Category Archives: New works

Two new songs

Thursday, October 22, 2009

I’ve spent some time over the past few days writing two new songs – part of a group of birthday songs for friends. The 8 planned super-short songs are, of course, a part of the Song Album Project (I haven’t forgotten about it!), but will be available in the Tobenski Music Press store as soon as they’re written.

So far, I’ve written songs for my friends Danny Stone and Joel Conarroe (the latter of whom is having a big birthday bash tonight on the East Side), who turned, respectively, 30 and 75. For Danny, I wrote the 1&12frac; minute “Twilight”, on the short poem of the same name by Walt Whitman. And for Joel’s one-minute song, I used another short Whitman poem, “To a Western Boy”.

Six more to go!

Also filed in Song Album Project, Tobenski Music Press, Website updates | | Comments (0)

Ucross: Day 9

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

The remainder of last week was quite productive. I put off the orchestra piece to finish "Take All My Loves", mostly because I was feeling a little closer to the latter since I’d been working on it longer. Plus, I felt as though I should finish it sooner rather than later. So, I plugged away during the week, and managed to get close.

Friday evening, two of the residents gave readings in a dance studio in Sheridan. Collier Nogues read some of her poetry, and Kenneth Lin presented an early draft of his latest play, read by Collier and three Sheridan natives (one of whom is also a current resident in filmmaking). Both were quite fantastic. They’re clearly very talented writers, and their readings (as they should) made me want to read more of their work.

After the readings, we had a night on the town, and met some colorful characters, indeed. One particularly drunk middle-aged fellow at the Mint Bar decided that one of the female residents was his girlfriend, and offerent to step outside with her "boyfriend" when he arrived. He was too far gone to realize that she had implied that I was her "boyfriend" in order to avoid his advances. Fortunately, she managed to politely escape when he turned away to guzzle more beer. And apparently (so I was told later in the weekend back at the Foundation), some local young homophobes were doing their best to get my attention with flamboyant, fey gestures. Again, fortunately, I was too engrossed in conversation with another of the residents to take notice. I don’t know what’s wrong that sort of person. Scum of the earth, though. That much I’m sure of.

On Saturday, I was given a broader tour of the area by Darien’s friend’s cousin and his wife, who we met at a wedding just a few weeks ago in Boston. Small world! We had some delicious meals around town, and visited a few really interesting museums: the Bradford Brinton Memorial & Museum and the Don King Saddle Museum.

In keeping with my personal rule of not working on weekends or after 5 o’clock at colonies, I spent all of Sunday relaxing. I went nowhere. I did nothing. I puttered on the internets, and ate leftovers from the week’s delicious meals. Then I went to bed.

Yesterday was an odd feeling sort of day. The Foundation was half-open – meals were prepared as usual, but the office wasn’t open – so I took that as my cue to only half work. I slept in and knocked off early, but also managed to finish "Take All My Loves": I set the last three lines of the poem and finished most of the engraving. All that remains to be done is to let it set for a week before I consider revisions, and to put in dynamics (which I have set in my mind, but always save until the very end).

And today: back to the usual grind. I set aside the orchestral movement that I started last week (I’m not convinced of it yet, and become less so as days go by – it seems destined for the scrap heap), and began sketching another. The opening of the movement came to me in a flash of inspiration as I stood on Labrador Beach this morning. I ran back to the studio to get it all down on paper before I’d lost it. Only tomorrow will tell if it’s any good.

And here are some deer standing in the field and stream near my studio that I photographed today. Stupid creatures, but pretty.

Also filed in Photos, Residencies | | Comments (0)

It’s all I have to bring to-day

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

This afternoon I added a new song to the Tobenski Press store: “It’s all I have to bring” for voice and piano, composed for Neri Shulman’s 60th birthday in 2007. The song, on the Emily Dickinson poem, clocks in at just under a minute – a cute little gem.

The engraved Sibelius file has been sitting on my hard drive for some time, now (over two years!), and sitting with my laptop on a rainy day in Montauk seemed to be the perfect time to post this little musical offering. I made a cover page and a very few minor revisions to the score, and here it is!

Here’s what my diary has to say about the writing of the song: “Ran back to Astoria in the morning and wrote Neri’s song. Decided on an Emily Dickinson poem – ‘It’s all I have to bring to-day’ – and wrote the song in around a half hour. Seventeen bars. It’s catchy and pretty!” There’s something about the pieces that you shake out of your sleeve – they have the real spark of life, and an easy grace that can’t be faked.

Enjoy!

Also filed in Song Album Project, Tobenski Music Press, Website updates | | Comments (0)

Playing catch-up

Thursday, May 28, 2009

I’ve been a bad boy lately, and have been neglecting my bloggerly duties. This has mostly been due to the wrapping up of my academic career at CCNY. Last Monday, I passed the Oral Examination in music analysis, concluding my academic responsibilities at the school. And two weeks prior, I submitted my thesis (at least a moment). Today is, in fact, the Commencement Ceremony, which I happily forewent in favor of sitting home and getting some work done (and not paying nearly $100 for the cap/gown/sash/etc that I’ll only wear once, then stick in a closet somewhere and never look at again).

So after two (kinda long) years, I have a Master of Arts in Music. Now I can… do… stuff…. Ok, I knew going into it that it was another piece of paper for my mother to put in the safe where she keeps all the important family things. It allowed me to study with David, which was my primary goal (the remainder, I mostly saw as jumping through hoops). And it’s a stepping stone to the doctorate, which I intend to do in about five or six years. I’m in no hurry to start – I’m all schooled out for the time being. But the doctorate will allow me to teach when I’m good and ready (I’m thinking my mid-40s) so that I can have some kind of pension in my old age. Such a practical plan!

Now that I’m done, I can start to concentrate again on things that fell by the wayside during the past two years, namely the Tobenski-Algera Concerts. It’s now been over a year since the last T-A concert, and I’m none too happy about that fact. We’ve had a few abortive attempts at relaunching the Series, but any number of random obstacles got in the way: scheduling conflicts with performers, difficulties getting commissioned composers to actually write the pieces that were commissioned (another rant for another day!), and (not least) the “school mentality” I got into that slowed certain areas of my productivity/motivation to a crawl. But we’re currently planning a NYC Gay Pride Week concert as a follow-up to our 2007 concert, which was such a success. More details on that as everything coalesces.

Plus, there’s another art song concert in the works for the early fall, and a concert with the ensemble Percussia.

I can also start applying to colonies for times other than the Summer, when it’s nearly impossible to get in. I love art colonies, so it’s been painful not having the ability to go when I’d like to. Or, really, at all, since everybody and their brother applies for the summer sessions when nobody’s teaching, leaving no room for young’uns like me.

Performance-wise, I premiered Casey Hale’s “Todesfuge” on May 12 with pianist Mia Elezovic at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Elebash Hall. It was a fun performance, and I look forward to the opportunity to sing it again.

I also sang an orchestrated version of “Permanently” from at least a moment for the CCNY Musicians Accord readings. The orchestration was a little difficult to get started, I’ll admit. I found it incredibly difficult to distance myself from my initial harpistic conception of the piece. When I brought in a first draft to David, he spent the majority of that lesson more than a little angry at my horrible orchestration (though an hour later he was praising my orchestration of a MacDowell piano piece, proving my point that the problem was a matter of personal distance from the original piece). The final result, though, was quite nice: some great shifts in color, and good use of the tutti ensemble.

And compositionally, I’ve finished the first and second movements of the Glukh piece. End-of-semester business forced me to put the piece aside for a few weeks, so I’m picking it back up next week. I completely rethought the Fanfare movement, and the music just exploded out of me. I originally wanted a full-ensemble fanfare, but got mired in canonic silliness that killed the movement. So, I took a step back and noticed that I hadn’t used the violins at all in the Chorale Trio preceding the Fanfare. Why not write a fanfare for the two violins? It’s a fresh sound, and completely unexpected, as far as fanfares go! The thought that completely freed me up, though, was about timing – I had originally wanted each movement to be roughly 3 minutes. So, why not cut it down to one? A one-minute fanfare for two violins. Perfect! In a matter of days, I had finished the first draft of the movement, and I finished the revisions within a week. Now, I’m waiting to start the Aria, which will be for the full ensemble.

I’ll wrap up with a tiny rant. Yesterday, I got back my materials from one of the competitions I entered this Spring (none of which I even managed to place in, by the way). Now, I don’t put the competitions’ return addresses on my SASEs, so I’m not entirely sure which competition these materials were from, but based on the piece I sent, and the fact that the score was clearly an ‘anonymous submission’, I have a pretty darned good idea which competition this was from. I won’t name names, but I will say that it wasn’t one of the big ones. Now, I’ve heard a lot of composer friends complain endlessly about the way that competitions treat applicants’ materials. (Poorly.) And I’ve had more than one score come back bent, scuffed, or with stains that weren’t there when I mailed it off to be judged. But never before have I had part of my application disappear. I mailed off a score and a CD. The CD, I put in a nice little jewel case to keep it from getting scratched or broken en route. I got back the score and the CD, but not the jewel case. Did the jewel case get lost? Broken? Accidentally put in with someone else’s application? Or just stolen? Regardless, I don’t care. The fact that the jewel case was missing shows a real disregard for applicants’ materials. I paid to have that anonymous score printed and bound, I bought the blank CDs, CD labels, and jewel cases, spent around $10 in round-trip postage, and paid an entry fee for this competition. Not to mention the time I spent considering my application, compiling all of the materials, and standing in line forever at the post office to get the application mailed by the postmark deadline. I think I deserve to get all of my materials back in the same condition that I sent them in. If the postal service damages my materials en route, that’s between me and them, but when a piece of my application (specifically, the only piece I can even think of reusing, since an anonymous score is worthless and [I think] a complete waste of my money) doesn’t even make it into the return envelope that I provided, there’s a real problem. Rant over.

Also filed in Awards, Blessays, Performances, Tobenski-Algera Concert Series | | Comments (0)

Two new works

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

I’m currently embroiled in two new works: a 15-minute piece for piccolo trumpet and string quartet, and a short cycle for soprano and piano.

The piccolo trumpet and string quartet, commissioned by David Glukh, is as yet untitled, but has settled around the extra-musical idea of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I started writing the piece nearly a month ago, opening with a fanfare, but I quickly got stuck. I couldn’t make the fanfare ‘right’, so I sat on it for a week or so. When I brought it in for a lesson, DDT made an off-hand remark about a choral piece of mine that he’d heard, asking why couldn’t I make this piece more like the choral one. My brain immediately took hold of the idea and ran with it. In an hour, I had restructured my plan for the piece – rather than starting with a Fanfare, why not start with a Chorale? Then have the Fanfare come out of the end of the Chorale. So, the piece is now structured:

1. Chorale Trio (Prayer to Prospero)
2. Fanfare
3. Aria
4. Chorale
5. Theme & Variations

The Chorale Trio is for the piccolo trumpet, viola, and cello only. It’s a three-voice chorale, meditating on the idea of Prospero-as-god, a theme explored in Dan Simmons’ novels Ilium and Olympos. So, the piece is a little closer in inspiration to Dan Simmons than it is to Shakespeare. (Does that make the second movement Fanfare for the Little Green Man? Oh, the temptation….) I’ve scrapped the Fanfare that I started with, and am in the middle of rethinking my approach to it.

The song cycle is set to be premiered the first weekend of June (I’d better hurry!) during the Virginia Woolf Conference at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University. The cycle’s texts are by Idris Anderson, who I collaborated with on Starfish at Pescadero in 2007, and uses the same title as Idris’ set of poems: The Long Barn. These are three meditations on the diaries and correspondence of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. The first poem I’ve divided up into 5 very, very, very short songs, each beginning with a spoken phrase (used in Idris’ poetry) from VW’s writings.

1a. …and there I lay in Swansdown and recovered
1b. My dearest donkey West
1c. You my Dark my Dusky Beauty
1d. Honey, dearest, for whom I would do anything
1e. Dearest Kentish Creature
2. What we do today
3. Vita’s Sonnet

Last Friday afternoon, after in the morning having come up with a wonderful opening to picc-tpt/str 4tet Fanfare in the morning and then having promptly forgotten it, I went for a walk down Riverside Drive to relieve some of the stress of having to write so much so quickly, and also to have left my apartment at least once before dark, I managed in about 20 minutes (I hadn’t even reached the Grant Memorial, walking from my apartment in the 140s) to write the entire first songlet. By the time I reached 110th St, I had written 1a, and mapped out 1b, 1c, and 1d.

This afternoon I sat down again and managed to hammer out all of 1b, and start in on 1c before calling it a day. Tomorrow will be spent engraving 1a and 1b. I’m hoping by Monday to have 1c and maybe 1d written.

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

More beginnings

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

This week marks the beginning of several new things in my life:

1) Tomorrow is the first day of my last semester of classes at CCNY. I’m particularly excited to be finishing up my degree, for any number of reasons. One of the particularly nice things about this semester is that it’s an “All David” semester – I have my weekly composition lesson with David Del Tredici, a weekly orchestration course with David, and an independent study with David.

2) I’m starting work on a new piece: Long Barn, a set of three songs on poetry by Idris Anderson. This is the other of my “exciting announcements”, because the songs will be premiered in June as part of the 2009 Virginia Woolf conference at Fordham University near Lincoln Center. I’ve begun living with the poetry and will probably start putting pencil to paper in the next two weeks.

3) My independent study with David is the beginning of a larger project that I’ll be talking about a lot more in the coming weeks. For now, suffice it to say that our sessions will involve lots of interviews and me riffling through David’s papers. The project will spawn a new series of posts here (which will hopefully be a little more regular than my current posting schedule!), along with some video, audio, and possibly photographic materials.

Beyond this week….

Kaity Volpe and I will be starting back into our photo project very soon, which will certainly spill over into the independent study project.

I’m hoping to finally relaunch the Tobenski-Algera Concerts in the next two months, even though I said we’d have a concert back in December. We’ve encountered stumbling block after stumbling block these past few months, and it’s been beyond maddening. Finding a suitable performance space for the relaunch has been difficult, though I think we may have finally solved that issue. Now we have to deal with scheduling….

And it’s application season! Nearly every award and artist colony has applications due in the next few months, so I’ll be spending hours upon hours filling out applications and spending insane amounts of money printing and binding “pseudonymous” and “anonymous” copies of my scores. I’m sure I’ll be writing about the process soon enough.

Also filed in Addictive Riddle, Tobenski-Algera Concert Series, Young Composer Project | | Comments (0)

New choral work

Thursday, January 22, 2009

I spent about a half hour this morning on the phone with the Director of Choral Activities at Illinois State University discussing a new commission.

There aren’t a lot of details yet, but it’ll be a multi-movement choral work, possibly integrating an obbligato instrument or a small instrumental ensemble. I’m currently exploring some possibilities for texts that I think would be appropriate; one sequence of poems in particular.

This is one of my two promised “exciting announcements” – Dr. Carlson and I have been throwing around ideas on extended works for over a year, now, and we’re finally starting to make it happen. I’m really looking forward to starting the project – it’s always a joy to team up with my alma mater on new works!

I haven’t written any choral music in about 3 or 4 years, and I’ve really grown and evolved as a composer since then, so this will be a great opportunity to revisit the genre that was once at the center of my compositional endeavors, and which really sparked my interest in the marriage of words and music. Almost all of my choral works were written for ISU choirs. I wrote mostly for the Madrigal Singers – at least one new piece per year – though I also composed two shortish works for the Concert Choir and one (which lies unperformed in the bottom of a box somewhere) for the Women’s Choir. (I’m not terribly upset about the latter. It was a reasonably good piece, but wouldn’t be worth the trouble of securing the rights for the text, unfortunately. I make a point of getting the rights well in advance of writing a piece, but…I was young and stupid. Ironically, the lack of performance had nothing to do with the rights.)

Choral music really shaped the way I view meter. So much choral music is written in straight-ahead four- or three-quarter time, but the average Midwestern choir takes those boring, square measures and messes with the pulse in a really beautiful way. Beats are expanded or contracted wildly – yet organically – to create a living, breathing musical line. Where was once a simple, regular pulse is suddenly an exhilarating rush forward, or a floating, liquid cessation of time. No two beats are exactly the same.

What comes so naturally to these choirs and their directors is surprisingly complex when captured on the page, which is what I did. 4/4 becomes an asymetric 9/8: 1-2–1-2–1-2-3–1-2. Or 11/8: 1-2-3–1-2–1-2-3–1-2-3. Words otherwise lost in a steady pulse take on new meaning and weight. A beat or a half-beat is dropped in to lend emphasis to the high point of the phrase, or dropped out to avoid emphasis on an unimportant syllable. An extra beat of rest is dropped in at the ends of certain phrases for the sake of taking a breath. Why not just leave out the beat and put in a little breath mark? To remove the guesswork: “Yes, breathe here.” Sure, most choirs will drop in that extra beat anyway, but why run the risk of some choir clipping off the end of the phrase in order to maintain the pulse?

All of this, of course, made its way into my instrumental writing. Meters shift just as constantly in my chamber works as in my vocal music; portions of beats are dropped in and out just as often. But everything sings.

I’m really looking forward to flexing my choral muscles again. I’ll post new developments here as they happen.

Also filed in Blessays | | Comments (0)

at least a moment: Finally!

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

After four months, including a one-month hiatus from writing, at least a moment is finally finished! It’s definitely the best piece I’ve written to date, and I’m incredibly proud of it. I’ll be doing a few rounds of minor revisions and edits, but it is, for all intents and purposes, finished.

The final notes were penned Friday afternoon (1/16) at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. (The coffee shop where I did the majority of the work on the piece recently ousted the laptop crowd, so I had to relocate to a new “office”.) In the coming week or two, I’ll do some consultation on harp logistics, as well as on piano logistics for the future voice-and-piano version (wherein the “harp spellings” will be ironed out for ease of reading at the piano).

The Fall was a time of setbacks for the work, even as I flew through the first two movements (now the third and first, respectively). The fall performances were either canceled or rescheduled, and the grant application we had put in for the commissioning fee was turned down. The former setbacks were minor and understandable. The latter was more than a little disheartening – especially as I’m so absolutely proud of this cycle – but clearly didn’t stop the project from progressing. Now that it’s finished, though, we look ahead to a new schedule of performances, and a subsequent transcription for voice and piano!

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

Permanently, almost.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

I’m finally nearly finished with “Permanently”! Unfortunately, my addled brain reordered a few lines in the final stanza of the poem, so most of my musical planning there is shot. But never fear! I’ve got the situation under control! I should have the song finished within a week (I’m also working on a website for a new client, and some major updates for another client at the moment).

For whatever reason, I fell into a compositional rut in early December that I’m just now climbing out of. I think I can safely blame a) the end of the semester, b) the impending holidays, c) a seasonal general malaise, d) the need for a break, etc. By all rights, the song should have been finished a month ago, but that didn’t happen, so we just finish it and move on.

I’m hoping to make two more exciting announcements soon. I’m just waiting on final confirmation for a couple of things before I post the full details here.

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

Singing in the New Year

Friday, January 2, 2009

I’ve never been one for New Year’s Resolutions – they’ve always struck me as being more than a little silly. How does the roll-over from one calendar year to the next mark any sort of significant change in a person? And what good is promising to “give up sweets” for an entire year? Especially when we know that we won’t last the week? To promise to “try to work out more” is a bit of a cop-out – we know we should, but we know we won’t. We haven’t made any real effort yet, so forget about making one now.

I’ll admit, though, to having made two “resolutions” in January 2008: to read 50 books, and to buy at least one book per week. The latter, I abandoned in September when I ran out of money (though I rallied last week when I raided the used bookstores near my parents’ house in IL and came away with around 15 new volumes for my shelves). The former, though, I reached by the end of July. I hit the mid-60s in September and since then haven’t been able to maintain a sustained effort. (Maybe, though, that’s because I no longer ride the subway for an hour to and from work each day since I was laid off from my day job in…let’s see…September. Anybody have a spare day job lying around that I might borrow?) The big difference here, though, is that these were achievable goals, and dealt with pursuits that I already cared about and was involved in.

Which is by way of saying that in honor of the changing of the last digit in the calendar year, I’d like to begin a new project. I’d like to propose, as proposingly as I might, this propose: a “Songbook” – a song album, if you will – of individual art songs not attached to any larger structure such as a song cycle – some twenty to twenty-five art songs on diverse poetry for any voice, collected into a single volume and published by the Tobenski Music Press.

I’m budgeting about two years for the project so that I can take my time with it. This way, I can chip away at it slowly between larger projects. The extended timeline is also in hopes that some of the songs will be commissioned (songalbumproject@dennistobenski.com) along the way. Who wouldn’t want their name in italics above the title of a published song?

And to inaugurate this new project is “It’s all I have to bring”, a short song on the Dickinson poem of the same name, composed for Neri Shulman’s 60th birthday.

Also filed in Song Album Project | | Comments (0)

Switch to our mobile site