Category Archives: Tobenski-Algera Concert Series

Tobenski-Algera Concerts: Jan. 27th concert run-down

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

I realize that I never properly gave a run-down of the January 27 concert.

I must say that I’m very pleased with how the concert turned out.  I think that Marc and I gave a very good performance of all of the works on the program; and the audience was sizable and enthusiastic.  Since I was the one performing, I can’t very well review the program, though I can say that I’m very, very happy with the turnout and the performance.

There are two things that I’m, unfortunately, not happy with.

1) The quality of the audio recording that we got isn’t very good.  Normally, we hire a friend, Robert Bullington, to record our concerts, and his recording philosophy for concert music is to make it sounds as if the listener were in the front row.  Hence, his recording company is called Front Row Seat Productions.  I’m consistently thrilled with the quality of Robert’s recordings.  He will absolutely be recording our next program.

This time, we decided to go with the in-house recording service in order to scale back on costs, which was a mistake.  The sound tech did a fantastic job of miking me and Marc for the room, but I think that she didn’t process the mix at all before burning it to CD.  Consequrently, the piano (which, it turns out was rather out of tune – something we didn’t notice at the time since we were in performance mode) sounds tinny, distant, and far too quiet; and I sound like I’m swallowing the microphone, which has absolutely no reverb, so every tiny flaw is made screamingly present.  Although I promised the recording to all of the composers on the program, I’m frankly too embarrassed to send it to them.  Instead, Marc and I will re-record the entire program in March.

2) Someone (or, rather, several someones) who sat near the video camera talked regularly throughout the concert.  Now, I don’t mind that people chit-chat while I perform – it’s a cabaret theatre, and there’s drinking going on.  But I should hope that the people sitting right in front of a big piece of recording equipment could manage to keep their voices low enough to avoid being overheard.  I got an email from the booking manager at The Duplex a few days after the concert letting me know what had happened with the video.  The video engineer has apparently taken bits of the audio recording and synched it up with the video.  I’m picking up the DVD this evening, when I’ll be able to judge the overall quality for myself.  But I’m not optimistic since the audio recording that I sincerely don’t like is being used for some – if not all – of the video.  My hope, after hearing the audio recording, was that we could pull the audio track from the DVD and use that as the recording, but no such luck.

Now I have to figure out where, when, and how to go about doing the re-recording next month.  Bah.

We still love the space – everyone raved about the atmosphere and how wonderful it was! – but we’ll probably avoid the in-house audio service next time.  It’s ideal for recordings of poppier things, but alas, not for recording what we do.  Live and learn!

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Looking Back and Looking Forward

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

2009 turned out to be a particularly slow composing year for any number of reasons. Last year I finished the final quarter of “Permanently” from at least a moment; wrote one choral work and four short songs; and started – but didn’t finish – a short work for orchestra.

One reason for my lack of significant output turned out to be a little surprising – I didn’t have a teacher anymore! I’ve always been quite a self-starter, so I was a little surprised to realize that one reason why I wasn’t churning out music was that no one was looking over my shoulder, and I didn’t have to have a certain amount written each week for someone else to look at. I’ve temporarily changed that state of affairs – this past weekend, I started private study with Chester Biscardi, a web client and good friend (also the Director of the Music Program at Sarah Lawrence College). We’ve decided to use the orchestra piece I started in Ucross as a jumping-off point. I’m glad to be finishing the work finally, and to be working with Chet because he’s a fantastic composer – and by all reports a great teacher, as well!

While working on the orchestra piece (still as yet untitled!), I’ll also be working on a paraphrase of at least a moment for solo piano. Marc Peloquin and I have been putting together the next Tobenski-Algera Concert lately, and, while I didn’t plan on having one of my own works on the progrm for once, Marc insisted that I write a new piece for him to help balance the program. So, rather than wrack my brains for new material under such a tight deadline (the concert is March 9!), I’ve decided to rework the Koch cycle – shorten it considerably, and fold the vocal line into the piano. I consider it a “paraphrase” – a la DDT’s Acrostic Paraphrase, but I’m making the work shorter rather than three times the original length! I’ve made the bulk of the cuts already, so my next task is to start folding the vocal line into the piano part. I’ve been aching for a premiere of the cycle, so this performance will be a bit of a palliative.

In keeping with the arrangement kick…. Last year, I showed Chet the finished score of at least a moment – or, rather, emailed him the PDF of the score with MP3s of the MIDI playback from Sibelius. Since I loathe the voice sample used in Sibelius’s Kontakt Player, I always use flute instead. After listening to the MP3s and looking at the score, Chet made the comment that the vocal line stands so well on its own that I could easily pull out the text and use it as a flute piece. So, I shall! The only decision that remains to be made before I jump in with the Delete button is whether to transpose it or not. As it stands, the piece goes a minor third too low for a standard flute (the piece bottoms out at A3), though it’s ideal for an alto flute. So I have to decide whether to leave it as is and say it’s for alto flute, or bump it up a minor third. Or I could do a version of both!

Further on the compositional horizon – past the completion of several other works that have been in my compositional queue for far too long (completing the piccolo trumpet & string quartet piece for David Glukh; writing a duo for violin & piano for Roger Zahab) – I’ve been thinking quite a lot on a musical subject that I’ve frequently been told I should pursue: opera. Probably the main impetus for my starting to think seriously in this vein (I’ve frequently, and idly, thought about writing opera throughout the years, and have several ideas for larger-scale projects that I won’t tackle for a little while) is the fact that I’ve been lucky enough to go to the Met several times in the past few months: I saw Janacek’s From the House of the Dead (liked the music, hated the production) and Strauss’s Elektra (wonderful) and Ariadne auf Naxos (absolutely divine). I’ve started grabbing recordings of operas where I can find them and putting them on my iPod to listen to at work. (Recently heard Der Rosenkavalier for the first time and was absolutely transported!)

So I’ve been thinking about how I would go about writing an opera – what a good starting point would be. I may start with an existing short play, since that would probably be the simplest in terms of getting started and working on my own. I’ve definitely got my eyes peeled for a potential librettist, though. There are a few ideas bouncing around in my skull at the moment that have got me excited (not so much plot ideas, as structure and general concept), and I’d like to pitch them to a librettist. That is, if I can find one! I suspect that I could make one of my large-scale ideas happen fairly easily (and, frankly, I need to do it quickly if it’s going to happen!), but I’d like to have a chamber opera or two under my belt first. More details as things progress.

This sudden burst of compositional thought and action ties in closely with the second reason for my dearth of output last year. I spent all but a month and a half of 2009 unemployed (2009 didn’t manage to be the Year of Buying DVDs – instead it was the Year of Falling Behind on Rent!), which left me with a lot of free time. By all rights, I should have been churning out new works right and left! The problem, though, was that I had too much free time, and I fell into a horrible habit of intense procrastination. I would wake up late every day (between 10:30 and noon), putter around the apartment for a while, then settle in front of the computer for the rest of the day – frittering away the hours with blogs, silly internet videos, and watching movies and TV shows on Netflix. Needless to say, there was a bit of honest-to-goodness depression involved here, which also stemmed from the fact of my unemployment. I found that when I don’t have a draw on my time, my time tends to become somewhat valueless, and therefore meaningless. A day job – the eternal enemy – is actually a necessity at the moment. And for more than just paying the bills!

I recently started a new day job – some temp work, which allows me the flexibility to function as a musician – and the result is that I can now both pay the bills and feel as though I want to write again!

Now that I’ve discovered two creative danger zones for me, I can address the issues and fix them.

Hopefully 2010 will be a Year of Writing a Lot of Music. 2009 was a let-down in a lot of ways. Compositionally, I wrote far too little. Financially, I was always anxious and falling behind. Economically in general, things just sucked. And politically, the year was a little disappointing – although some good things were accomplished, those accomplishments went largely unnoticed amid the noise of Balloon Boy; the hyped-up, insane expectations of The First 100 Days; the utter absurdity of The Second 100 Days (as though we hadn’t head enough talking heads talking about other talking heads’ evaluations of etc); etc. But with the success of the first new T-A Concert, and the start of a new day job, I’m feeling energized and positive about this year.

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New American Art Song – Next Week!

Friday, January 22, 2010

Rehearsals for next Wednesday’s concert continue apace, and about 90% of the concert is ready to go. Marc and I have scheduled 2 more rehearsals, Sunday and Monday, and you can be sure that I’ll be drilling certain passages in the meantime.

I’m really, really happy with the song selections that we’ve made, and I very much look forward to presenting them next week. A few extra weeks of rehearsal would be nice. Even one more week would go a long way. But I also think that the concert would be good if we performed tomorrow.

In the past year, I’ve picked up a hobby horse that I absolutely love to ride: supporting the vocal line in a song or aria. I’ve hounded certain composers whose work I’ve performed about giving the singer more guideposts along the way – it’s something that I aim for in my own work, and is very important to making the singer’s job a little less aggravating. I think we often write harder music than is absolutely necessary so that we look smart to other composers. (“My music hard, and that makes me smart.”) It was certainly drilled into my brain by a number of past teachers that I had to write music that was super-smart, which clearly meant “not attractive” and “difficult”. I was even told that certain pieces of mine, typically the more well-received of my works, were “too beautiful” – which means exactly what? (I think that it means absolutely nothing.) One trap that we song composers fall into when we lose our bearings and stumble off into SmartyPants Land is to make our vocal lines extremely difficult. I don’t mind super-hard vocal lines, myself, so long as they’re supported in the piano, or whatever instrument(s) I happen to be singing with. A well-placed note that gives me my starting pitches – or that shows me that I’m on the right track – can go a really long way toward making me comfortable. It always feels nice to know that I’m not completely on my own – I question myself a lot less.

Accuracy is clearly something that is desired by both composer and performer. But if, after weeks of rehearals and private drilling of parts, I still can’t find my pitches, I have little choice but to approximate in performance. It’s not ideal, obviously. And something I maybe shouldn’t really admit to. But I also believe in being honest with composers or performers I work with. I’ve told performers on a number of occasions to approximate certain passages because, honestly, who but me is going to know the difference? I’d rather that they sing the pitches that I’d spent hours/days/weeks working on, but if it comes down to the singer sounding timid and unsure of themselves, or sounding as though they know what they’re doing even if they don’t really, I choose the latter any day. I’ve also had to tell some composers that unless they gave me more support in the piano part, I’ll probably end up singing pitches that are quite inaccurate, but I’ll sing them as though they’re right.

I’ve mentioned that I strive to support my singers as much as possible, but I know that I sometimes fall short. I definitely do in two of the songs from echoes, which I’ll surely be revising a bit after this performance. My supportive sins aren’t major, but I’ve found myself floundering in the middle section of “conspiracy”, and in the opening of “people shouting”. A few well-placed supportive notes would go entirely unnoticed by listeners, but would have made the songs simpler to rehearse! How bizarre to be having problems singing my own songs! Fortunately, the unsupported sections are short, and the vast majority of the cycle feels great.

I do want to single out one cycle in particular from this concert for the composer’s excellent work in supporting the vocalist at every turn in a way that is comforting to the singer and very elegant. Zachary Wadsworth’s Three Lullabies is really well-written, and I’ve felt super comfortable with it in rehearsals. At first glance, it’s a little intimidating (some harmonic nebulousness that seems prohibitive, and some seeming rhythmic scariness in the second song). However, his songs have given me the least worries, and have felt really relaxed from the beginning. At every entrance, and during tricky phrases, Zach gives little nudges in the right direction. He never outright doubles the vocal line, but selects important pitches (and sometimes rhythms) throughout many of the phrases and echoes them in the piano part. Unsupported, X or Y pitch may be difficult to grab out of thin air, but he always finds an elegant way to make his singer feel at home, even with tricky, chromatic passages.

There are some moments in the program where I’d like a bit more support from the piano part, or a little clearer engraving (another hobby horse, one I’ll surely address here soon), but I like to think of myself as a smart singer – I can figure it out (I have figured it out, but we’re all prone to slip-ups). I feel as though all that remains to be done now is to pound about 5 or 6 entraces into my brain. Beyond that, the program is performance-ready!

So everybody make your reservations now!

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Tobenski-Algera Concert Series: Art Song selections

Monday, January 4, 2010

This past weekend, Jeff Algera and I made the programming decisions for the first concert of the Tobensk-Algera re-launch. The program will consist of the following works:

Dennis Tobenski: echoes, six songs on poetry by Mark Statman (NY premiere)
Jeff Algera: “Twenty” and “Former Soldier”, on poems by Oscar Wilde (world premiere)

Ricky Ian Gordon: “As Planned”, “Adolescent’s Song”, “Proof of Gold”, and “A Contemporary”

Aaron Alon: “All Rights Reserved” (NY premiere)
Tim Kiah: “La Nuit”
George Lam: Fog Argument, two songs on poetry by Mark Doty (NY premiere)
Justin Merritt: “Dissonance” & “May Evening in Central Park”
Keane H. Southard: selections from Three Songs of Dylan Thomas (NY premiere)
Zachary Wadsworth: Three Lullabies (NYC premiere)

We had 25 scores to choose from, and all of the entries were of a very high caliber. Paring the submissions down to a 90-minute program was no easy task, but I look forward to preparing and performing all of the works that we’ve selected. And learning 90 minutes of music in 23 days will be no easy task!

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Tobenski-Algera Concert Series Call for Scores responses

Friday, January 1, 2010

Greetings from the year 2010! Whether or not this is indeed the year that we make contact, it’s certainly already started off quite well.

Yesterday, the T-A Concerts’ call for scores for our Spring 2010 series closed, and the responses were uniformly amazing! We had 42 composers from around the world send in 76 scores – a far greater number of both composers and scores than we anticipated!

Tomorrow, Jeff Algera and I will start making our programming decisions for the art song program, New American Art Song. Our work is definitely cut out for us – every entry has been really great, and we’re going to be hard pressed to pare down the 25 submissions for the art song concert into a 90-minute concert!

Three works we know for certain already – I’ll be singing:

  • two new songs by Jeff Algera
  • my song cycle, echoes, on texts by Mark Statman
  • and four unpublished songs by Ricky Ian Gordon

    • I’ve got my work cut out for me – learning all new works for a 90-minute concert in less than a month!

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    Tobenski-Algera Concert Series: Jan, 27, 2010: New American Art Song

    Thursday, December 10, 2009

    Reservations are now available for the inaugural concert of the Tobenski-Algera Concert Series’s Spring 2010 re-launch. The concert, at The Duplex’s cabaret theatre in NYC’s West Village, will take place at 9:30pm on Wednesday, January 27, 2010.

    The concert will feature new art songs by young and emerging composers, as well as four songs by Obie Award-winning composer Ricky Ian Gordon.

    $10 cover & two drink minimum with a reservation; $12 cover & two drink minimum at the door.

    Make your reservation now!

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    T-A Logo?

    Monday, December 7, 2009

    Thoughts on this as a possible Tobenski-Algera logo?

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    Tobensk-Algera Concert Series Fundraising

    Monday, November 23, 2009

    I’ve decided that at least through the end of January, all sales at the Tobenski Music Press are being donated to the Tobenski-Algera Concert Series to help fund our concerts. So get a-buyin’!

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    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.

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    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.

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