Izzo: Public Speaking

Now that Memory Theater has been completed it's time change direction and think about public speaking.  Ahh, public speaking my favorite thing in the world to do...  It's an odd thing because there are times when I'm completely at ease and other times when I sound like the guy stranded on an island who's been talking to a soccer ball for 5 years. 

Be that as it may, as part of our residency in Alabama, we three composers have been given a few opportunities to address an audience directly:

1.
On Wednesday, March 24th. we're going to be presenting our solo cello music to the undergrad student convocation at UAB.  Basically we'll be giving a quick nuts and bolts description of the music followed by a performance by Craig Hultgren of the piece in question.

2.
On Saturday March 27th. we'll be giving a pre-concert talk at 6pm.  After weeks of going back and forth trying to decide what form this discussion will take we decided to do a question and answer session with a slight twist.

The purpose of these lectures/talks is to help introduce classical music, (more specifically new classical music)  to a public that might not know much about this world.  We've decided to solicit questions from people that we'll answer throughout the course of our talk.

With that in mind, we'd love it if you'd be so kind as to send us a question.  Specifically, if you had the opportunity to ask a composer anything at all, what would it be?  The question can be deep and serious, or silly, or even provocative; it doesn't even have to address questions of music directly.

The idea is that rather than trying to guess what an audience might want to know about the topic, we've decided to allow the audience to tell us directly.  We hope it sets the tone for a fun, informal prelude to the evening.

If you have a question, please send it my way:  Tom at tizzo5@yahoo.com

We'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject!

Izzo: Memory Theater

So far we've gotten nostalgic, fought off a swarm of bees, floated in the air with a ballerina, sang a hymn to the heavens and looked in fear and wonder at those same heavens.  This leads to the final movement which I titled Memory Theater and which incidentally isn't named after a Cornell piece.

I came across the phrase in Charles Simic's book/tribute to Cornell called Dime-Store Alchemy and I think it fits the music well.  In fact I've decided to use Memory Theater as the title for the entire piece.

And as it turns out, the piece is almost exactly 20 minutes long as opposed to my initial 10 minute estimate.
Now, I knew that I had the freedom to think a bit bigger which is why I let the duration grow as my ideas developed, but had there been a specific duration limitation I would have kept to it.

Anyhow, I say this simply to illustrate that if you've been following along you're experiencing the piece in fragments and as such the larger scope and journey that the music takes you on gets lost.  If you'd like to hear the entire piece please click the concert links at the top of the page--you can listen live online.

   

    Electronic Realization:

    
  
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Izzo: Landscape With a Figure

This piece is going to be longer than I expected.  When I first began working on the music I planned to make each variation around 2 minutes long.  There are times however, when your calculations need to be discarded no matter how nice they look on paper.  That's what I find so fascinating about this process; it truly is a balancing act between logic and intuition.   


I also discovered that the 2nd. half of the piece wants to be more serious in nature than the first half.  This is pretty evident in the 4th. variation titled Landscape With a Figure; the character of the music is brooding and at times explosive.
 
Electronic Realization: 

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Sternfeld-Dunn: Coming up against History

As a composer I often find that I am happiest writing music for ensembles that aren't standardized. The benefit of this is there is no literature set for the ensemble for your music to be compared to. The bad news is it's harder for you to get these pieces performed because you have to create your own group.

Of course writing for solo cello means you are putting yourself up against hundreds of years of solo cello literature and that means going up against the big man himself...J.S. Bach. You can't write a solo cello piece and not have Bach's Cello Suites looming over your shoulder. Maybe this means you react against the grain or maybe you embrace what he did but either way he is there waiting to make your solo piece look like chump change.

While my solo piece has at times been a reaction against the Cello Suites I have also decided to embrace certain aspects of these works. The second movement, Crackle!, is really an homage (or maybe a desperate attempt) at the contrapuntal writing that Bach is famous for. This movement focuses on two main aspects, two voices interacting with each other and interesting colors.

While this midi recording doesn't really capture the colors of the piece I hope you can hear the counterpoint.

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Izzo: Celestial Navigations

Joseph Cornell created a series of works with a similar theme that he called Celestial Navigations.  In these pieces he used items such as star maps, diagrams of trade winds and solar and lunar eclipses to create a personal inquiry into the cosmos.


This series inspired my third variation.  For some reason I kept thinking of an old wheezy pump organ as I was working on the music.  I may have been juxtaposing the grand themes of the space & time with Cornell's involvement in Christian Science which creates a picture in my mind of Cornell with a small, humble group of followers gathering in a backroom to sing hymns.

Electronic Realization:

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