RLPF.ar

I'm slowly feeling more awake and alert through the day. Yesterday at this time, I couldn't do anything but crash into bed. Tonight, I'm blogging. That's progress.

Contributing to the fatigue has been a new sensation: nervousness about my teaching gig, due to start in the next couple of weeks. I should have expected this -- I've gone through a round of self-doubt before every job I've ever started -- but, also like every time in the past, it snuck up on me before I knew it was coming. Just recognizing it is enough; it will pass on its own with no effort from me, beyond seeing it and allowing it to run its course.

Last night, on a lark, I listened to a CD that I bought in college, which includes a singular work by David Maslanka, A Child's Garden of Dreams. It's well known in wind-band circles, but not so much outside that community. (Contemporary wind music suffers a double whammy: the obscurity of new music in general, and the marginalization of the wind band next to the symphony orchestra.) The wind ensemble at Butler played it while I was there, and I thought I got to know it fairly well in rehearsals. Not so! I found myself listening more deeply this time around. One thing that changed for me is my study of techno and house in grad school. Maslanka often favors complex textures made of simultaneous layers, each with its own rhythmic and pitch profile. His music is not danceclub music, but last night, I could understand how the layers fit together better than I could as an undergrad. I think listening closely to a lot of techno (which is also organized around the interaction of distinctly-profiled rhythmic layers) has something to do with that.

The most obvious precedent for Maslanka's music is Mahler. This is unusual for living composers, who more often admire Mahler but don't show it in their music. Both composers' use of the ensemble ("orchestration") is light-years ahead of their contemporaries. Last night, I caught myself more than once forgetting that I was listening to a wind ensemble; usually, wind music is easy to identify from the smaller color palette, but Maslanka blows the ensemble's supposed limitations out of the water. Both have overtly religious/spiritual overtones. Both could be criticized for the use of themes "beneath" classical music -- Mahler for quoting and mimicking Austrian folk songs, and Maslanka for the occasional hint of pop music -- and both transcend those materials.

It would be a tall assertion to put Maslanka on the same level as Mahler, but I can say this: the piece has more of an effect on me now than when I first got to know it, even as I have become a more critical listener. It's aged well, and it leaves the sensation of more layers waiting to be peeled away. That, in my book, is a marker of good stuff.

While in LA, I spent more time with my Duke colleague Penka. One day, we went to Little Tokyo for lunch with another Duke colleague, Chris Adler. It was very nice to see them both and catch up on what they are doing. Here we are in front of the tall tower at the entrance to the crowded plaza.