I’ve just finished a new piece to be premiered next spring under the baton of maestra Victoria Gau. When I wrote it, I was going for a retro-modern, sci-fi, Jetsons, mid-century vibe, so naturally I called it Rocket Ship Model X-14z19 (Personal Space Vehicle P-90). This 12-minute work is for a standard big orchestra. I hope it’s a blast to play—pun intended—especially for the entire brass section.
– Charlie's Blog –
Of jazz and baseball
For decades, my city didn’t have a baseball team, and I didn’t miss it. I was not a ball player when I was young—well, certainly not a good one. But in the dozen years since the Nationals arrived in DC, I have become a true fanatic. I think it’s because for me, baseball has a lot in common with jazz: both pursuits combine a predictable structure with an unpredictable outcome. When you listen to Art Tatum playing “Honeysuckle Rose,” you know he is playing variations of the song’s structure, AABA, over and over, but you don’t how he will sail away from the melody, from the original harmonies, from the key center, to unexplored places. Baseball is structured like that: 6 outs an inning, 9 innings a game (barring a tie). But from the umpire’s “Play ball!” until the last out, no one knows how the game will unfold. No two games are the same. And a game can last one hour, or eight. When my beloved Nats were off for the night recently, I found myself happily watching the women’s NCAA softball tournament, with the same enjoyment of the gentle journey that every baseball game takes. I hope your summer, and your musical life, are taking you to a few unexpected but reassuringly familiar places.
12ness premiere
The play I wrote last year about George Gershwin and Arnold Schoenberg, 12ness, is having its first production soon, and I was lucky enough to get to see part of a rehearsal last week. The director is a total pro named George B. Miller who seems to instinctively know exactly what I had in mind for each scene. No, actually he seems to know much better than I how each scene should appear on stage. Suffice it to say, I can hardly wait to see what the final production looks like. If you happen to be in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley next week or the one after, I hope you consider seeing it. The play is being produced by the Crowded Kitchen Players. It opens on June 9.
New classical album: Retablos
On April 1, I released Retablos, a CD of several of my works for strings. The title track, which I’ve written about before, is a new, Latin-themed work commissioned last year. The other two pieces, The Brisk West Wind and String Transparencies, are earlier works recorded here for the first time. Living near Washington, DC, I know a lot of top-notch string players from the National Symphony and other local orchestras. It’s always a joy when I can bring a few of them into the studio to interpret a work I’ve heard only in my head (and on synth tracks, of course). Robots may be coming for all of our jobs eventually, but for now, there’s nothing like a living, breathing human to take black dots on the page and turn them into music.
The return of mon oncle
My long history of attempting to learn French goes all the way back to high school-lessons that centered on the exploits of “Margot et Mon Oncle.” It was never entirely clear what Mon Oncle’s relationship to Margot was. The language lab at Easton Area High School was full of speculation on this matter. I didn’t learn French then, or during any of several subsequent efforts, but now I am reinvigorated because I have a deadline: my jazz band, Chaise Lounge, will be playing in Paris in June of 2018. I also have a new language-learning method: Duolingo, a free site that serves a number of noble purposes—one of them being to help translate Wikipedia in its entirety. I am astonished at how perfectly crafted this service is. If you get a sentence wrong, the computer gently drills you on it until you get it right. And, unlike most human teachers, the computer has infinite patience. Of course, the site acts as a reminder that, sooner or later, robots are coming for a lot of people’s jobs. But in the meantime it also makes me wonder: could this teaching method be applied to musical sight-reading?
Peanut Butter & Jam Session
Even though I helped raise three spectacular daughters, I have never been drawn to the idea of playing children’s concerts. But earlier this year, I was commissioned to write a new string quintet for a regular Takoma Park, Maryland, kiddie event called “Peanut Butter & Jam Sessions.” My first instinct was to write something harmonically and melodically simple. But aside from it being a boring task, I realized that it probably wouldn’t work for this concert. The “Pixar” model of bi-level sensibilities is what kids—and their parents—expect now. So in the end I wrote a pretty interesting piece that had enough surprises in it for a three-year-old, enough musical meat in it to hopefully be satisfying for the adults in the audience, and just enough of a technical challenge for the quintet. The Takoma Ensemble string quintet also performed the third movement of my Three Completely Workable Perpetual Motion Devices. What fun! The players did an outstanding job with both pieces, and I discovered something about children’s concerts that hadn’t occurred to me (or that I had forgotten): music has an instant visceral impact on kids. Just hearing live music makes them fall on the floor—rolling and laughing. I’ve had some great nights in my life, but I can’t remember hearing my work played for a more appreciative crowd. A big thank-you to Maestro Vicki Gau for making this happen, and to the string quintet who took the work so seriously, while clearly enjoying the day.
Noir premiere
A few weeks ago, my cello concerto Noir was premiered by soloist Lawrence Leviton and the Central Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra. I wasn’t able to attend, but I heard the recordings and am proud and grateful the piece got such a fine welcome to the world. Lawrence did a stellar job, as did Maestro Pat Miles and the orchestra. (You can listen to a recording and view the score here.) For a composer, it’s never easy to get a new work premiered. Even harder: finding the second performance of a new piece. But I’d love to make that happen with this one.
Four Cities in concert
Usually if I am playing in public, I’m playing jazz on the piano, guitar, or accordion. I hardly ever have to play the exact notes of a piece—especially since there often aren’t exact notes to play, only chord changes. But on April 2, I will be performing a piece of mine called Four Cities with the wonderful violinist Teri Lazar. It is a four-movement suite for violin and piano that I wrote in 1997. It’s about 40 minutes long—and it is hard! I’ve been shedding for this concert for weeks already. I find it somewhat unnerving that Teri, because she is an excellent musician, will be expecting me to play precisely the notes I wrote. It is a reasonable expectation, to be sure. And if I were sitting in the audience, as I usually am when one of my pieces gets played, I would have the same expectation. But the prospect of sitting on the business side of the stage, playing a difficult piano part, and having the soloist fully prepared for me to nail it, is a little frightening. The movements are all named after cities: Fredericksburg, Virginia, where I spent my early years; Hollywood, California, where I’ve worked off and on for decades; Damariscotta, Maine, where my mom’s people are; and Memphis, Tennessee, the throbbing heart of American blues music…and a place I have never been. In some oblique way, this grouping makes perfect sense to me. Each of these places inspired a kind of sonic dreamscape—especially the one I’ve only dreamt about.
New Chaise Lounge album
Last month, my jazz band, Chaise Lounge, celebrated the release of our eighth album: The Lock & the Key. There are eleven cuts on it: nine originals and two covers. It took just about a year to make, and we are quite proud of it. I’m not sure it is appropriate to pick out favorite tracks, but so what? I have them. One is “The Sweet Ride Home,” for which our singer, Marilyn Older, wrote a gorgeous lyric about the moments just after a wonderful date. It’s driven by the perfect groove from drummer Tommy Barrick. The melody is ghosted a fourth down by Joe Jackson’s trombone. And the tutti ensemble section in the middle is the perfect, full-on Chaise Lounge statement. Another fave: “The Earl.” Our sax player, Gary Gregg, routinely stuns our live audiences with his ultra-melodic solos, and we captured a hot one on this track, named for one of Gary’s saxophone heroes, Earl Bostic. And I especially love the last song on the record, “I Grew a Rose,” because we tried to get a very retro Harry Belafonte sound, and I think we hit the nail on the head. In concert, we sometimes use male backing vocals as comic relief, but on this cut we are nothing but sincere. The artwork for the album is by Adriana Cordero.
Netherlands museum gig
This project was fun: I wrote the score for an animated film that will play for visitors to the Welvaren Museum in Amsterdam. When I score a feature film, I leave the sound effects to the pros, but in this case I was hired to do both score and “sfx,” in filmmaker lingo. Since it was a cartoon, the sounds I had to find or make were cartoonish—shoveling sounds, ker-plops, big cannons, little fireworks. I can’t imagine doing this job before digital editing. Thank goodness for ProTools. I will never again take the “boing” in a Tom & Jerry episode for granted.