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IRONY ALERT: this rant may not be suitable for children under the age of 12.

This short rant is inspired by a Culturemap piece that Joel Luks wrote this week. (I’m sorry Joel, for cashing in on your own article, but I just gotta get this off my chest.) You can read Joel’s piece here, I’ll refrain from regurgitating it verbatim. The gist, however, is that a local community orchestra is prohibiting children under the age of 7 from attending concerts. Let me write that again, but this time with suggestive typeface: a community orchestra is prohibiting children under the age of 7 from attending concerts. So much for the community, huh?

Now, we’ve all been more than a little annoyed with children at movie theaters, restaurants, libraries, and everywhere else on the planet. I refuse to enter any fast food establishment that has a play place, as I know that the sound of screaming children and the sight of them running around the dining area makes me want to run through a plate-glass window. I have a two year old daughter. Hell, sometimes the sound of her screaming and the sight of her running around our dining area makes me want to run through a plate glass window. McDonald’s allows for unruly children. A play place wouldn’t have been erected and a clown wouldn’t have been adopted as their spokesperson otherwise. Most parents seem to have the good sense to take their children to places best suited for young kids, but occasionally parents decide to go elsewhere for breakfast/lunch/dinner/4thmeal. In my opinion, this is necessary for kids to learn several important things: food shouldn’t always come with toys, food should sometimes be healthy, and that restaurants and gymnastics go together like cookies and sandcastles. It is important for parents to include their children in things other than “child/kid-friendly” environments because that is how they learn to adapt to the world around them. Very few things in my adult life include jungle-gyms and sing-alongs, and children need to learn that this is, more often than not, the general rule.

Lately, it has come to my attention several times that more establishments are looking to generate a kid-free environment. I get that bars, strip clubs, rated-r movies, and casinos should be kid-free, but why a restaurant or a concert hall? What is it exactly that some adults want to be doing in a concert hall that a child’s presence would prohibit them from doing? Do these people want to light up a joint, yell strings of expletives, and dance naked of tables? Do that at home buddy, I’m here with my wife and I just want to eat without you bothering me! All kidding aside, I know that these people want to enjoy their music or meal in peace, but do they really think that adults are any better to be around? What about the adults that never quite learned how to act like adults around other adults in adult situations? I’m constantly annoyed by loud adult talkers at restaurants, adults ignoring smoking ordinances, adults with loud and smelly candy during emotive quiet moments at the symphony, and adults that never learned personal space. Don’t get me started about adults who own cars and drive (talk about asshole central!). Adults make me angry because we supposedly have the ability to think through situations rationally and control our own behavior, but many make a conscious decision to ignore that ability. Children have an excuse. The nice little old lady who unwraps her delicious mint DURING the performance is just inconsiderate (Here’s a thought, put the HALLS cough drop in your mouth before the downbeat. I can hear your candy. WE CAN ALL HEAR YOUR CANDY! The maestro can hear it and thinks you should leave, but is a gentleman and puts up with it to save face).

If you want to enjoy your meal or music without being distracted by others, then do yourself a favor and learn to cook and buy a bitchin’ stereo. When you choose to enter into the public and be surrounded by others, then you forfeit various amounts of conveniences. Deal with it. I can’t ban your tacky shirt, don’t ban my child.

Misha Penton. photo credit: Kerry Beyer

I’ve been extremely lucky in my brief, post-grad school months. Right out of the chute, I’ve had several extraordinary musical opportunities essentially fall into my lap. Being that this seems like a rather unusual occurrence of coincidences for a young composer such as myself, I’m devoting two separate posts to two of the projects that I am currently involved with here in Houston. For those who might not be aware of some of the happenings in Houston’s music scene, there are some great things happening in the classical community. My posts are going to focus primarily on two of these things: Divergence Vocal Theater and Scordatura Music Society. This first post will be about DVT.

I’ve linked to the Divergence Vocal Theater website above. For any Houston musicians who haven’t heard of Misha Penton and DVT, I strongly advise you to cease all other activity and head on over to her site right this instant. Misha, a singer and entrepreneur, is definitely one of the freshest creative forces in Houston, in that she has not only founded her own opera/mutli-disciplinary company (Divergence Vocal Theater), but has also created one of the coolest new venues in town (Divergence Music & Arts) wherein a multitude of artists and performers throw down, located at Spring Street Studios in Houston’s cultural arts district. Her artistic focus with Divergence Vocal Theater centers around the creation of new music, particularly chamber opera. Having collaborated with composers such as Elliot Cooper Cole and Dominick DiOrio, Penton has quickly become a local favorite amongst many of us in the Houston-based composer community. DiOrio, by the way, just recently won Houston Press’ Best Composer award for his collaboration with Misha on the opera-dance-theater piece Klytemnestra. Misha’s attitude towards creating new art through building and developing a community of artists and musicians embodies exactly what is needed in a city as diverse and musically fractured as Houston.

The venue is easily one of the more interesting performance spaces in Houston. Situated in the corner of a large interdisciplinary arts complex, Divergence Music and Arts provides an atmosphere that is immediately intimate and engaging for both the audience and the performers. Complete with an acoustically treated 20 foot ceiling, wood floors, and the complete lack of a raised stage, the space invites audience members to receive an up close and personal experience that puts themselves at arm’s length from the performers. While most patrons park their rears in standard “chairs,” Divergence also offers the option to put one’s self right in the thick of it all on cozy and stylishly arranged pillows “down in front.” To boot, I have been amazed at the clarity of sound at this venue. Not one note was lost at a recent premiere of the Houston Heights Orchestra, who gave their inaugural performance in the space.

The project that I am involved with will be an upcoming Autumn Soirée, which will feature vocal and instrumental music spanning the 19th-21st centuries, dance, puppetry, poetry, and theater. Being an autumnal theme in October, there will be much reference to spooks, specters, and decapitation. My roll has been to create music that more or less provides continuity throughout the evening. The instrumentation for this feat, as I have mentioned in a previous post, is electric guitar, piano, and tabla. My initial thought when proposed the idea to compose some music for the evening was something like, “what the hell do you write for THIS group that could possibly hold this thing together?” I of course welcomed the challenge with open arms. The thought of juxtaposing electric guitar and tabla with 19th Century French art song is just way too good to pass up. The performers for the evening include: singers Misha Penton and Alison Greene, dancer Meg Brooker, puppeteer Kelly Switzer, actor Jon Harvey, pianist Jeremy Wood, tabla player Mini Timmaraju, and myself on electric guitar. Heads will roll!

Please spread the word:

October 14th and 15th, 2011

8pm – $20 @ Divergence Music & Arts

1824 Spring St.

NPR has posted a First Watch video of So Percussion’s newest recording, of Steven Mackey’s It It Time for percussion ensemble. Once again, Steven Mackey hits it out of the ball park for my ears. You can hear it (for a limited time) and read a little about it here. The sheer honesty of this piece grips me immediately. Without looking too much into the extra-musical association with Mackey’s own saddened realization of finite time (as the NPR article references), the very first musical gesture shows perfectly a man who has not yet fully accepted life’s cruel fate: everyone’s clock is ticking from the start and is forever running out. It Is Time is an epic struggle of the most fallible of anti-hero’s quest to gain control of time, lost and fleeting. I imagine Mackey giving the powers that be a huge middle finger, while uttering the words “look what I can do with your stupid time” under his breath.

As much as I enjoy his orchestral works (Lost and Found, Dreamhouse, Eating Greens) and concertos for larger forces (Tuck and Roll, Deal, Banana/Dump Truck), I have to say that his chamber works are what I often find most impressive with his writing (Micro-Concerto, Heavy Light, Physical Property, and Indigenous Instruments). The pieces are always organic, rhythmically charged, harmonically rich, brilliantly scored, and colorful as hell. Mackey’s writing is always inventive, never dull, and always just a smidge off-center. The last point is my favorite: he is one of the few composers that I feel shares a similar dry, yet honest, cartoon sense of humor with my own. While Mackey is an electric guitarist, his percussion writing leads me to believe he is a drummer at heart. Along with Micro-Concerto, It Is Time easily sits among my favorite Mackey works. Of course, this work is made even more special by So Percussion’s wonderful and engaging performance. These guys really do get right to the heart of the piece! Couple their performance with the video work of Mark DeChiazza and the result is nothing short of a mesmerizing and compelling 40 minutes of art. For my money, this is a recording to own.

Technology is Infringing on Classical Music
I’m sharing an article from the LA TImes by Mark Swed, the Times’ music critic. The article came to me via Facebook, posted by Houston’s own KUHF. There is only a small bit of irony in a classical music radio station using a social media tool to link to an article that blasts classical music’s use of social media. Swed’s article makes a couple of pretty good points, sandwiched between a bunch of ridiculous ones. The best paragraphs are the first five, which serve as some sort of introduction to a tirade on how classical music is not pop music, despite all of the really cool hybridization that has occurred over the last few decades. Swed is apparently really irked by the fact that, without naming which ones, symphony orchestras are now inviting patrons to bring their smartphones and iPads to concerts. He seems to think that iPhones are going to turn your average orchestral performance into a Lady Gaga show. I’m not going to summarize the article, as I will let you, my super awesome readers, read the piece for yourselves. I will, however, pull from the article my favorite moments, and then give my take on them.

1.) “People who care about music are the ones who are truly engaged, and they are going to take the trouble to respond. Tweeters have already moved on.”

The article is full of “zingers” like this one. I just joined Twitter this week (follow me! @georgeheathco). I find Swed’s condescension towards the tweeting public to be rather insulting, as 90% of the people I am following are folks who have musical opinions and careers that I respect. It is precisely because these people are engaged in their art forms that I am considering their Twitter company. I have been to several performances over the past year that have used smartphone apps as a means to provide concert goers with extra bits of information about the performance and musicians. In these instances, the smartphone apps were a means of saving money and paper normally used for printing programs. I have even considered using Twitter as a means to communicate musical form, in real time, during performances. Trust me when I say that there is no real line between the “engaged” and the tweeters. And for those who are going engage themselves at a concert, no amount of social networking  is going to cause them to detract their attention. In my opinion, I would rather a concert goer follow along with the music using an iPhone than nodding off and napping during the show. At least the smartphone user has the option to pay attention, as it is hard to do so when you are not conscious.

2.) “Technological fascism is not, I think, too strong a term for it.”

Yes, Mark, technological fascism is too strong a term for it. The last time I checked, no major orchestra is requiring a smartphone or iPad to gain admittance. Judging by the last symphony concert I attended, I would be surprised if 3/4 of the audience even knew of such new-fangled devices (ageist and condescending, I know. Sorry, cheap jab.) The use of technology by orchestras and other performing arts organizations are merely options given to the public to listen to the music and enjoy it however they please, not mandates as Swed suggests. I agree that concertgoers should try to better engage in what is happening on stage, but to say that the only real way for them to do so is to sit quietly with hands in lap for two hours is a bit over the top. There is no better way to alienate an audience than to tell them how they need to experience your art. Relax, Mark, you can take off the tin foil hat. As I hinted at above, there are a good number of people who attend concerts of some of the world’s finest musicians playing some of the world’s finest music only to doze off immediately after the initial downbeat. Try telling this patron that he has to sit there for an hour and half, in a dimly lit room, with his hands in his lap. Now tell him that he was just exercising the freedom to listen to the music as he chooses. Phrasing it like I just have sounds a lot like Orwellian Newspeak, but it is what Mark Swed wants you to do. Technology just gives that sleepy audience member an extra method for engaging with what is on stage. Nobody is calling for a homogenous method of listening, except for maybe Swed.

3.) “The important point is that a classical concert provides an opportunity to untie the digital umbilical cord and replace it with chords that really do resonate.”

I’m pretty sure that Mark Swed wrote the entire article just to get to this gem. I won’t argue that classical concerts provide an opportunity to connect with great art or even one’s self. I will argue that connectivity with the digital world automatically slams the door to introspective discovery. I won’t say that iPhone actually enhance a classical performance, but I can’t rule out that they have the potential to do so.

4.) “Was [The Beatles' "Revolution 9," from the White Album] the result of the Beatles being called in to a meeting with a marketing director telling them they must find a way to build a new audience among listeners of avant-garde music?”

This question is beyond pointless in this entire discussion. The Beatles didn’t have a marketing director to tell them that “Revolution 9″ was a good idea, because they had powerful psychedelics to do that for them. The Beatles had something else that the world’s great orchestras don’t have: staggering record sales figures. When the White Album dropped, nobody questioned The Beatles as force to be reckoned with. I don’t think a week goes by where I don’t read about classical music’s relevance or that another orchestra in the world has folded. Besides, most bands in the mainstream do have marketing directors, only they are called a&r divisions.

5.) “Already iTunes has forced classical music into a pop straitjacket, whether by an infrastructure that recognizes music as consisting only of songs, or through its severely constricted audio.”

I’ll go backwards on this. Are mp3′s and m4a’s really worse than cassette tapes after 5 listens? This idea that iTunes offers shitty audio quality is bogus. If you aren’t an audiophile, the difference between CD or HD quality and a 256 kpbs mp3 is virtually impossible to detect, unless your stereo system in worth $5,000. If that quality really annoys anyone, there is a great option: DON’T USE ITUNES. Simple. CD’s are still being manufactured and they are sold in lots of places, including most artist websites, where the artist is benefited from a direct purchase. As for iTunes forcing classical music into a pop straitjacket due to the pricing and pay structure, all I have to say is that Mark’s gripe is not with the technology here, rather the company’s policies. As a consumer, I enjoy paying the same price for 60 minutes of classical music as 3 minutes of pop, but as an artist I can relate to the grief of having my art devalued due to an unfair policy. I would prefer that iTunes charge by a project’s length of time. If a piece of music is between 0 and 4 minutes, then charge $.99; it the piece is 5-8 minutes, charge $1.29, and so on. Of course, it is possible that folks would still complain that this type of proposal would see classical music sales decline due to the cost of individual tracks. Oh well, I guess you can’t win for trying. Did Mark Swed complain about CD sales? Is an hour of Beethoven really worth the same amount as an hour of Greenday?

6.) “The latest villain on the scene is Spotify…”

7.) “Sorry, folks, but Mozart won’t make you smarter unless you switch off your smartphone.”

ZING! I retract my previous statement. This seems to be the quote Mark Swed had in mind as the knock-out punch for the article.

“In a recent presentation to a university composition seminar, a younger composer asked about the role of discipline in the life of a freelance composer. It’s such a difficult, open-ended question to answer because it is so particular to the individual, yet it is something we all have to deal with. I don’t think that the need for discipline is really any different for a freelance composer than for a composer with a non-composing job or, for that matter, a composer who is a parent. We all have events that we have to schedule our creative existence around, whether they are classes (giving or taking), concerts (presenting or attending), a 9-to-5 job, or childcare.”

The above quote is from Alexandra Gardner, who wrote a nice opinion piece for the NewMusicBox. In a nutshell, the article briefly hits on the fact that self-discipline is uber-important to a composer at any stage of his or her life, and particularly to the freelance composer. I agree with her, but in the quote above she distinguishes the freelance composer from the composer who also happens to have a non-composing day job, as well as the composer who also happens to have a child. I know, she was only making a small distinction to make a larger point about the sameness of the three, but it is curious that a distinction had to be made at all. I would personally call myself all three things. I am a freelance composer who has to generate most of my own income from teaching because I have a family and some mouths to feed. Gardner is inadvertently suggesting that a freelancer ONLY makes his or her income from that chosen field, and that somehow having the day job strips you of the freelance title. This might lead one to question what is on the next lowest rung of the latter, underneath freelance? Hobbyist? Amateur? I do not consider myself either of those, by a long shot.

What then does she think of the academic composer whose principle roll at the university is to teach classes and lessons, and conduct ensembles? It is possible that the time a lot of academic composers spend actually composing is smaller than that of the composer who has the day job and is a parent. Is the roll of professor not the same as a day job? Sadly, Gardner’s attitude is shared by others, even in the academic world. I once had a teacher ask, “if you have the day job, or if you are spending all of your time self-publishing, then when do you find the necessary time to create your art?” Is the university gig any different from my private lesson gig or another’s administrative gig? I don’t think so. It might not look as impressive on my resume, by at the end of the day my roll in the community is essentially the same. The reality is that people of all crafts have to do what is necessary to stay afloat and to survive. At least for now, freelancing alone doesn’t provide what is needed for my family to survive. One doesn’t have to be defined purely by what they do to bring in money. I mean, I usually spend MORE time composing in a day then I do teaching.

To be fair, I don’t think Gardner meant to make any distinction as to say A cannot be B, nor can it be C.

I failed to mention that Slumber might have another performance in September, on percussionist Luke Hubley’s doctoral recital. The piece is for voice (baritone) and marimba, and the text was written by Benjamin Cunningham, the vocalist for The Pant Factory. The first performance of Slumber was on my graduate recital this past Spring. I wasn’t particularly proud of some of my writing in certain sections, particularly in what I felt was the middle section (of some sort of ABA form). Neither the voice or marimba part were very clear nor idiomatic, and it was just more complicated than it needed to be. It meandered harmonically and the phrasing didn’t make any sense. Ultimately, I decided to rewrite the entire section and tweak the outer moments to make the piece a little more cohesive. I haven’t heard the results sung or played (beyond my midi renderings) yet, but I definitely feel more confident in the parts. I’ll post the recital date as soon as I find out more details.

I have had the fortunate opportunity to come in contact with many awesome musicians and artists over the past year, and I’m even more fortunate to say I’ve got a laundry list of badass projects that I’ll be involved with over the next year or so.

I’m going to be working out several small vignettes for an Autumn soiree put on by Misha Penton at Divergence Vocal Theater. The performances for this will be on October 14th and 15th. I get to work with a tabla player and play electric guitar on the same program as Donizetti. DVT is awesome and is doing some great things in the Houston music community. If you get a chance to check out any of their performances (especially at the DVT venue), then I highly recommend going. On November 12th, Scordatura Music Society will be premiering six new compositions (of which I am one) and six new paintings as part of their 12 X 7 Commissioning project. I have only just begun writing the piece, which is scored for violin, viola, and piano. There will be a number of videos that each of the involved composers will be making leading up to the performance. On February 19th and 20th, the University of Houston’s contemporary music ensemble,  AURA, will be performing a new work of mine on a program that is tentatively titled “Topography.” I only just received the details, and I can let a cat out of the bag for my writing plans: there may or may not be some Yes and Roger Dean album art involved.

I have been working with a poet/hip hop artist/social worker named Christopher Perri on a piece called The Capital of Punishment, which is about the juvenile justice and delinquency system in America. The work centers around a spoken word piece that Christopher wrote, and will feature a largely electronic score and possibly a video element. There is no set date for a performance as of yet, but we are working on it. If the piece is anywhere as intense to others as it has been to me, then I’m sure that it’ll be received rather well.

Lastly, I am going to be writing a bunch of music for a dance production, to be premiered in over a year. The music will be performed by a new ensemble that I am assembling. The details are few for this at the moment, but I shall be finding out more over the next few months.

I’ll update again soon, to give a little more detail about each of these things.

This past year went by FAST. It seems like yesterday that I was bitching about having to write 40 minutes of music and praying for the possibility of dreaming about the end of grad school. It is all finished now and the dust has only begun settling after the whirlwind year I’ve had, only to reveal a completely new set of hurdles. This past year has marked the biggest leap of progress I think I have ever made, provided me with absolutely amazing opportunities, and giving me the extra boost of confidence a freshly graduated classical music composer in the 21st century should have to go barreling towards a life of road blocks and banana peels. Taking the necessary steps to embark on my next phase in life feels like I’m riding my bike again for the first time in 10 years. Actually, this is an amazing analogy for how I currently feel. Allow me to indulge in a rather unnecessary story:

I rode around the neighborhood for hours when I was a kid, and was quite daring at that. When I was in high school, my focus shifted heavily towards practicing my music-ing and driving automobiles, so my bicycle took a backseat (pun definitely intended!) for quite some time. Fast forward almost 10 years.  Soon after I graduated with my bachelors, I decided to buy a new bike and take up riding around the city. Everything basic in life follows the old adage that these things are “like riding a bicycle,” because picking it up again after a lifetime of neglect is supposed to be quick and painless. The initial ride made for a great second honeymoon, until the moment my legs lost all energy to continue after 3 miles. The ride back home was way more of a workout than it would seem a 24 year old should endure from a 5 mile bike ride. The real fun came the following two days, when it felt like an elephant had punted me right on the tail bone. It certainly made the next bike trip feel like I was sitting on an up-turned 2×4. From then until about 6 months later, I rediscovered that wind was invented because God hates cyclists, going downhill makes the bike travel faster and scarier, and that if I ride out too far, then I struggle the entire ride back home. Only after months of rigorous riding, did I start to develop the stamina for longer rides and greater distances. Fast forward 4 years. 25 miles is my standard ride, and my endurance for wind and mild fatigue is greatly improved. I ride more now than I ever did as a teen.

I have “planned,” for years it seems, to piece together an ensemble for the purposes of performing new and contemporary music. The first time I ever had the thought of such a ridiculous thing was about seven years ago, after listening to some some orchestral Zappa records. The idea was awesome enough to entertain for all of the 35 minute drive from my parent’s home in Katy, Tx to where I lived just west of downtown Houston. The idea didn’t recur until a few years later, when I had decided to take up composition as a possible career path. I was playing guitar in a tech-metal band at the time (which I only quit doing so a year ago, by the way), and had some difficulties “getting my way” musically in the band when it came time to write music. I remember reading about Philip Glass and Steve Reich having their own ensemble’s as outlets for their music and thinking instantly that I needed to do the same. When I combined this with my love for Frank Zappa’s music and his many incarnations of live ensembles, I was led to the conclusion that having my own “modern classical band” was the real solution to my problems (because starting a band is always a great solution to something else).

As I began my graduate studies, I quickly noticed that I was following an all too common pathway for young composers. I discovered that many of my now favorite composers had really began their careers with the same intentions as me. What a great way to affirm my mostly intuitive compulsion! The day I realized what Bang on a Can was, and that one of its co-founders, Michael Gordon, was going to visit my school for a premiere and listen to my music during a masterclass was absolutely mind blowing. Looking back, I wasted a great opportunity to ask him some great questions about starting up the group: It seems all I have right now is a bunch of paper work and bullshit to wade through. Did BOAC have similar issues?

As graduation drew closer and closer, I realized that I would soon be faced with the reality that time had run out and I would need to either shit or get off the pot, as they say. I began asking around for some minor advice and for some players to jam out with me. I was faced with real decision making for the first time. What the hell kind of ensemble was it? What is the instrumentation? Will it play only my music? What is the name? Where will we play? Who will play? HOW IS THIS EMEFFER GOING TO BE PAID FOR? Only a year ago did most of these questions present themselves to me. A FREAKING YEAR! Shouldn’t I have considered some of this shit before then? What the hell was I doing with my time, besides having a family, working full-time, and going to grad school?

I’m proud to say that most of these questions have been answered. I have some players. I’ve got a plan. I have some repertoire. I have potential venues. I even have the outlines for a sweet educational outlet. But, where’s the name? Where’s the money?