'What I love about music'
Part 1 in the story and anatomy of my composition, "This Could Be Madness"
Introducing this series
I am a composer, in addition to all the other hats I wear and things I write about on here and elsewhere. Last June, a tremendously talented percussionist named Cameron Leach premiered a percussion chamber concerto of mine called This Could Be Madness (2022) in Ypsilanti, MI with an ensemble of wind instruments conducted by Kevin Fitzgerald, who is the incredibly skilled Associate Music Director of the Jacksonville Symphony. Kevin and I worked together from 2015-2022, just after This Could Be Madness premiered, leading ÆPEX, a nonprofit concert presenting organization in southeast Michigan that specializes in the music of underrepresented and under-performed twentieth and twenty-first century composers from around the world.
This Could Be Madness, its world premiere concert, and the subsequent recording session sum to the greatest and proudest achievements of my life as a composer, so far. As I wrote in a blog post published not long before the onset of the festival that featured the first performance of This Could Be Madness, “this work is, without a doubt, the purest distillation of what I love about music”. At over thirty minutes in length and formed as a single movement , This Could Be Madness is, by far, the longest and most ambitious composition I’ve attempted. The music is expansively expressionistic, with a highly varied, abstract style that pulls all the energy and grandeur it can from the instrumentation.
We are very close to finishing an excellent, high-quality video recording of This Could Be Madness that was filmed in Eastern Michigan University’s Pease Auditorium right after the world premiere. In anticipation of this forthcoming release, and in order to fully honor what this piece means to me, I’ve decided to write a few posts on here that celebrate everything about and that went into This Could Be Madness’s composition.
As a self-produced endeavor supported by donations and grants awarded to me, individually, as well as ÆPEX as an organization, I entered into this opportunity with the goal of making the most confident, powerful, and personal musical statement possible. Based on the course of my my post-graduate career as a composer, I began writing This Could Be Madness knowing it is very unlikely I will have the chance to write a piece like this again. I hoped to say everything I could, everything I needed to at that time, in a manner that was gripping, dramatic, beautiful, and exciting. I believe I absolutely succeeded in realizing this goal, thanks, on an enormous scale, to the superlative, generous efforts of Cameron, Kevin, and the group of instrumentalists we recruited from the local area (flutists Jordan Smith and Justine Sedky; clarinetist Nick Thompson; bassoonist Bryce Richardson; saxophonists Philip Kleutgens, Jason Frazier, Roberto Campa, and Brian Kachur; trumpeter Amanda Ross; trombonist Austin Oprean).
I wrote almost all of This Could Be Madness in December 2020, after beginning to brainstorm the piece the previous April. Kevin suggested I write something for an ÆPEX concert, which was not the norm for my work as executive director, and recommended Cameron as a collaborator. At this point in time, my wife’s and my first son was a little over two months old, and we thought it was strange that COVID-19 hadn’t yet gone away. It is no surprise that the challenges of concomitant early parenthood and early pandemic existence shaped This Could Be Madness’s emotional and symbolic foundation. I felt a symmetry between the quotidian relentlessness of childcare and the surge-recede-surge recursions of COVID. To a significant degree, the whole of This Could Be Madness unfolds in this way: energy builds, erupts, and fades away, but not always on the same time scale as before.
A Peek Inside ‘This Could Be Madness’
I am particularly happy with the piece’s form and pacing, which are two of the most ‘inside-baseball’, composerly characteristics to celebrate. In my (biased) view, This Could Be Madness really needs to be as long as it is, and the music justifies its length by compellingly covering an enormous amount of ground in terms of energy, texture, rhythm, and emotion. I will use the subsequent posts on this topic to examine the piece’s building blocks in more detail, but I wanted to point out one transition I really enjoy, which you can hear in the video excerpt embedded below:
Transitions vary and can be quite tricky to compose well. The above excerpt from This Could Be Madness draws on ideas from Ravel’s 1920 orchestral work La Valse as well as Meshuggah’s 2012 song, “Demiurge”, and 2005 song, “In Death - Is Death” (those recording links are cued to the relevant sections within each example). I aimed to make this transition very interesting and engaging on its own, so it would not feel like connective material, while also adding elements that prepared and dovetailed with the music to which it leads. Throughout this section, you can here alternations of 2 and 3 sixteenth notes (the basic rhythmic unit at this point) in the melody, but the larger groupings continually shorten from units of 11 to 5 (notated, “2+3”). The resultant quickening is subtle, but helps produce a sense of building momentum that adds inevitability to the entrance of new material at the end of the above excerpt. You should also be able to hear ascending scales in the ensemble that help lead the music, melodically, into the subsequent section, an idea I borrowed directly from La Valse and “Demiurge”.
The music that precedes this excerpted transition only uses the irregular meter 11/16, and establishes both the use of the octatonic scale and back-and-forth groupings of 2 and 3 notes that continue as key components in this transistory passage. The next section, what this connective material leads to, uses a different, regular, and more common meter of 4/4 (recurring units of four quartet note beats, the meter we hear the most in popular music), but also retains the octatonic scale in its melodic material.
One of my biggest concerns with this transition was making the departure from irregular collections of 2 and 3 sixteenth notes to a more stable 4/4 time feel relatively smooth (obviously, any change like this will be noticeable, and it should be). You can hear my solution in the regular, spaced-out snare drum hits Cameron plays until the end of the excerpted passage. This specific part of his overall solo is uses the same 4/4 time as the section this transition leads to, as do the aforementioned ascending scales in the winds. This feature introduces the future meter in the background of the irregular patterns that dominate this section, making the eventual arrival of 4/4 feel less jarring.
This breakdown shows you the general stylistic influences that inform This Could Be Madness’s sound, which I discuss the in the aforementioned blog post from May 2022. Drawing on the aesthetics of heavy metal here is something I do in a lot of my music, and usually not in a superficial way. Whenever I lean into my love of heavy metal in a concert setting, I attempt to distill its quintessence, what I believe is its unique intensity and rhythmic energy. This Could Be Madness plays with this idea to a greater extent than any of my other compositions, but builds on the precedents of my song cycles Bound (2015), Folio 1 (2016), and the marimba duo Noa (2017). Unlike that earlier workd, This Could Be Madness is a concerto and, therefore, must negotiate the relationship between the soloist and the accompanying ensemble. Cameron and I communicated very closely about what his part would be like, especially in December 2020, when I wrapped up the first draft, and June and July 2021, when I completed my revisions and began orchestrating the piece.
When you listen, you will hear many times when Cameron’s solo part is doubled and augmented by the other instruments. In some sections, like the more lyrical vibraphone-heavy passage around a third of the way into This Could Be Madness, the winds’ accompaniment emerges entirely from what Cameron plays, like the ramifying branches of a tree. In that particular moment, the slowest and most contemplative in the piece, I use the ensemble to create a multi-layered ‘delay’- and ‘reverb’-style effect where the notes of Cameron’s slow-moving melody are echoed by various wind instruments, each playing at a different speed. Similarly, in parts of This Could Be Madness’s final, climactic section, the trumpet and trombone are tied to interjecting lines Cameron plays on the woodblocks. Here, again, the accompanying instruments color and amplify aspects of the Cameron’s part. The pervasiveness of this characteristic means This Could Be Madness lacks the symbolic struggle of the ensemble against the soloist, and vice versa, that typifies traditional classical concertos. But, why should a piece written in the 2020s uphold those paradigms?
This Could Be Madness unquestionably grabbed the audience at its world premiere in June 2022 at the Ypsilanti Freighthouse. With the venue’s side doors open, the music burst beyond the historic brick walls out onto the adjoining plaza, drawing many people up to hear my music more closely. I’ll never forget the father with a young daughter who came up the Freighthouse’s steps during the middle of This Could Be Madness and recorded about five minutes of the piece on her iPad. Between my compositional choices and Cameron, Kevin, and the ensemble’s incredible performance, the people who heard This Could Be Madness that day found it irresistible.
You can listen to the complete world premiere performance right now by following this link to watch the archived live stream. Thanks to the endeavors of ÆPEX Board Member Adam Schumaker, that video sounds and looks very, very good. With that said, I am so excited for new recording, which is simply spectacular. We partnered with Nelson T. Gast, a local composer, audio engineer, and videographer who also enlisted a fabulous local filmmaker named Toki Shiiki to create a truly splendid multimedia document. You can already see some clips from this video recording on Cameron Leach’s Facebook and Instagram feeds, and I will post my favorite excerpts to my Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube accounts, as well as in the subsequent entries in this series, as soon as possible.