Happy Birthday, Shosty

Let me tell you how much I love the music of Dmitri Shostakovich: sometimes on dark, cold evenings, I like to headbang to String Quartet No. 8 while sitting in my living room. Like, actually. It contains one of the greatest drops in classical music history.

My first introduction to Shostakovich was when my youth orchestra performed his second piano concerto, when I was 16. It was one of the more memorable concerts of my life: I loved the piece, of course, but the dress rehearsal had been abysmal. None of us knew if we’d be able to pull the piece off at the concert without becoming a trainwreck (especially that 7/8 section in the last movement). However, the impossible happened, and our performance at the concert wound up being nearly flawless. It was such a miraculous event that we all made black T-shirts with hot pink print that said, “I survived the Shostakovich,” which apparently I still have:

Still one of the greatest achievements of my youth orchestra experience.

In college, I fell in love with Shosty all over again after listening to a few pieces for music history classes (Symphony No. 5, of course, and String Quartet No. 8). I was especially drawn to the string quartets, and after watching a riveting performance of his ninth string quartet by the Artaria String Quartet in the summer of 2011, I decided I needed more. A friend gave me his copy of a recording of the complete string quartets of Shostakovich performed by the Emerson String Quartet, and I spent the particularly angsty first semester of my junior year of college jamming to the album and watching the snow fall over the rural Minnesota landscape outside of my dorm room window to cope with my feels. After deciding that taking an upper level post-tonal music theory class wasn’t enough theory for me, I ended up doing an independent study analysis of String Quartet No. 9 during the second semester of my junior year. Twenty-one pages of analysis later, I was still in love. I bought a phone case that said DSCH and had a picture of his iconic glasses, which I had for years before that phone finally died. I blame Shostakovich for the fact that I’ve written two string quartets now, even though I’m not a string player (a friend of mine once told me that she could hear the Shostakovich influence in The Phoenix… I’ll take it). These days I’ll take any chance I can get to hear the string quartets in recital – most recently, it was Accordo performing No. 4 at Icehouse, a bar in Minneapolis, which was such a lovely setting!

Shostakovich’s life is so fascinating to me. I still have quite a bit of reading left to do about his life before Stalin (although from what I’ve read in his bio so far, he sounds like he was kind of a diva as a young man), but as a composer, I’m constantly struck by the struggle he went through under the censorship of Soviet Russia. There are conflicting theories as to whether or not he secretly hated the U.S.S.R., but regardless of how he felt, the string quartets (which were subject to less scrutiny than the symphonies), are so dark. Yes, he reused a lot of his own themes over and over again (I had a long discussion about this with one of my theory professors over a few pints of beer in a small pub once), but it never bothers me. I always grin when I hear the DSCH motive poking out of somewhere unexpected.

I’m currently sipping tea and listening to String Quartet No. 10 while watching the grey, chilly, early autumn weather outside my apartment. It’s so delightfully perfect.

Happy 111th birthday to you, Shosty! Thanks for all of the music and inspiration.

Website Changes are Coming!

I’m in the thick of busy season at my day job, and my laptop is slowly dying, but I have found a rare moment of free time and laptop-working to say that I’m going to be updating this blog in the near future! Now that I’ve been writing music fairly regularly again for the last year or so, I’m going to work on getting updated versions of my scores ready to put out there (contests, hello!). Also, thanks to my lovely photographer friend, I have some pretty new headshots on their way. It’s been a while since I have been blonde, after all…

A composition update: I set a goal for myself to finish the first movement of my piano sonata in the month of January, and I did it! As in, there’s a pretty solid first draft of it completed, and now I’m letting it simmer for a bit while I work on the other two movements and do some research on a possible song cycle (what??) that will be written concurrently with the last movement of the piano sonata. Shooting for late spring to finish this piece, which would be record time for me in recent years (how did Ives work a day job and have time to write?).

I have decided that String Quartet No. 2 is finished… for now. I may make a few minor tweaks after I hear a live quartet run through it, but otherwise, that three-and-a-half year endeavor is finally at a close. There’s now a listing for it on my “Compositions” page, and it’s got a title: A Meditation of Time. Because that’s literally what it is. Titles are my least-favorite aspect of writing music…

Hey, friends, things are rough for a lot of us, but don’t forget to support your local arts if you can. Next weekend here in the Twin Cities is the next Punk-Ass Classical show! I will unfortunately be out of town, but it looks like an awesome show. Get out there and support new music!

Oboe Improv?

May is here, which means a busy month for me, but I still make time for music. Concert-tastic April finished strong with the Punk Ass Classical show, featuring new piano works, including an incredible 10-minute solo piano work by my dear friend Sam Tygiel. I love hearing new music, obviously, but it’s even more fun when the works you’re hearing are written by your friends! The next Punk Ass Classical show is at the end of this month, so expect some heavy promotion from me in the next few weeks…

My focus for May is oboe playing. I’m getting back into a regular practice routine so that my face stays in shape, but right now the only music I’m practicing is stuff I’m doing for fun (Gordon Jacob’s anything for oboe. Love his oboe music so hard). So on Sunday I found myself looking at my calendar and realizing that the next Potted Meet was on Monday. For those of you who don’t know, Potted Meet happens once a month at a bowling alley in Northeast Minneapolis, and it serves as a conversation between music, visual artists, and community organizations. I’ve always talked about bringing an instrument to it and jamming with Improvestra (the “house band,” you could say), but I didn’t actually get around to it until this month. Instead of bringing my mandolin (which I’m used to jamming on), I brought my oboe and decided to try oboe improv. Yeah, jazz oboe isn’t really a thing, so I haven’t had much practice doing improvisation on oboe. However, it came pretty easily to me since it’s A) a tonal improv orchestra and B) a lot of 12-bar blues progressions. I never thought I’d find myself jamming on oboe with friends at a bowling alley bar, but it happened, and it was awesome. I’m looking forward to bringing Gilbert the oboe to more jam sessions in the future! Don’t worry, mandolin will get some love this summer, but my face needs more of a workout than my fingers do at the moment.

I just finished working on String Quartet No. 2 some more this evening, and I’ve decided that I need to rewrite the second movement. I’ve rewritten it twice already, but I’m so happy with the rest of the piece that I need to make sure I’m in love with the second movement before I start showing it to people to read. New goal is to finish it in May (might be hard with all the extra oboe-playing), or at least get it to a point where someone can read it and give me feedback.

Finally, I will mention that I’ve been on a Facebook hiatus for about a week now, and it’s the best decision I’ve ever made. I’ll dedicate a more thorough blog post to that once my hiatus is over next week, but wow, I never realized how stressed out I was getting just from my Facebook feed! It’s an interesting place to be in as someone who loves social media… Right, as I said, more on that next week.

Let the music play on, friends, and take a moment to look at the flowers this week. Spring is here, and it is beautiful.

The Ticking Room Premiere

I meant to write this back in November, but life got busy. I finally had a premiere again for the first time in well over a year! Some good friends and new friends (thank you Greg, Tessa, Ben, and Baylen!) performed the third movement of my upcoming string quartet at the second Punk Ass Classical Basement Show in Minneapolis on November 19. The third movement, currently titled “The Ticking Room,” is a minimalist, rhythmic movement based on the idea of having multiple clocks in one room, and they’re all slightly out of sync. It was very well-received, and I’m delighted with how the performance went! I do have a recording of it that I hope to put on my SoundCloud in the next few days or so. Since it was in the basement of an old house, there’s a bit of creaking floor sound in the recording, but I feel like that makes it more authentic. Sort of. Work with me here.

This was my first Punk Ass Classical Basement Show, and I had a wonderful time! Besides my own work, my friend and fellow composer Michael Betz also had a premiere that night, a haunting work for solo flute that was masterfully performed by Joshua Weinberg. And the turnout for the whole show was amazing! I don’t know how we fit so many people into one tiny basement, but it worked. My only regret was that I had to leave early to get down to Iowa for a work conference. Bravo to everyone involved in the show! I’m already looking forward to the next one!

Now that NaNoWriMo is over (I finished at a little over 58,000 words!), I’m back to working on String Quartet No. 2. I think it’s safe to say that the first movement is finished and ready for a read-through. The second movement is getting some final touch-ups. And then the fourth movement… I have a concept, and I’ve started it, but I think my concept might be a little too abstract to properly convey through sound. However, I’m determined to make it work. My self-imposed deadline for a double-bar on this piece is December 31. It would be so lovely to finally finish a piece again!

That’s it for my quick update. Back to writing!

So Much Progress! A Quick Update on String Quartet No. 2

In the month or so since my last blog post, I can proudly say that I’ve overcome my writer’s block. FINALLY.

Yes, String Quartet No. 2 is coming along swimmingly! I’ve finished the third movement, I’m making final tweaks to the first movement, I’m about halfway finished writing the second movement, and I recently started writing the fourth movement. My goal for this piece is to have it at about 20 minutes in length. I was originally shooting for something closer to the half hour range, but as I’ve been writing it, 20 minutes seems more appropriate. While I don’t think I will hit my goal of being completely finished with the piece by November 1, I’m still going to get pretty darn close at this rate. Seriously, a month ago I only had light drafts for the first and third movements that I’d been chipping away at for two years, and as of tonight I have almost 15 minutes worth of music written.

Part of the reason why I had a bit of a slow-down in progress for the last week or so is because I’ve started a new full-time job! And while that is very exciting, and I love my job so far, it does mean that I have less time during the day to devote to composing. This is the main reason why I likely won’t be able to finish the whole piece by November 1, but I’m hoping that by the time NaNoWriMo rolls around again, I’ll have finished three of the four movements and just making little tweaks to the remaining one. (Why am I doing NaNo again? Well, apparently, playing three instruments, composing, dancing, cooking, and making elaborate Halloween costumes aren’t enough creative outlets for me…)

This last month has been so refreshing. There was one Thursday in the middle of September where I sipped a good German beer and spent over two hours working on this piece. I don’t think I’ve been able to have such a productive composing session like that since undergrad! Tonight I spent a little over an hour making some final tweaks to the third movement. I think I’m ready to call that one finished (I may add an articulation mark here and there or change a dynamic tomorrow). The third movement became a priority because it’s going to be performed later in November. I would give specifics, but I think I’ll wait until the official Facebook event goes out, probably in a week or so. Be on the lookout for invitations on the Facebook, to all of you Facebook friends. There will probably be some Twitter announcements, too.

So while I may not meet my initial deadline for String Quartet No. 2, I can gladly say that composer Katie is back in action. This double bar is going to be one of the most satisfying double bars of my career so far.

Unfocused Writing

It’s September, and currently the Minnesota State Fair, which means one thing: summer is coming to a close.

For the most part, I’m pleased. I’m definitely a cold weather person, and at times this summer felt a little too toasty for me. Bring on autumn weather and an excuse to wear beanies again!

Another awesome part about summer ending: the youth orchestra I work with starts up again in two weeks, which means being reunited with some of the most musically-passionate middle schoolers I’ve ever met. Seriously, watching these kids grow last year was so inspiring and made me even more dedicated to my small contribution to music education.

But the end of summer brings one major bummer (rhyme unintended).

I had one big goal for the summer, and that was to finish one of my many partial compositions floating around in manuscript notebooks and Finale files. Guess what I didn’t accomplish this summer? That.

To be fair, I did work a fair amount on my second string quartet, and I added bits and pieces here and there to other works for undetermined instrumentation. I also started a few pieces, but I can’t seem to finish anything. In fact, I haven’t finished a work of music since January 2014, when I wrote a joke piece for an informal composition recital at St. Olaf. Other than that, I haven’t finished anything since May 2013. That’s over two years ago!

I could run over to my piano and force myself to stay there until String Quartet No. 2 is finished, but I still have no idea what the concept of the final movement is going to be, and back in July I found myself wanting to scrap the second movement and start all over again with something different.

I’ve found that since I finished undergrad, I’ve been seriously lacking two things that helped me compose at a fairly quick rate while I was in college: deadlines and focus.

Deadlines, while I hate them, served as a great motivation to finish a piece, because I needed to finish that piece in order to get a decent grade and eventually graduate. Now that I have no deadlines, I can take as long as I want to work on a piece, which has ultimately been not such a great thing. I’ve tried self-imposing a few deadlines, like this summer, but as you can see, it didn’t work out so well because I can still take as long as I want to on that piece. I haven’t lined up any readings or performances for it, so what’s the rush?

The other, much larger thing I’m lacking is focus. I finished undergrad and moved into a lifestyle of having a regular day job and evening social activities. While it is much more relaxed than my life in college, I’m no longer surrounded by academia. I’m not walking through the halls of the music building and passing by practice rooms filled with students working on audition excerpts, and I’m not spending countless hours in a music library working on music-related projects. These days, I go home after work, do a bit of yoga, practice an instrument or two, make dinner, and then run off to whatever activity I have going on, whether it’s blues dancing or meeting up with a friend at the bar for a pint. Composing gets relegated to weekends or the occasional lazy weeknight, and without any hard deadlines to keep me on target, I usually just play around on my piano for a bit and scribble a few notes down before I run out of ideas and go back to Facebook.

I do have a white board where I keep track of when I practice and work out, which has helped a little bit. For example, the last time I composed anything was August 13, for a half hour. I worked on a canon for fun, just to keep the juices flowing. However, that wasn’t my string quartet, which I’ve been working on since the summer of 2013.

So, what does all of this rambling boil down to? Well, I need to start spending more time composing, which is a realization I came to during my time up on Madeline Island in June and July. I truly enjoy doing it, but I have too many interests and not enough time for them all. This means I’ll need to cut back on some other hobbies, but I know in the end, it will be rewarding for me when I finally get that double bar on String Quartet No. 2 and start looking for a time when my friend’s quartet can read it.

New deadline? Let’s shoot for November 1, before National Novel Writing Month takes over the majority of my creative time. Here’s hoping my inspiration comes back!

Adjusting to Post-Grad and Writing Again

Eventually I will start updating this more frequently…

Three weeks ago today I graduated from St. Olaf College. It’s still a little weird to think about, especially since I’m still living in Northfield this year to do a marketing internship through the music department there… So I’m leaving, but I’m not really leaving.

Since I still have access to the music building (and I haven’t turned in all my keys yet… whoops…), I’m going to clean up the recordings of both my band piece and my recital. I also want to see if any musicians who are around would want to do some kind of collaboration this summer, since I will have far too much free time.

Speaking of free time, I’ve started writing the first movement of my second string quartet. I absolutely love string quartets, even though I’m not a string player. There is so much to play with! I’m not really sure what the “theme” of this one will be. Like my first string quartet, I’m playing around with another three-note motive so far, but I think I’m going to try to change things up so I’m just not writing the same piece with two different three-note motives… Anyway, it’s been nice getting back to writing again!