On my flight to Thailand in December, the in-flight entertainment console at my seat was playing as background music a piece by English composer Arnold Bax. I hadn’t heard of Bax before, and as I sat there browsing the Action & Adventure category of movie selections, I stopped to take note of the piece’s harmonic language and use of orchestral color. It was exactly the kind of early 20th century writing that I’ve come to love and obsessively seek out....
For not terribly compelling reasons, I am trying to get my score for My Name is Richard Rozen printed and published semi-professionally. When I wrote the music a year ago, I didn’t put much effort into typesetting the sheet music properly, because I would be the one performing the work, and honestly I had a lot of it memorized anyway. Now I’m paying the price in hours spent poring over the manuscript, tweaking margins and spacing, adjusting page breaks, and adding rehearsal letters....
I have to write a piece for flute, horn, and percussion by early August. Effectively, by August 1. Let this be my written commitment to getting it done. I’ll get it done if it kills me. The creative process has me on my knees at the moment, but I know that as long as I hack and toil away at the notes, they will arrange themselves in some acceptable fashion on the page....
It’s been over three years since I last opined here. It is troubling to think about how much time has passed, since I don’t think I’ve been particularly productive as a musician since then. In that time, I’ve written essentially just two pieces and who knows how many 8-bar phrases of vapid melody that will never make it farther than the inside pages of my sketchbook. The first piece was an andante for horn and piano, which may be my only mature work at this point, and the second exists more as a short suite: incidental music for a small play performed in Palo Alto....
The No. 3 (C-minor) etude from Rachmaninoff’s first set of Études-Tableaux, Op. 33 was omitted from the original publication and released posthumously. I haven’t read anything that explains why, but it probably has something to do with one of its melodies making an appearance in his fourth piano concerto, written some fifteen years later. I guess it’s only expected that, as a composer, you would eventually come to realize that a particular figure might shine a little brighter in a different setting....