Monthly Archives: January 2009

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.

Filed in Addictive Riddle, New works, 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.

Filed in Blessays, New works | | 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!

Filed in New works | | 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.

Filed in New works | | Comments (0)

Tobenski Music Press: PDF Downloads

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

As of Monday afternoon, the Tobenski Music Press now sells PDF downloads of select scores: And He’ll Be Mine, till night is overgone, Sweet Briar Songs, echoes, Starfish at Pescadero (score only), Letter from a Young Poet (score only), and String Quartet No. 1 (score only). I’ll be adding more scores and their accompanying parts in the coming days and weeks.

If anyone encounters any difficulties, please let me know ASAP at tobenskipress@dennistobenski.com. My live tests with the new scripts have gone well. I should emphasize that the process is completely secure – everything is handled by Paypal and the Linklok Paypal IPN system. All credit card information is handled entirely by Paypal, and the file downloads are dealt with through the secure Linklok scripts. I’d love to be able to write all of my own scripts to handle everything on-site, but security’s far too important an issue to entrust to little old me.

Bound scores will be handled the same as before: place your order through Paypal, and I’ll mail you a pretty, bound copy of the score(s) or parts.

PDF downloads (and, in the future, MP3 downloads) are even simpler! Place your order through Paypal (Shameless Plug: note the lower prices because of the lack of printing/binding fees!), and Linklok will provide you with links to download the appropriate files. The links will be provided in two forms: a page loaded immediately after completion of your order with secure links to the file you purchased; and a confirmation email sent to you immediately. This email is distinct from the receipt you will receive from Paypal with your complete purchase details.

I ran several test transactions Sunday afternoon, and everything ran smoothly. Paypal even made a point of calling me to make sure that all of the sudden transactions-plus-refunds-of-my-own-money were “authorized activity”. As if I didn’t trust Paypal enough, that made me a believer – a phone call on a Sunday afternoon just to “make sure”. Good people! (Thanks, Karen! That kinda made my day!)

I’ll be adding a few more things to the Tobenski Music Press pages very, very soon (Shipping/Return policies, etc.) to flesh out the storefront and make the processes super-clear.

The process of making this happen has been really exciting for me. I’ve been eyeing Linklok for months, now – going over their materials, reading reactions to it all over the NetarWebs. I think I read their manual a half dozen times before I even bought the scripts! Just the initial Paypal integration for the bound scores storefront had me ten kinds of excited, so to finally get this up and running has me over the moon!

Filed in Tobenski Music Press, Website updates | | Comments (0)

A Ned Rorem Reader

Monday, January 5, 2009

I recently pulled down from the shelf one of my few unread volumes by Ned Rorem. I’m sure I’ve read most of these essays before, and if I haven’t read X or Y particular essay, I’ve read any given statement in the book at least a dozen times in the various diaries and collections of essays. Rorem’s one of the few writers I never tire of reading, like Jean Cocteau and Douglas Adams (whose ‘trilogy’ I revisit in its entirety every few years): though I’ve read them before, there’s always something new to be gleaned, a new interpretation that springs from the mere fact of time having passed.

I remember fairly racing through the earlier diaries in college. I was told of The Paris Diary by a friend – he claimed it was a sort of Queer Who’s Who of the arts scene in the ’40s, though admitted to being incredibly bored by all of the names he didn’t recognize. I was much more widely-read than he and knew many more of the names, so found the book infinitely interesting.

I was already a voracious reader, and Ned’s diaries pushed me into a whole new world of writers and writing of which I was previously unaware, or had never before felt the urge to explore. Cocteau was a Rorem-inspired discovery, as were Gide, Genet, and Isherwood. I’ve even devoured a few Simenon novels I happened upon during a month-long residency at the VCCA because of the continual references to them in Rorem’s diaries, and recently took it a step further by grabbing up almost all of the old Simenon paperbacks in a few used book stores I regularly raid. Have the diaries introduced me to any music? Remarkably little: Satie’s Socrate, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges. More often than not, reading Rorem begets more reading for me.

I did the bulk of my Rorem-reading in my most musically formative years, and I’ll freely admit to being strongly influenced by some of his published musings on music. My thoughts on prosody, on diction, on repetition of text all have their roots in the pages of Ned’s books. (The few suggestions I’ve gotten to repeat a line from a poem in one of my songs have been met with steadfast refusals – not because Ned Would Disapprove; merely because I’ve worked with enough living poets that I happen to agree with him on the issue.) It’s funny to think that Ned’s writing has probably influenced my music more than his music has, despite my having known his songs first – I gave an all-Rorem recital in college, which sparked my friend to mention the diaries, which etc. Performing his songs give me ideas on rhythm and motivic play, but no more so than did participating in the Midwestern choral tradition or studying Copland’s Piano Variations (though “A Night Battle” and “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books” from War Scenes certainly did a lot for my sense of recitative). Not surprisingly, it’s Ned’s “hits” that have taught me the least – they have a life of their own, and work because they work; their secret is non-transmittable. Yet they have taught me this: a song either has the spark of life or it hasn’t – it can’t be faked – and when it has, it is a truly beautiful thing.

Filed in Blessays | | 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.

Filed in New works, Song Album Project | | Comments (0)

Switch to our mobile site