Friday, January 31, 2014

Writing in 2013


I retired from the University of New Mexico so I could spend the majority of my time composing and writing. That’s what I do now and last year I composed two pieces, Centenary Fragment and Walden Miniatures, which I’ve discussed at length in previous blog entries.  Colin Holter in a review of my 2011 CD Devisadero, called me a “young composer,” and I hope to remain one for the rest of my life. I’m carefully and patiently putting together a sound world of my own, over what (if I live long enough) will be a process of many years. Colin’s review, from which I learned a lot about my music, can be found here:


Intentionally “not knowing” as I compose has, I suspect, engendered some strange reactions to what I put on the page and how that gets heard in performance.  As such, I deeply appreciated the time Colin took to really listen to the music I wrote between 1995 and 2009 as found on my CD. What he heard is surely “in there,” as one might say, but what I hear and write down follows the advice of Buckminster Fuller who opened his book Synergetics with the following, “Dare to be naïve,” and I firmly believe in what I think he means by that: look and listen to everything without pre-condition or expectation, making therefore every experience “new.”

By the way, you can read all of Synergetics (wow) right here:


Even the old, the “already understood,” thus becomes material, and not in some overly-determined and theorized sense of a postmodern de-coupling of the past from its historical context.  What I compose, regardless of how one hears it, comes from an intentionally “naïve” place, which I suppose will someday allow a scholar to theorize what is meant by that. But whatever it is, I can say at least this much: it has nothing to do with what might be regarded as a “postmodern” appropriation of material, nor is it influenced by anything that could be called “postmodern,” except perhaps for an unconscious desire on my part to make sure that it isn’t.  I truly believe that period of academic scholarship will be seen (if it isn’t already) as one of the laziest and most self-serving bodies of work ever.  I had to read a lot of it while working on my Ph.D. in American Studies back in the late 80s and early 90s and while, as always, some brilliant work exists from that period, much of it now speaks to how “dated” things become when critics place themselves rather than what they study at the center of discourse.  Looking back, I’m surprised not just by how bad much of that writing is, but how boring it is which, from my perspective at least, is even worse.

Well, enough of that. This post isn’t about composing anyway. I instead want to reflect on what I wrote in 2013 that is part of the scholarly side of what I do. And also about how what I feel about scholarly pursuits has been challenged this past year because of what I’ve been asked to write. And those challenges are, indeed, connected to what I’ve written here so far, as will become clearer in what follows.

Writing in 2013 included some reviews, mostly of essays being considered for journals, something I do often and enjoy. Those I can't tell you about of course (all confidential) but there's one review I can: Rob Haskins's wonderful book titled, simply, John Cage. I read it immediately when it came out and then in much greater detail when I was asked to review it for American Music. Not only does Haskins present Cage's life and work in an imaginative (and concise) fashion, he also points the reader to much of the currently available scholarship on Cage for anyone who would like to study the subject further.  He does so not only through the usual means of a bibliography at the end but also by drawing attention to the scholarship within the body of the text. In other words, he directly credits the work of Cage scholars when he uses that information to tell Cage's story. Can't recommend it highly enough. Here's one place you can buy it:

http://www.amazon.com/John-Cage-Reaktion-Books-Critical/dp/186189905X

I wrote the preface for a soon-to-be-published collection of writings by composer and theorist Thomas DeLio.  This was a "labor of love" as they say because I've been engaged with DeLio's work since the mid-1980s and I regard him as one of the most important experimental composers of his generation. It should be published sometime in 2014. 

Another preface I wrote was for my recently reprinted monograph, Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition. Out of print for fifteen years, learning that it would finally be published as a paperback and e-book edition was one of the highlights (for me) of 2012. Writing the preface in 2013 was my first reflective task of the year, where I revisited the personal history that led to my becoming a scholar rather than a percussionist. I'd never addressed that in print before. 

However, the most significant piece of writing I did last year connects with the most significant event of my life in 2013, the subject of which will bring my "2013 review" to an end: the death of my father, Terry Shultis.

My Dad suffered from Alzheimer's for many years (probably more than ten) and finally succumbed to the disease this past May at the age of 77.  I was there when he passed away and it is still too sensitive a subject for me to write about, except to say how impressed I was/am with hospice care. He died in a beautiful place, cared for by the excellent staff at Relais Bonne Eau in Edwardsville, Illinois, and I'm grateful to them for making my Dad's transition from this world a peaceful one.  The most immediate task after he died was my writing his obituary, which can be read here:

http://www.gentfuneralhome.com/memsol.cgi?user_id=985855

But there was something else happening at the time that requires a bit of backstory. In 2010, I was living in Taos, (Hee Sook was on sabbatical and had a Wurlitzer residency there), commuting to UNM in Albuquerque for what ended up being my last semester teaching. I got a call from composer/percussionist Gustavo Aguilar asking if I would like to contribute to a book he was putting together about percussion and percussionists. I was surprised that he asked. I've not performed percussion professionally since 1994 (Verdi's Requiem of all things) and I left the percussion world without really having ever looked back since.  In truth, I couldn't as it was too painful not being able to play. Also, when I stopped playing I was not terribly happy with the direction percussion as a profession was heading, in particular what was happening in the professional organization to which I'd devoted much of my young career, that being the Percussive Arts Society. I swore I would never join again when I left PAS for good in 1996. The only percussion-related things I did after 1996 concerned my work as a scholar: in 2002 I read a paper about John Cage's early percussion pieces as part of a presentation Scott Ney and the University of New Mexico Percussion Ensemble put together (they gave an excellent performance of Third Construction using, as close as possible, original instruments) for a Percussive Arts Society International Convention in 2002. I also was asked by Steven Schick to take part in his Roots and Rhizomes conference (I participated in a discussion with Julio Estrada, a dear friend and the composer of eolo'oolin for percussion ensemble) at the University of California-San Diego in 2005. This was where I met Gustavo Aguilar who also was/is close to Julio. I later gave Gustavo a real Teponaztli, actually made in Tepoztlan, that Julio found for me when I visited him for the first time in 1987. But that's another story for another time. The point is I didn't expect such a request from Gustavo and certainly not for a book that had such an extraordinary group of contributors. Why me?

Meanwhile, my nephew Arlo Shultis, an outstanding young percussionist now a junior at the University of Michigan, was applying to colleges and conservatories and I was offering assistance in whatever way possible. This included taking him to auditions at Temple University (where we saw Alan Abel's graduate masterclass) and Peabody Conservatory, where I tried to hide out but got "caught" by Robert Van Sice during a break just before Arlo's audition. It was beginning to seem, more and more, that my percussive past could no longer be escaped!

One year later, another request: this time from Bill Sallak to sit on a panel at that year's PASIC about "percussion masterpieces," the transcript of which will also be part of the book Gustavo and Kevin Lewis (his co-editor) have put together. My mentor at the University of Illinois, Thomas Siwe, was being inducted into the PAS Hall of Fame at that convention and I wanted to be there when that happened so I agreed to participate. Only one problem: PAS had a new rule that all convention participants must be members. I fought and fought to no avail, finally breaking my vow and joining in order to attend. By then I'd begun writing the book chapter requested by Gustavo the year before--what essentially ended up being a memoir about my life as a percussionist, mostly about the composers I'd worked with and the pieces I'd performed in the period between 1980 and 1996. As it turned out, there were some moments in my life worth writing about and, I hope, worth reading about. A lot of that was intimately attached to the working relationships between my students and me during those years and I intended to dedicate the chapter to them.  

In 2012, I was asked be part of another PASIC, this time in Austin, for a John Cage centennial celebration. With the help, again, of Scott Ney and the UNM Percussion Ensemble, I put together a presentation that is now one of my earlier blog entries, which can be found here:


In other words, I was becoming more and more involved with percussion and, mostly, because there were percussionists out there who wanted that to happen.

By the spring of 2013, the book deadline was approaching, and I was rushing (as I always do) to finish the essay. Then my Dad took a bad turn healthwise, had been in the hospital for weeks, and I decided to drop everything and fly to Saint Louis. For who knows what reason, I brought my computer with me and finished the essay on the plane, now with an ending that included the important role my father played in my early life as a percussionist. I've since added him (in memoriam) to the essay's dedication.

As you'll read in the obituary (that's why I included it here) my father was himself an outstanding percussionist. It was something we shared together and, as Tom Goldstein reminded me after Steven Schick's phenomenal concert at the Miller Theater last night (more on that in a later post), my Dad often joined me at percussion conventions and did so for many years.  Most of my percussionist friends in the 1980s and 1990s knew my Dad pretty well. So I can imagine, looking back at that time with the safety distance blessedly allows, that my Dad also lost something when I couldn't play anymore and stopped being the percussionist I'm sure he would have wanted to be had he been able to follow the path I took, the path to which he had led me. Now that I've lost him, those percussive memories are among those I treasure most.

I've asked permission to include here the end of my essay, ("Writing (at the end) of New Music"), which will soon be available in this book:

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415716956/

"Unlike me, my father played percussion his whole life. Even toward the end, when his illness required hospitalization and he could no longer use sticks, my mother purchased a hand drum, and he played it instead. After I stopped playing for good in 1994, I always called myself an "ex-percussionist" and that's how I introduced myself to Janet Abel, wife of renowned percussionist Alan Abel, when I joined their church in Ardmore, Pennsylvania in 2006. She protested immediately, 'You can never be an ex-percussionist. Once a drummer, always a drummer.' When my nephew graduated from high school and was auditioning for universities, Temple was on his list, and Alan Abel invited both of us to attend his graduate student masterclass. Listening to one of his students play the snare drum excerpt that opens the second movement of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, I was astonished to hear, when Mr. Abel suggested to the student that he move the thumb of his left hand, walking over to him and adjusting it a mere fraction of an inch, the student play that excerpt perfectly—all due to the slightest grip adjustment I've ever seen. At that moment, I had an epiphany, like the proverbial scales falling from my eyes: perfection. My desire for perfection—enormously frustrating to my students in my percussion ensemble days, enormously frustrating to me when I was making recordings with that ensemble, and probably the reason why all those hours of practice to achieve it ended up causing my injury in the first place—that desire, now as a composer of music with an intentional simplicity that insists that everything—sounds and silences—be in exactly the right place, has never left me. In fact, if anything, it is now more central to my musical self than ever. Hearing Alan Abel teach his student the necessity of such perfection in orchestral performance brought it all back to me. Janet Abel was right—my entire musical sensibility is wrapped up in what I inherited from my father and what I learned from him and everyone else I studied with. I'll be a percussionist until the day I die. Just like Dad."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One final note to end my summary of 2013:

My Dad always wanted to buy a Miata, you know that two-seater sportscar made by Mazda. Being a practical man, he never did. Last month, when my old 1997 Honda Accord started showing signs of trouble, my wife Hee Sook Kim told me it was time to get the car I'd always wanted: a Mini Cooper, British Racing Green with a white top.  So on the last day of 2013 I took the impractical route I'm sure my Dad would have approved, just as he approved my impractical choice to become a percussionist: I bought the car!

Friday, January 24, 2014

Concerts in 2013 (Including my "Top Five" list)


I go to a lot of concerts. When I lived in Germany, especially when I was in Heidelberg, (1999-2000) I went constantly. Darmstadt a half hour away had a good opera house where I saw Janecek's The Makropulos Case. Frankfurt, an hour away, made it possible for me to see a solo recital by Alfred Brendel (my first time seeing him live), the Schoenberg piano concerto with Mitsuko Uchida, and a great performance of Jonathan Harvey's Bhakti with the composer himself running the sound board. I could go on and on: Wagner's Ring in Mannheim (fifteen minutes away), Globokar and Tristan (not the same night!) in Karlsruhe (thirty minutes away), and countless great operatic performances in Stuttgart (one hour away) including Schoenberg's Moses und Aron (the opening of which was wrecked by a cell phone that no German would claim and therefore rang and rang and rang) and Luigi Nono's great opera Intolleranza 1960 whose choral writing strongly influenced my own choral work Walden Miniatures. Heidelberg itself had a decent orchestra and I remember in particular a great concert with the clarinetist Sabine Meyer as soloist, the first (and only) time I've heard her live. I also saw Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre there and must admit finding it somewhat humorous to read about the "big deal" it was when a few years ago Alan Gilbert programmed a concert version of it with the New York Philharmonic. Here's a review of it in the Times:


What's the population of Heidelberg, something like 150,000 people? And packing the house in a city of millions a decade later? How brave to program such a piece in NYC, and then how brave for the audience to come and enjoy it. Give me a break!

Then again, at least the United States is trying to catch up a bit on having missed most of the interesting music written in second half of the last century. I've heard some great concerts of twentieth-century music since moving to the so-called Northeast Corridor. There was an amazing Feldman retrospective put on by Bowerbird (including a magnificent performance of his 2nd String Quartet by the Flux quartet at the Philadelphia Cathedral that kept me riveted to my seat for the entirely of its six hour duration). Mode has put an excerpt of the piece on YouTube, which can be heard here:


Their Cage festival was great too and I especially enjoyed hearing Margaret Leng Tan perform Sonatas and Interludes at the Philadelphia Museum. Her performance was a highlight of the Cage centennial for me!

The Miller Theater in New York City is doing much to improve exposure to living composers, particularly those who write within the continental side of experimentalism and I've enjoyed concerts there, including one this past year that featured Georg Friedrich Haas, who recently left his position in Basel (where my friend, trombonist and composer Mike Svoboda also works) to accept an appointment at Columbia University. I had nice seats, thanks to Mariusz Kozak, a former student of mine and now a colleague of Haas at Columbia, and I enjoyed what I heard. Alex Ross recently made a big deal of his "string quartet in the dark" (No. 3) when it was performed at Carnegie Hall and I like that piece too. Here's his review:


But again I'd already heard the piece ten years ago (in Berlin) performed beautifully by the Kairos quartet so that's not news as far as I'm concerned. By the way, to my memory, the audience didn't get a "test run" in the Konzerthaus. It was just dark. Are concert-goers in the United States so pathetically weak or do they just get treated that way? I vote for the latter. And stop having someone come on stage before concerts and talk. Or worse advertise a sponsor. I HATE that.

Meanwhile, it seems clear to me that few in New York (or elsewhere for that matter) are trying very hard to find out what interesting music is being written right now. Especially when it concerns composers who live here in the United States. Unless, that is, they are writing like the Europeans who are increasingly getting their due in the US, or writing in the trendy style coming out of the top music conservatories, often under the tutelage of composers who themselves constitute what is getting played today by mainstream ensembles. In an essay I wrote some time ago, about the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection's attempt to collect the works of "America's leading composers," those names are mostly forgotten to us now. I suspect we'll also forget a lot of the names I presently read about in the NY Times arts section. Pretty soon too I'm betting.



Here are the best five concerts I heard in 2013:

Shostakovich, The Nose, Metropolitan Opera

The most exciting production I've ever seen at the Met. This is due primarily to the direction of visual artist William Kentridge, whose vision created what looked and sounded like a collaborative work between he and the composer. Another big plus was the Met's percussion section, led by Greg Zuber, who I've known since our days together at the University of Illinois, whose performance was superb. I remember playing the percussion excerpts from the opera, arranged by Mark Johnson (my percussion professor at Michigan State University) way back in the 1970s, but I don't remember anything that sounded as good as what I heard played at the Met!

Atoms for Peace, Temple University, Philadelphia

I've been a fan of Radiohead since the late 1990s, own all their CDs, and have seen some really great live performances, the first of which was a spectacular concert at Red Rocks in Colorado. That performance featured a lot of their guitar-oriented music whereas the last concert I saw, in Camden, featured their more recent dance-oriented stuff. In both cases, there is little room for opening things up. In fact, one of the things I've always liked about Radiohead is how "composed" their music is. So in that sense Atoms for Peace is a real departure. Based on Thom Yorke's compositions, beginning with "The Eraser," (his great solo CD), this is a band that allows Yorke to really cut loose. It's fun to hear. And watch. Especially with the added visual (and aural) bonus of Flea on bass. One of the few instances where I felt like the concert was better than the CD!


Wagner, Parsifal, Metropolitan Opera

I love Parsifal, this performance was good enough to satisfy, and was definitely a highlight of 2013. Still, I thought the piece went by too quickly, with Daniel Gatti conducting, tempos all too fast. Nothing in my mind has ever matched a recording I have of Levine at Bayreuth in 1985. Everyone says it is too slow. I think it's "just right." 2013 was Wagner's Bicentenary and was also Verdi's. That said, special mention can be made here of a great production of Falstaff I saw near the end of 2013. I'd never seen it before and with James Levine conducting (how I wish he'd been well enough to conduct Parsifal) it was certainly a highlight of the year. By the way, one unlikely fan of Falstaff was John Cage.

Beethoven, Symphony No. 9, Philadelphia Orchestra

I've heard (and performed) this piece so many times I would never have guessed there could be something in the piece I hadn't yet heard. In fact, I'd recently heard the Philadelphia orchestra perform the 9th under the baton of Charles Dutoit and it was so unimpressive you could actually have reason to believe there really isn't anything new to hear and because of that even great orchestras under great conductors can get bored with Beethoven. Certainly what I heard that day was boring! So it was quite a surprise when our new music director Yannick Nezet-Sequin led the orchestra in an astonishingly powerful performance of the piece. He's terrible with Rachmaninoff (he destroyed my two favorites, both late masterpieces--his Rhapsody and Symphonic Dances) and I'll likely skip any further attempts. But Yannick has definitely reinvigorated the orchestra and I look forward to what will (hopefully) be a long and productive relationship.

Elvis Costello, Merriam Theater, Philadelphia.

One of the best things about living in Philadelphia is the chance to see Elvis Costello. I've loved his music ever since I bought "Imperial Bedroom" in 1982. And he is one of few artists where I have their entire musical catalogue. But he never came to Albuquerque. Or anywhere in the Southwest that I know of. The only time I ever saw him prior to moving here was in Cologne, his "Brutal Youth" tour in 1994, when I was teaching in Aachen. I was in such heaven I actually sang the missing vocal harmonies, something I usually never do. And hate it when I hear others who do. Here's a brief video of Costello when he appeared with the Imposters at Upper Darby's Tower Theater (I love that space):


That was a great concert and the "spinning wheel" format was a good way to cover a lot of material. Costello's voice now is no longer what it was when I heard him in Germany (I especially liked his singing around the time of "Mighty Like a Rose") but it was still impressive to hear him in a solo concert--what he could do with just himself and a guitar and how he was able to make the many styles in which he's composed work in that minimal situation. Finally, though the tickets cost me a small fortune (I usually buy the cheapest seats but my fear of heights made that impossible in the incredibly steep balcony seating at the Merriam), I did have the pleasure of being probably as close as I'll ever get to one of my musical idols.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Walden Miniatures Premiere

This week's blog entry updates a previous one about my Walden Miniatures, which was premiered last Sunday at Ardmore Presbyterian Church. The Haverford High School Chamber Singers did a wonderful job with its difficulties. And the director Marsha Core was able to clarify, thanks to her interpretive sense of tempo throughout the piece, the centrality of time passing that frames all the sounds and where I placed them. I especially enjoyed the basses singing "the sun is but a morning star," and not only because it featured Christopher's singing, although it is a pleasure hearing his voice in the mix.

Christopher was the reason behind my writing the piece for this outstanding group. And he was also responsible for reminding me about the possibility of going back to Walden Pond for inspiration. Smart advice.

Here's a recording of the premiere, made with my hand-held Edirol, which is also what I used to record the sound of a train that I heard at the pond and which is what is heard between the second and third miniature. Thoreau, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not automatically bemoan the encroachment of technology, in this case the railroad tracks just a few yards away from where he built his cabin. That doesn't mean he favored all kinds of advancement but, regarding the railroad at least, it is an early example of the "co-existence" I see as central to how he lived in the world.

https://soundcloud.com/cshultis/walden-miniatures-premiere


You can also find an article about the premiere written by local journalist Lois Puglionesi at this link:


Finally, here is the program note I wrote to accompany the finished score, which like everything I've written, is published by the American Composers Alliance:


I read Walden in high school and it made no impression on me. I was a small town Midwestern boy and for me "the woods" was definitely where I didn't want to be. Only in the late 1980s, where I began working with (and studying about) John Cage did Thoreau and his writing come back into my life. At this point I was living in New Mexico and for me the wilderness was no longer woods but mountains.  As I was writing my book about John Cage (Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition, recently reprinted by Northeastern University Press) I read everything Thoreau ever wrote, including all fourteen volumes of his journals. But with my head buried in books, there was one thing I never tried to do.  I read what Thoreau wrote but never did what Thoreau did: take long walks in the wilderness. As he mentions in his essay "Walking," "I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least--and it is commonly more than that--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements." When I began taking walks like that, it changed my life. And it also determined how I write music. All the music I've written since 1995 has been found while listening during walks, initially in the mountains of New Mexico and now in the woods of Pennsylvania.

An exception to that are these short pieces, written thanks to an invitation from Marsha Core, one of the best choral conductors I've ever met, to write a piece for her highly acclaimed Chamber Singers. Hee Sook Kim and I have been working on large scale work using Thoreau's writings and we decided to include choral interludes between acts. So two summers ago we traveled to Cape Cod and Walden Pond; we even tried to climb up Katahdin in Maine like Thoreau (he didn't make it all the way either but that's another story). The idea was to be where Thoreau was when he wrote what he wrote. Walking around Walden Pond, even swimming in it, inspired these miniatures, which use as a text the last four lines of Walden.

One final note: as I was finishing the Walden Miniatures, with most everything already sketched out, my work came to a complete halt. I remembered a similar moment as I was writing  "a little light, in great darkness" for soprano saxophone and woodwind quintet (my first composition where sketches were all written during walks)--I left my studio and traveled to a wilderness area just outside of Taos, New Mexico. The inspiration was immediate, I wrote down what was needed, and the piece was finished. In this case, the drive took a little longer, but sitting on the edge of the pond in early October, not far from where Thoreau built his cabin, I sketched out the final miniature, "Morning Star." (This is also where I recorded the train passing by that is heard between the second and third miniatures.) Every note of this last miniature was written in the same place Thoreau's text was written: at Walden Pond.

Christopher Shultis
25 October, 2013
Ardmore, PA

Friday, January 10, 2014

What I Love About Music

This is what I love about music. A composer, speaking about myself and thus using pronoun "he", doesn't really know what he is doing. Often it requires an interpreter to fully locate what is going on in a piece. Once written, it's only an idea put into notes on a page. Writing. But music is not writing. Writing is what makes it possible, (music written in score form that is), for someone to make it sound. And how it sounds is what then is heard and considered "music."

"Walden Miniatures," my contribution to music in 2013, and which receives its premiere performance this Sunday, uses the last four sentences of Henry David Thoreau's Walden. I've always known someday I would use those four lines musically--so enigmatic, so open to interpretation: "the light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." I'd originally only used three lines, not using "there is more day to dawn." And yet when I found myself sitting on the banks of Walden Pond last October, near the cabin site where Thoreau lived for the two years that made it possible for him to write Walden, the final miniature, "the sun is but a  morning star," which I literally wrote right there as the sun rose, required the addition of "there is more day to dawn." And those lines comprise the only moment in the "Walden Miniatures" that uses the chorus in a traditional way. "There is more day to dawn"--the sunrise made those lines no longer enigmatic but actual--an experience I personally had. So that the enigma, what does it mean "the sun is but a morning star," aligning day with the night, lightness with the dark, somehow made possible the reality of "more day to dawn." An optimism that really isn't found at the end of Walden but is found in my miniatures.


Sunrise at Walden Pond October 2013

How fortunate I am to have met a great interpreter who discovered the truth of this--that the end of my "Walden Miniatures" is not really an end but a beginning: sunrise on Walden Pond, so beautiful, and an opening to possibilities. An open-ended result. Marsha Core, the remarkably gifted director of the Chamber Singers at Haverford High School, for whom I wrote the piece, sent me a late night email--" Mvt 3 is the  DAWN!!! It doesn't end down, it's UP--it's the SUNRISE--'there is more DAY to DAWN--there is MORE DAY TOOOOO DAHHHHHHHHHWN--the sun is coming up ... -it represents the rays as they peak out, more and more then build as the rays gather and the sun bursts through at the 'crack of dawn' Right? And so the end is the satisfied feeling that the sun portrays as it's in its 'rightful morning position.' Quietly satisfied but not a finality...a quiet but still intense BEGINNING of the day not END." Yes that's it. Not what the composer intended but instead what the music has to say. Anything I've ever written worth listening to has been about finding a way to take my ephemeral listening, what I hear in those fleeting moments, and bring it to a more permanent state of life, something that can be heard. Again and again. And often quite differently each time. I've now listened to these miniatures, beautifully sung by these gifted young people under the direction of the best choral director I've ever met, many times. Heard how it is changing through continued listening, finding what there is to hear and singing it. This "process of singing" as John Cage would have put it: "and when you sing, you are where you are. All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working it is quite clear that I know nothing." I knew that "Walden Miniatures" would be difficult to sing. But I didn't realize until I started hearing them sung how hard it had been to write these miniatures. To "know nothing" when you compose is the hardest thing. I love the sound of that in my "Walden Miniatures." And it took the great interpretive gifts of Marsha Core to make it clear that the pleasure in this music is the "nothing" at its center. This is what I love about music.