Commissioning Club to create a septet to be premiered on their summer festival.  Over the last six months or so, the club, led by composer Jeremy Jolley, has been getting together from time to time to discuss my music.  On Sunday they will meet me — and I will meet them — for the first time, and we’ll talk about the new piece I’ve written.  Then in July I will return for the premiere.

What’s not to like about this scenario?  Curious music lovers support the creation of a new work and get a glimpse into a composer’s creative process.  The composer gets paid for his work and gets it performed before a knowledgeable, engaged audience.

There are so many communities that have the resources to create this kind of setup.  All it really takes is one person with vision and persuasive skills to bring it off.

So I’m getting ready to board transcontinental.  If I find out more about how this club works, I will share when I return.

Tuesday is tomorrow.

Oh well.

As it happens, I am nowhere close to finishing this piece.  But the pressure I put on myself to get it done had some benefits.  I now have some very clear parameters I’m working with:

• Two movements
• First movement is a long, excursive piece; second movement is much shorter, very concise.
• There are two possible endings for the first movement – I think that deciding how to end the first movement may be one of the last things that happens in the compositional process.
• There is a lot of work to be done on the second movement, but I think it’s mostly clerical work (making sure all the details are in order), as opposed to imaginative work (figuring out what needs to happen).

I still intend to set it aside on Wednesday for other projects.  Can’t wait to see what I think of it when it returns front-and-center.

Why next Tuesday?  There are a couple of orchestra pieces I need to get cracking on, and I’m going to an orchestra concert next Tuesday night, so I figure I will sit down next Wednesday morning and crack away, preferences and prejudices fresh in my ears

But why not just set the quartet aside in whatever state it happens to find itself?  Because, as I say, the piece is at that point where some pressure – even artificial pressure — will be beneficial.  I could dicker around with it for another year, but it’s close enough to being a real composition that I want to just force the issue a bit.  Focus on getting it done, and a lot of the loose pieces may fall in place.

Really, it’s a no-lose situation.  I might not complete the piece by next Tuesday – in which case, I still have 8 months to finish it.  By forcing myself to push through it, I might end up with something I really don’t like – but again, I have another 8 months, and one of my favorite things to do besides starting a new piece is to start over on a piece I’ve chucked in the recycling.

Then there is always the chance it could turn out just right by next Tuesday.

Then I have eight months to write number seven.

To illustrate the first of his six artistic principles – Lightness – Italo Calvino recalls the weight of the domestic life borne by women through the centuries. In a leap that conveys the power of the imagination, these women took the tool of their servitude – the broom – and transformed it into an extraordinary symbol of lightness and power, donning their steep-peaked hats and soaring off to the moon.

After performing his Violin Futura program a gazillion times all over the map in the last six years, Piotr Szewczyk is bringing it to NYC next month.

What is Violin Futura?  In the words of Santa Fe New Music, it is an “enthralling program [that] shows off the diversity and range of the contemporary violin.”  As Piotr says, “I created the Violin Futura project because I wanted to expand the contemporary violin repertoire with pieces that are exciting to play and listen to while bringing something new and unique to the repertoire. Violin Futura is currently in its 3rd edition and I have over 40 pieces written for me by composers from United States, Germany, England, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Australia.”

The version he will be playing at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall includes works by Kari Henrik Juusela, John Kennedy, Marc Mellits, Gary Smart, Adam Schoenberg, Richard Belcastro, Sydney Hodkinson, Clifton Callender (World Premiere), Moritz Eggert, Piotr Szewczyk, Ethan Wickman, and Lawrence Dillon (World Premiere).

The admission price is $10.   Anyone interested in an introduction to what the 21^st-century violin is about can have it all at an excellent price.

Kenneth Florence: Aeon Transfer
Nicholas Rich: Songs at Sunset
Bruce Tippette: Tranquil Lullabye

All three works are challenging, but I’m sure the composers are going to be mighty pleased with the results.  As for me, it will be great to reconnect with this wonderful group: I’ve known violinists Muneko Otani and Jennifer Leshnower since 1997, when the quartet premiered Furies and Muses at the Swannanoa Festival.

Constantine and I go back quite a ways: he was one of the factors that enabled me to survive my adolescence.  We split our high school years between goofing off and waxing profound on musical matters.  Since then, Constantine has had quite a career as an in-demand maestro — Music Director of the Queens Symphony Orchestra and Chatham Opera, and guest conducting all over the map.  Though I can’t make it to south Florida to hear his performance this weekend, it tickles me not a little to think of my old pal leading an orchestra through my swirling 16^th-notes.

Though I spoke of a number of concerns, the central topic of my talk was the set of string quartets I am presently completing.  Here’s is an excerpt:

…At the very end of his novel Invisible Cities, Calvino says “we are living in hell, and we have two choices: we can become a part of the hell around us, or we can find those things around us that are not hell, and give them a form that will allow them to endure.”   I love this image, this idea that no matter how bad things get, there is a certain nobility in finding the good things and passing them on.  It sparked in me a desire to explore traditional, Classical forms in a really detailed manner, to figure out what makes these forms effective or not effective for us today, what they can tell us about ourselves.

I set myself the task of writing six string quartets, each one focusing on a specific traditional form.  That was back in 1998, fifteen years ago, and I’ve been working on this idea steadily since – I’m currently on the sixth and final quartet of the cycle.

One of the fascinating things about art is the way it connects the personal and the cultural, the world of experience and the world of imagination.  As I look back on the fifteen years I’ve devoted to these quartets, it is clear that while I thought I was exploring traditional forms as intellectual constructs, I was also responding in a very personal and even broadly cultural way to these forms.

The first quartet focused on scherzo, which is a form that is closely associated with humor in music.  The piece is in four movements: three scherzos followed by a nocturne.   I wanted to use the Classical concept of scherzo as a means to explore a personal and cultural concern I had at the time, the late 1990s.  I felt that I was using humor – and we as a society were using humor, frivolity – as a way of distancing ourselves from real engagement, and that though this was a comfortable stance, it wasn’t necessarily a good one.

A few years later, I wrote my second quartet, zooming in on the concept of fugue.  The word fugue means, literally, flight, so I created a quartet of six fugues dealing with different aspects of flight.  I was working on this piece at the same time as I was fulfilling a commission to commemorate the centennial of the first flight of the Wright Brothers, so I very much had the exhilaration of flight on my mind, this astonishing idea that humans could fantasize about the ability to fly for thousands of years – and then actually make it happen.   That’s an incredibly capacity we have as a species.  But this was also in the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks, so the concept of flight was also very terrifying – it was a time when it felt like boarding a plane could never be the same.  The resulting piece confronts these conflicting feelings, all through the musical device of fugue.

Flash forward a couple more years, and I was ready to take on my third quartet, in which I had decided to tackle the tradition of aria.  In contrast to where I was when I wrote the first quartet, I found I was unable to detach myself from that tradition, I was unable to attain any ironic distance, and instead I wrote a passionate, unapologetically romantic quartet in aria form.  Again, in retrospect, it’s clear where I was coming from: I was a newlywed, and like many newlyweds I was swept up in the power of love, I was finding it very difficult to think objectively.  Critic Alex Ross called the piece “unlawfully lush,” and I have to agree.  In a sense, the third quartet is the least self-aware, self-conscious – and, again, that is appropriate: like most species, we humans tend to become very narrowly focused during mating season.

My fourth and fifth quartets were composed simultaneously, the fourth focusing on rondo form and the fifth on the idea of variations.  Once again, what started out as explorations of tradition ended up as expressions of extramusical concerns, almost in spite of my intentions.  You see, shortly after my third quartet, my wife and I had our first child, and then our second a couple of years later.  The world I was living in at the time of the fourth and fifth quartets was aswarm in toddlerhood, and my music could hardly be expected to escape that influence.  The fourth quartet ended up being a very joyous, playful piece.  The fifth is an ode to anxiety and sleep deprivation.  Those of you who have had small children will be familiar with those two poles of experience: exhilaration and exhaustion.

As I said, I’m currently working on quartet number six, in which my intention is to explore the traditional concept of fantasy.  I’m deep in the process of creating it and it’s fair to say that at this point I have no idea where it is going to take me.  But this again is one of the great beauties of art: we don’t tell it where to take us, we release ourselves into its custody…