Looking to Tap into the Zeitgeist? It’s in St. Paul, Tonight!

Zeitgeist New Music presents
Night Singing: Music by Andrew Rindfleisch
October 7, 8, 9, 7:30 p.m.
Studio Z, 275 East Fourth Street, Suite 200, St. Paul MN
$10

A week ago, I was wishing for a couch, but this week I’m upping the ante: what I really need is a private jet to get to all the concerts I’d like to hear! Hey, I can dream…

If I were in St. Paul this weekend, I would check out Zeitgeist, an ensemble with a 30-year history of promoting and performing music by living composers. The group features woodwind player Pat O’Keefe, pianist Shannon Wettstein, and percussionists Heather Barringer and Patti Cudd. Three of the four (Pat, Shannon and Patti) are former grad school colleagues of mine from U.C. San Diego, so I’ve had the honor of hearing them many times (they’ve even played my music!), and they are fantastic. They’ll be joined this weekend by violinist Alastair Brown, flutist Jane Garvin and cellist Jim Jacobson. Here’s an audio preview of what they’re playing.

The concert is both a season opener and CD release celebration for a disc of music by composer Andrew Rindfleisch: Night Singing, on Innova recordings. Andy lists grave-hopping as a hobby, and I can attest to that, as he and I both attended a composition seminar in Prague many summers ago which included a side trip to Vienna’s Central Cemetery, where several great composers are laid to rest.

Here I am paying my respects to Arnold Schoenberg:

Speaking of Schoenberg, I think he would endorse Zeitgeist’s mission to present the music of our time! So if you’re in the Twin Cities area, go hear them, and tell them Miss Music Nerd sent you!

The 30 Days Project, Live in Concert!

I have exciting news, Music Nerds!

If you’ve been following the adventures of Miss Music Nerd for any length of time, you’ve probably heard mention of The 30 Days Project. Back in the summer of 2007, I wrote a short piece of music every day for 30 days, and posted digital recordings right here on the blog. I made the recordings using my digital piano and MIDI sounds provided by my resident ensemble, the All-Electron Philharmonic Orchestra.

Ever since I was in the thick of the project, it has been my dream to have all 30 pieces performed as a live concert at some point. It’s a logistical challenge given the number of instruments involved. But the starts and planets eventually aligned in just the right way, and I made the acquaintance of a group of talented musicians from New England Conservatory who were itching to tackle interesting new music projects. They call themselves the Inter-NEC Ensemble. Finding the musicians was the hardest part, but I also needed a venue. That’s where it helps to be involved in organizing a concert series at the church where I’m the Minister of Music!

So I am very pleased to announce that a dream three years in the making is finally coming true!

UPDATE: I almost forgot, I’m also planning to webcast this shindig, so if you’re not a local music nerd, watch this space for details! (MMN-TV is currently doing quality assurance testing!)

Here are the vital details:

Saturday, Sept. 25, 7:30 pm
St. John’s Episcopal Church
1 Roanoke Ave, Jamaica Plain (Google map link)

JP Concerts Presents:
The Inter-NEC Collective
The 30 Days Project
music by Linda Kernohan

$10 suggested donation • more info: jpconcerts.com

What Miss Music Nerd Did On Her Summer Vacation!

Greetings and Happy Autumn, Music Nerds!

It’s been an exciting summer here at Music Nerd Central! Before I get into the details, I have a few important news items to share.

First off, if you live in the Boston area and you like to sing, you are cordially invited to check out Masterworks Chorale, a group that McDoc and I sing with. We have open rehearsals tonight at 7:30, and next Tuesday, September 21, same time. Click here for location and details!

September brings with it not only the excitement of my birthday (which was the 8th, but I’ll accept greetings all month!), but the start of the classical concert season as well. I’m going to preview what’s on offer this season in the coming weeks – selectively, of course, because covering Boston’s music scene could be a full-time job (for which I’m available if anyone wants to hire me!). Among the groups I’ll be covering are friends of MMN, Cantata Singers and L’Academie, as well as the aforementioned Masterworks.

On Saturday, September 25 at 7:30 p.m., my 30 Days Project will be performed Live In Concert by members of the Inter-NEC Collective, from New England Conservatory. This will be the realization of a dream I’ve had ever since I completed the digital version of the project, so I’m really excited! Details are here.

And finally, I have my first official not-on-any-old-blog writing credit! One day, while procrastinating doing some musical work I really needed to do, I came across an Open Call on Salon.com’s blog network, Open Salon. They were asking for essays on the theme, “Conflicted Carnivores.” I’m more of a conflicted vegetarian, but I got inspired and wrote a piece entitled, “Of Guinea Pigs and Tuna Melts: My Mostly Vegetarian Journey.” It was tapped as an Editor’s Pick, and I was very excited. Then I got an email from the Open Salon editor saying they wanted to post the piece in the Food section of Salon.com itself, as in the actual online magazine, not the place where any schmo can fling their pixels. So here it is, with my real-name byline and everything: A Lutheran turned vegetarian. I like my original title much better, don’t you? Now I know how Milton Babbitt must’ve felt…

In July, I performed Schumann’s Dichterliebe for the first time, with singer Peter Terry, and I believe it was one of the hottest performances on record. Literally. We had to stop in the middle to give the audience a water break. The beautiful old church where we performed has no A/C, and it has fixed windows that can’t be un-fixed, as per the Boston Landmarks Commission. I wore a halter dress that I had previously judged too bare to perform in, but this was the kind of summer that makes you change your mind about such things!

In August, McDoc and I took a trip to Montreal, where I snagged several Keyboards of the World pics. And one evening while strolling through the Parc La Fontaine, we happened to be in the right place at the right time to hear a free performance by the chamber group Constantinople, who performed Baroque music by Marin Marais and Dimitrius Cantemir in the Theatre de Verdure.

Constantinople Ensemble

Toward the end of the month, McDoc’s son visited from Southern California. Son of McDoc is twenty-three (I’m a trophy wife, you know 😉 ) and a connoisseur of Scandinavian heavy metal, so I always learn a lot from him. We forced him to attend the final Masterworks Chorale Summer Sing, because what young person doesn’t want to go to a sing-along Mozart Requiem? He had fun, I think – he pronounced the whole affair “pretty darn nerdy!” So what’s your point? 😀

Finally, I spent the first week of September visiting my family in Northern California, for the first time in over two years! I had a great time, and began a new collection of photos: watch this space for Guitars of the World, coming soon!

MMNFAQ: Getting Graphic

I’ve been asking McDoc to come up with some questions for the MMNFAQ, and he has a lot of ideas, but some of them reveal certain hidden agendas that he has. He would really like to be my business manager, you see, this whole doctor thing notwithstanding; I have to keep telling him that someone around here has to actually earn a living!

At any rate, his question is:

Who does Miss Music Nerd’s graphics?

Thank you for asking! Why, Miss Music Nerd does them herself, of course!

I have a seemingly bottomless well of creativity, especially when it comes to procrastinating and doing something I’m not really supposed to be doing. 😉

I had the idea a while back of creating a cartoon-like drawing of myself, and I talked to a couple of graphic artists about it, and even got a couple of mockups, but I wasn’t getting that Just Right Thing That I Wanted, so I said, lemme try doing something myself, just to get a ball-park idea for a real artist to do some magic with.

But I had so much fun doing that, I never got around to turning the work over to a professional!

Here’s the design I made for business cards; I also use it on Twitter:

And here’s the Miss Music Nerd fainting couch, to which I frequently repair in response to the hectic nature of modern life:

I’ve created a couple of composition-related graphics, too. While doing some revisions to an older piano piece that provided many good examples of what we in the music biz call the “forest of accidentals.” Here’s a tiny sample:

And here’s a slightly more literal illustration of the phrase: 😉

Just one more: I have a long-standing compositional habit of taking bits and pieces of melodies I like and doing terrible things to them, disguising them, cutting them up, and otherwise harnessing them for my nefarious purposes. For a long time, I didn’t have a snappy term for this proclivity, but then one day it hit me:

It’s the Miss Music Nerd® Tuneblender™!

Now, I know what you’re thinking: how can I get these awesometastic designs on a coffee mug, T-shirt, or other gift item? Well, that is just one of many things I have in the works. I can’t reveal my plan for world domination all at once, now, can I? 😉

MMNFAQ: Producing The 30 Days Project

Hey, music nerds! Want to help me write my FAQ? Send in your question!

Here’s one from LisztNut:

How did Miss Music Nerd make the recordings in “The 30 Days Project”? Specifically, what type of equipment or recording setup was used, who were the performers, how much rehearsal was involved, etc.?

All of the pieces were recorded by me and my All-Electron Philharmonic Orchestra!

My basic rig consists of three pieces of hardware and two software programs:

Hardware:

• Mac computer (I was using an iMac at the time)
• Yamaha P-120 digital piano
• M-box 2 audio/midi interface

Software:

• Finale for music notation and some sequencing
• Pro Tools for sequencing, recording, processing and editing

For the solo piano pieces, I just connected my piano to the M-box with an audio cable and recorded into Pro Tools. In some cases, there may have been some over-dubbing involved — I can neither confirm nor deny that! 😉 There were a few piano pieces that definitely required more than one track, because they needed three or four hands: Tango-ish and Something Languid. There was even a two-piano, eight-hand piece: On Not Being Stingy.

When I wanted to use other instruments, there were a couple of different ways to do it. Finale has some passable MIDI sounds, so I used them where I could. Sometimes I could just save a whole Finale score as an audio file and be done, but more often I would save each instrument’s track separately and then load them into Pro Tools for tweaking and mixing.

When Finale’s MIDI sounds weren’t enough for me, I turned to Xpand!, which is a virtual instrument plug-in for Pro Tools. It has some fun percussion and keyboard instrument sounds; I especially liked the accordion and jazz organ sounds I used toward the end of Cicadas in Love and the “glassy glockenspiel” in Out of the Loops.

When using Xpand!, sometimes I would play the music into a Pro Tools instrument track through the piano, and other times I would generate MIDI data with Finale and import it, so I didn’t actually have to record it myself. In any case, using more than a few Xpand! intruments at once puts a serious strain on my system resources! I never lost data due to crashes, though (phew!). Someday when I’m rich and famous, I’ll have a top-of-the-line digital audio workstation with the most powerful computer known to humanity (until the day after you buy it, at least!), but for the moment I have to make clever and resourceful use of my mid-range gear. 😉

The cicada sounds, by the way, were the only sounds I didn’t produce myself. I used sound files from University of Michigan Museum of Zoology’s website, after the scientists there kindly granted me permission. I did, in fact, have live cicadas singing outside my window at the time, which is where the idea for the piece originated, but I wouldn’t have been able to get the quality and variety of sound files I had access to if I’d had to record them myself.

I’m grateful that we have this new-fangled digital technology, because it’s really fun to get an idea immediately of what your piece will sound like. Also, it’s the only way I could have done something like the 30 Days project.

Still, there’s nothing better than having your piece performed by live musicians. I am hoping to put on a live concert of these pieces at some point, hopefully this coming fall. I won’t have any trouble finding musicians in Boston, that’s for sure! Stay tuned! 😀

Post-Recital Thoughts: Simple, But Not Easy

I have returned home triumphant, after the second leg of my local recital tour, followed by pizza! 😀

Performing the same program multiple times presents interesting challenges. I had a harder time getting myself focused for this performance than for the first one; an evil little voice in my head kept saying, “You don’t really have to practice this music again, do you? You’ve already performed it! Let’s eat cookies instead!” But the answer is, yes, you do have to keep practicing. There is some cumulative effect to it, I think, but I also know that performing music is similar to being an athlete — if you don’t keep in shape, you may very well hurt yourself! 😉

Paradoxically, it can be particularly hard to practice an easy piece. I did a number of short and not-too-difficult pieces on this program, and the temptation to neglect practicing them is strong. The truth is, you really don’t have to woodshed them the way you must with longer, more difficult pieces. But you can’t completely neglect them either. I mean, what could be more embarrassing than stumbling over an easy piece? :O

I found that practicing the less technically demanding pieces is very similar to doing Zen meditation. The basic task is so simple: just sit, focus on your breathing, let your thoughts go by without getting caught up in them. What could be hard about that? So you do it for a minute or so, and then your attention wanders, and before long you catch yourself writing angry letters to the editor in your head, or maybe just making a grocery list, but either way, totally at the mercy of the monkey mind.

It’s amazing how complex one’s thoughts can get while simultaneously playing a piece of music. It’s like the Three Stooges are running around inside your head. This evening, among other things, I was absolutely tormented by a squeaking noise my shoe was making. I was wearing my organ shoes, which are incredibly comfortable, and I practiced in them and everything, but all of a sudden, my heel was touching the floor in just such a way as to squeak every time I pedaled. It finally went away, but little did the audience know that I wanted to scream bloody murder while playing my cute little piano pieces.

In Zen meditation, the instruction for when you find your monkey mind taking over is just to gently bring your attention back to your breathing and let the thoughts go. It’s similar with performing — you bring your mind back to the music, and don’t sweat the squeaks! 😉

Existential Pilot: A New Music Group That’s Going Places!

I have to confess: I get a little jaded sometimes. I ask myself, “Is being a musician really worth it?” I mean, except for a very lucky few, it’s not glamorous, it doesn’t pay a lot, it can be very time-consuming and stressful, and the tax returns are a bear! (Being self-employed makes for a lot of red tape, paradoxically, as anyone who has ever floundered in a sea of 1099s can attest!)

But just when I’m about to chuck it all and learn how to be an accountant or dental hygienist or something, I have an experience that shows me that it really is worthwhile.

I recently made the acquaintance of a the new music group Existential Pilot when they visited Boston on their first official tour. The group’s members are current students and recent alumni of the University of Michigan, which has a very well-respected music program. The members are:

William Zuckerman, composer, pianist and electronic performance
Ezra Donner, composer and pianist
Claire DiVizio, soprano
Jonathan Lubin, composer, pianist and electronic performance
Zoë Aqua, violin
Mark Dover, clarinet

I met the group for coffee the afternoon of their performance here in town, at First Church in Boston. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the concert itself — it was a Wednesday night, and I had a choir rehearsal to run… But I did get to hear most of their dress rehearsal, and that was pretty cool, because it was like having a private command performance just for me!

While fortifying ourselves with coffee beforehand, we chatted about how the group formed, what the different members are up to individually, and this business of running a new music group in general. There’s no set playbook for it — no one has written a “Forming a New Music Group for Dummies” as far as I know. One thing that really helps is advice and encouragement from others who have already done it, and composer-pianist Ezra Donner mentioned a few composers and groups who have mentored them, including composer Joan Tower, the groups Eighth Blackbird, and Time for Three, who said to them, “You can do this!”

EP will certainly have no shortage of material to perform. The program they presented on this tour consisted entirely of music by the three composers in the group, but they intend to issue a call for scores sometime soon, and branch out into playing works by other emerging composers as well.

I admire this spirit of generosity and cooperation. When I saw that there were three composer-pianists in the group, I had visions of dueling keyboards, both the piano kind and the computer kind. But the embarrassment of keyboard riches seems to serve the group very well. In fact, I was sorry to hear Jonathan Lubin was on the injured list that evening, and was unable to accompany soprano Claire DiVizio on his song, This is the Garden. Ezra stepped in and learned the piece on just a few days’ notice, but I wouldn’t have guessed that from hearing their dress rehearsal!

I also got to hear Ezra play his own Sonata no. 1 for Piano, which had energy to spare, with driving rhythms and harmonies based on 4ths and 5ths. His Sonata Judaica for clarinet and piano gave clarinetist Mark Dover a chance to rock ‘n’ roll as well.

I heard two of William Zuckerman’s pieces: Sinuous Rills, for violin, clarinet and piano, and a movement from Music In Pluralism, for violin and piano. William mentioned that he was influenced by minimalism, and we had a playful conversation about that, because I had to confess not being a huge fan of that style. But I didn’t really hear minimalism in his music — it had plenty of arpeggiated chords in the piano and ostinato-like passages, but it didn’t stay in one place or try to evoke a meditative or trance-like effect the way minimalism does, to my mind. Actually, I felt his music was rather romantic, full of drama and sweeping gestures, conveyed quite effectively by violinist Zoë Aqua.

It was great to spend time with these musicians on their first tour — funded, incidentally, through kickstarter, which helped them harness the support of generous family, friends and beyond. I hope it’s just the first of many successful ventures for them!

You can hear several audio excerpts on the Existential Pilot site — just click “Listen” on the lower right.

WMMN-TV Presents: Recital Video: the Amusingly Serious One!

I’m sure I’m not the only composer who periodically takes stock of her collected works, as a way to glean whatever insight may come from looking at where she’s been, where she is now, and where she might be going. I did that as part of the planning process for this recital, I was amused by what I saw. That’s probably due to the fact that my sense of humor has improved enormously over time. I was one serious little whippersnapper back in the day! It was all part of the temperamental artiste thing; I was in thrall to the romantic archetype of the tortured, angst-ridden soul who is happy to suffer for art. But over time I realized that, glamorous as it appeared, as a way of life it was downright unsustainable.

I also noticed that I’m a far more pragmatic composer now than I was while I was in school. When you get out in the real world, you discover that idealism is expensive! Hence, the piece I’m performing in the video below is the longest and most difficult one on the program. I know better than to make life so hard for myself now, I’ll tell you what! 😉

I still love the piece, though, and re-learning it after many years was a challenging and rewarding experience. It was a little bit terrifying too, I confess — I almost cut the crazy thing a few days before the performance, because practicing it was making me want to tear my hair out. But in the end I was really pleased with how it went, so I’m glad I didn’t. (Cut the piece or tear my hair out, that is!) In fact, I’m looking forward to playing it again!

In my spoken intro to the piece, I mention a Gershwin tune I had in my head while writing it. Here’s a full version of it — it’s a great tune!

WMMN-TV Presents: Recital Video: With a Little Help From My Friend

One of the drawbacks of being a pianist is that you can spend an awful lot of time playing alone, unlike other instrumentalists who, almost by definition, play in orchestras, bands, or chamber ensembles most of the time. I didn’t discover chamber music until I got to college, and it made me want to just… sing!

Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities for musical collaboration if you put yourself in the right place at the right time!

I especially love accompanying singers. This video is the first of two songs on my recital, where I was joined by the wonderful singer, and my good friend, Peter Terry. The song is a setting of a text from the Song of Solomon (adapted by yours truly). As I mention in the video, it was performed at McDoc’s and my wedding ceremony (but not by me!). Enjoy!

More to come… 🙂

WMMN-TV Presents: Recital Video: the Technical Ones!

While working out the order for this recital, I split the pieces from the 30 Days Project into two sets and alternated them with other selections, because I think it can get tedious to listen to a very long list of short pieces without at least a snack break or something. Hey, there’s an idea — I should serve milk and cookies at my next recital! Mmm, cookies… Oh, okay, and the audience can have some, too. 😉

I enjoy creating categories and putting things in them. These three pieces are what I call The Technical Ones; each one is built around a particular music-theoretical conceit. Other categories include The Pretty Ones and The Whimsical Ones. Actually, I like to think that any of the pieces could fit in any of the categories — it’s all just a matter of emphasis.

Herewith, I give you:

• Third Impressions
• A Study in Contrasts
• Chain Letter

Enjoy!

More to come… 🙂