Back in the Saddle

Dear friends... I am back!  After a fulfilling summer filled with adventures I have finally returned to my humble apartment in Pittsburgh and cannot wait to get started on all the projects I have been planning, and have been inspired to write after my travels.  It is amazing how important "personal space" is when it comes to the creative process.  While I love my parents dearly, and it is always fun to "go home" for a while (though the idea of "going home," as I turn more and more into a grown up, starts to mean things other that "going to my parents house") I found this summer that I was utterly powerless to create outside of what has become my home base here in Pittsburgh.

So... now that I'm back, what is on the proverbial plate?  The orchestra piece, of course, is a high priority.  Carnegie Mellon's composition program offers one of the highest luxuries of any music school in requiring its students to compose a work for full symphony orchestra in order to complete the degree.  The luxury part comes in the guaranteed performance by the usually-pretty-good Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic.  

Now, many of my contemporaries in the modern world of composition might consider the orchestra to be a "museum" and on that theme question the validity of such a requirement in lieu of conceptual and practical achievements in composition.  As for myself, Messien being one of my Four Pillars of Musical Inspiration, my vocabulary and aesthetic has begun to develop into the "for gigantic orchestra" genre.  From that I have also developed an ear for timbre and how the process of combining timbres can create a larger sound from a smaller ensemble.  As I often say, "I set pictures to music" I could just as easily say (in my quest for the surreal in sound) "my work is a musico-optical illusion".  That is, it sounds bigger than it looks!

Besides the orchestra piece, I have begun work on my "Missa Occulta" or "Secret Mass" which shall be a setting of the Latin liturgy scored for large pipe organ, two violins, cello, classical guitar, trumpet, trombone, flute, clarinet, percussion and ten solo voices (SSATB).  The planned premiere will be in Heinz Chapel (a beautiful space reminiscent of the St. Thomas Church in New York, with a magnificent pipe organ).  The work is a ten movement setting, with rhythmic structures derived from occult numerology (both Cabbalistic and Alchemical) and my own mystical melodies derived from the Hebrew names of the Sephiroth and branches of the Tree of Life.  I am even going so far as to create occult diagrams in the score, in the layout of the music.

I am also planning a work for violin and orchestra to submit to the Queen Elisabeth prize in Belgium, and several works for solo violin, violin and string orchestra as well as brass and percussion with a possible reading by the CMU Wind Ensemble.  

The last large project (is there enough time in the day?) shall be my one-act opera.  The details are secret, but rest assured it is weird, macabre and creepy.  Kind of like Edward Gorey.

More details to follow... I have lots to do!