The Study
The ASCAP/CBDNA Frederick Fennell Young Composers Award is a biennial recognition of an outstanding new work for winds by an American composer between the ages of 18 and 30. Although the award was initially given in 2002, the origins of the prize began at the 1997 CBDNA conference when John Harbison’s ballet music Olympic Dances was premiered. This piece represented the first time a consortium involving CBDNA was assembled to commission a major composer. Although consortia are common today, this practice was relatively new in 1997. A similar strategy was used to commission Daron Hagen’s opera Bandanna, which premiered at the 1999 CBDNA conference. Due to the success of these consortia and resulting pieces, the leadership of CBDNA took steps to create a more formalized budget over the next four years. This made funding available to continue similar projects involving composer collaboration, including what would eventually become the ASCAP/CBDNA Fennell Prize.
In 1999, Frances Richard, a member of the Creative Services Division of ASCAP and long-time mentor of composer Daron Hagen, attended the CBDNA conference at Hagen’s request. Although she had been somewhat aware of what was going on in college bands, she was pleasantly surprised and excited by the quality of repertoire and performance she heard. The CBDNA vice president at the time, Michael Haithcock, continued to speak with her over the subsequent months about repertoire development. She believed CBDNA and the band medium were successfully building their case for the upper echelon of composers to write for winds, with composers such as Michael Colgrass, John Harbison, and Joseph Schwantner leading the way. However, Richard felt young composers emerging from doctoral programs were still being encouraged to write their first big pieces for orchestra. The idea of an award for a younger age group was intended to attract these composers to the band medium earlier in their careers. (M. Haithcock, personal email communication, August 15, 2017)
The award was formalized over the next two years as a partnership between ASCAP and CBDNA, with CBDNA providing the prize of US$5,000, and ASCAP advertising the competition and facilitating the adjudication from their offices in New York City. Frederick Fennell, founder of the Eastman Wind Ensemble, was still alive but in declining health, and CBDNA chose to attach his name to the award as a way of honoring him in perpetuity. The timing was set up for the award to be presented during the fall of an even year (initially in 2002) before a CBDNA national conference (initially in 2003 in Minneapolis, Minnesota), where the winning work would be performed. A significant component of the original award concept was to have the composer in attendance at the national conference where he or she would be saturated in the quality of repertoire and performance witnessed by Frances Richard, with the ultimate goal of encouraging them to write more pieces for winds.
The winning work is selected through a juried competition that attracts submissions from eligible composers from across the United States. In recent years, the panel has consisted of two members of CBDNA, appointed by the president, and two to three representatives from ASCAP, appointed by Cia Toscanini, Vice President of Concert Music. Composers submit a hard copy of their score and recording to the ASCAP offices in New York, and submissions are not anonymous. The committee meets for one day at the ASCAP offices to select a winner. At this time, a proposal has been brought forth to switch to an electronic submission process, but at the time of the most recent award (2016), reviews were still done with hard copies (P. Dunnigan and E. Rombach-Kendall, personal email communication, August 22, 2017).
At the time of this publication, the award has been given eight times to the following composers and pieces: Michael Djupstrom (2002) for Homages, Yotam Haber (2004) for Espresso, Matthew Tommasini (2006) for Three Spanish Songs, Kathryn Salfelder (2008) for Cathedrals, Joshua Hummel (2010) for Haiku Symphony no. 4, Takuma Itoh (2012) for Daydreams, Shuying Li (2014) for Slippery Slope, and Nathan Stang (2016) for Undertow. The first five award winners (Djupstrom, Haber, Tommasini, Salfelder, and Hummel) received performances of their pieces at national CBDNA conferences. In 2012, the language of the award announcement changed to indicate that the winning piece would receive a performance by “a prominent ensemble” in the following year, with no mention or guarantee of a specific CBDNA conference performance. Subsequently, the three most recent winners (Itoh, Li, Stang) have not had their pieces performed at CBDNA conferences.
As the Fennell Prize has been awarded eight times to date, there is now a body of composers and pieces to consider. This study examines the composers that have been awarded this prize to introduce more conductors to them and their pieces, understand how the award affected their careers, explore each composers’ approach to writing for winds, discover other wind band pieces the composers have written or plan to write, and determine whether the Fennell Prize achieved its initial goals of increasing composer awareness of the band medium. The eight winning composers were interviewed via telephone by the author in January 2017.
Questions
How would you describe your piece to someone who might be considering programming it?
What effect did this award have on your career?
What have you written for winds since the award?
What is your approach to writing for winds? Are there models or composers you look toward when writing for winds?
What are some challenges you find in writing for winds alone?
Which living composers do you most admire?
What musical projects do you have on the horizon?
How Would You Describe Your Piece to Someone Who Might Be Considering Programming It?
Michael Djupstrom: I didn’t intend the piece [Homages] to be a series of homages to any particular composers, but when I wrote the piece, the deadlines and turnaround times were really short. Prior to writing the piece, I was just finishing my undergraduate degree, so I was in a period of development and exploration, and I was trying to do lots of different things in every piece. When this particular request came around, there wasn’t enough time for me to decide what I was going to do. I realized there was no time to intellectualize this, so I just sat down at the piano and started writing. The piece that came out was more traditional than anything I had been doing in the last couple of years. The first movement in particular sounds like Stravinsky. It wasn’t meant to be a Stravinsky pastiche, but in writing that first movement and then the other two movements, I realized to what extent the compositional tradition was part of me, how I had internalized it, and how that lineage and tradition was a really important part of what I felt I wanted to say in music, rather than always trying to say something innovative just for innovation’s sake. And that’s where the title came from. Maybe if it had been 10 years later, I would have tried to get rid of some of those overt influences, but because of the urgency of the commission, there was no time to do it. So I decided to let it be what it was.
I think most of the language is rooted in early 20th century idioms, harmonically especially. But also in some of the construction like the way the first movement is built out of different “blocks,” like instrumentation and motivic blocks. The music doesn’t develop that much; mostly it’s just different treatments of the same melodic material. It’s kind of like working with a red block, a blue block, and a green block, then you choose the order in which you’re going to put the blocks, but you only have those to choose from. You could say it’s rooted in the palate of early 20th century sounds. It’s a very dynamic work. The second movement especially is the most dramatic, or perhaps violent, of the three (M. Djupstrom, personal telephone communication, January 13, 2017).
Yotam Haber: I would say the piece [Espresso] is over before you know it. It’s a very small piece, it’s very concentrated, and it’s very dense. It’s very much like a shot of espresso. I wouldn’t say I write very programmatic music, but that idea of density and brevity definitely was inspired by my love of coffee. For better or for worse, it’s not a very “band-like” piece, and it doesn’t treat woodwind and brass instruments the way that they’re accustomed to being treated. I think there is something subtle about the piece (Y. Haber, personal telephone communication, January 12, 2017).
Matthew Tommasini: I think of the piece [Three Spanish Songs] as a mini-theater piece, in a way. It is based on three different poems by Latin American poets. The first one, “Olas grisis,” is basically a rain song, the second, “Nocturno,” was written as a type of opera scene, and the final song, “Sueño despierto,” is a set of theme and variations based on different dream images that are portrayed in the poem. What drew me to the poetry was this focus on imagination, dream states, and a variety of emotional states. I think, for the ensemble and the singer, it really runs the full gamut. The first movement is a strophic rain song and uses more of a tonal language. The second movement is more of a dark, intense opera scene. The piece asks a lot of the ensemble, and I think that’s what’s really interesting; you run the whole gamut of emotions (M. Tommasini, personal telephone communication, January 9, 2017)
Joshua Hummel: The inspiration behind the piece [Haiku Symphony no. 4] is the Japanese poetic form of three lines. Normally, it would represent brevity and a singular focus. But instead of using the brevity as a jumping off point, I wanted to see what would happen if I used the structure of a Haiku to form the structure of the actual piece. So under the hood of Haiku 4 is everything to do with fives, sevens, and fives, which are the syllables of a traditional English haiku. There are also a lot of 17s underneath it all. I was trying to take band music that I’d heard and see if I could put my own voice in it, and I think it was somewhat successful in that regard (J. Hummel, personal telephone communication, January 10, 2017).
Kathryn Salfelder: Cathedrals was inspired by Gabrieli, cori spezzati, and antiphonal choirs. After I experienced a live performance of Gabrieli’s canzonas, I thought, “Wow, that was awesome, I wish I wrote this.” My excitement about Cathedrals comes from my excitement about Gabrieli and 16th-century counterpoint, which I was also working on at the time. I had been writing a lot of motets in the style of Palestrina. I wanted to merge three things: the counterpoint of Palestrina, the vertical harmonies of Gabrieli, and my love of the wind band medium (K. Salfelder, personal telephone communication, January 13, 2017).
Takuma Itoh: When Cynthia Johnson-Turner asked me to write the piece [Daydreams], she asked me to try to think outside the box. The hall that the piece would be performed in [Bailey Hall at Cornell University] was a somewhat round shape with a balcony throughout the entire semicircle. I wanted to use that to my advantage and incorporate antiphonal aspects into the piece. Toward the middle to the end of the piece, I have a few musicians leave the stage and go up into the balcony, and at the end, it is a surprise when you start hearing music coming from all sides. It has worked a lot better than I expected for many of the halls where it has been performed. Even if they don’t have a balcony, the surround sound is fairly effective and not often done. So it’s a new experience, and if you make it a decent surprise then it’s a great effect (T. Itoh, personal telephone communication, January 10, 2017).
Shuying Li: As a composer, the first decision I have to make concerns process. The first note of Slippery Slope was put to paper only after I had the whole second movement in mind. At that time, this was the one and only movement, and it was not until after I had almost finished the movement that I developed ideas about the third movement and then the first, chronologically. There are several different levels or definitions interpreted about “slippery slope” in the piece. Whereas the second movement, or the main movement, explores various relationships between two different musical personalities (one rigid and angular, the other lyrical and emotional), and constrains every possible growth from developing into a final climax until the very last moment, the third movement offers the audience straightforward and undisguised excitement with the partially humorous, partially passionate journey as it takes so much effort to arrive at the peak (the second movement is indeed the longest) before slipping down the slope. Consider the first movement as a mystifying preparation interrupted by several “trailers”—fragments from the subsequent two movements, that either reveal or obscure what will happen next (S. Li, personal telephone communication, January 20, 2017).
Nathan Stang: I would describe Undertow as a response to Debussy’s La mer that is more concerned with the natural violence of the ocean than how beautiful it is. The piece relies a lot on control of density in the ensemble, and there are often times where many players are playing the same thing, but an eighth note or a 16th note away from each other to create a big effect. A lot of difficulty arises from these types of ensemble issues. I would call this micro-canonic, and that’s where a lot of the technical difficulty arises (N. Stang, personal telephone communication, January 11, 2017).
What Effect Did This Award Have on Your Career?
Michael Djupstrom: Having a large award at an early stage in your career is really important for young composers, most obviously because it puts your name on the map. One of the immediate things that happened was that the piece was performed at the CBDNA conference [by the University of Southern California Wind Ensemble with H. Robert Reynolds conducting]. At the time, Craig Kirchhoff was the Director of Bands at the University of Minnesota, where the CBDNA conference was held that year, and he heard the piece. Unbeknownst to me, he decided to publish it in the Windependence series at Boosey & Hawkes. I got an answering machine message one day from the then-president of Boosey & Hawkes, and I didn’t call back right away because I thought it was a joke. She had to call back again before I realized it was for real. So in that instance, the publication was directly linked to the Fennell Award and the subsequent CBDNA performance. I’m sure that even just having a major award as an undergraduate had a big impact on the relative success of applying to graduate school and later having the line in my bio saying my music is published by Boosey & Hawkes. The award was really a huge boost in the professional sense.
Yotam Haber: It is very hard to gauge this. It has not led to any other wind ensemble commissions, and it actually hasn’t been performed very much. Espresso doesn’t seem to really be a piece that has lifted off the ground. It has been played by a few universities, but it is probably too difficult for a high school group.
Matthew Tommasini: Three Spanish Songs is definitely my most performed work, and that certainly had to do with the award to some degree. The original version was for soprano and harp, and I had written it as a graduate student. Just as I was in my final months of school, Michael [Haithcock] approached me. He had heard a recording of the piece and asked if I would consider making an arrangement of the piece for chamber winds. At first, it didn’t really compute because that was the last ensemble I would’ve thought to make an arrangement for, but he was absolutely right. At the time, there was this focus for a lot of conductors to build the repertoire for chamber groups. Michael Haithcock, Rodney Winther, Donald Hunsberger . . . all of them were trying to create small groups of their best students to do more advanced chamber repertoire, and this was the way in which Michael put it to me: that it was a growing sector of the repertoire. So, after it won the award in 2006, it became my most performed work.
Joshua Hummel: This was my first real experience in the band world, and I went to the [CBDNA] conference and I met a ton of people as a result. What it did for my career was give me a lot of interesting opportunities right out of school, provided a positive psychological push, and gave me a certain kind of confidence that my music was worth looking at.
Kathryn Salfelder: I was just 20 years old when I wrote this piece, and I was fortunate to have it win three awards [the ASCAP/CBDNA Fennell Prize, the Walter Beeler Prize, and the U.S. Air Force Gabriel Award] in a relatively short period of time. One of the things I noticed was that it was much easier to deal with publishers when my piece had an award associated with it. It seemed like in publishers’ eyes, the award was like a vetting process or some sort of stamp of approval on the piece. They seemed more likely to take it on for distribution once they thought that people were aware of it because it had an award associated with it. I would also say that being at the CBDNA conference in-person and being able to speak to directors after they had heard it was a big plus. And then having it published by Boosey & Hawkes in the Windependence Series was a big plus in getting the piece out there and getting performances of it. It became a virtuous cycle because the award gave me confidence, the publication gave me confidence, and the performances I got gave me confidence.
Takuma Itoh: I got a few performances in the year or two following the award, but as far as the award leading directly to new commissions or new opportunities to compose for wind ensembles, it hasn’t happened. But were it to come up in the future, having this award would certainly give me more credibility in the eyes of people in the band world. Cynthia Johnston-Turner has championed the work and has performed it with many of the ensembles that she has worked with over the years, so she has been responsible for a large portion of the performances I have gotten of the piece.
Shuying Li: This is the first award on this level I received, and it is a pretty prestigious award. It was a really good foundation for me because this is only my second large-scale piece. After this, I think my writing got a little bit more mature, which is reflected even in my orchestral writing. I think this really helped me get the commission from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
Nathan Stang: I hope this piece will be noticed by prominent bands or people interested in commissioning new music for band. I actually grew up in bands myself, and I really love band music and writing for wind instruments. Even in my orchestra music, I tend to find the wind parts are more dominating than the string parts. So I would love to write more band music, and I hope this award leads to more people hearing Undertow, thinking it is of quality, and considering me for a commission in the future.
What Have You Written for Winds Since the Award?
Michael Djupstrom: I wrote one other [unnamed] piece 2 or 3 years later for a really excellent high school band in Alexandria, Virginia. The piece was performed once, and frankly, it was really hard, not just technically but from a musicianship standpoint. There were many challenges for all involved. It got played again by the University of Michigan Symphony Band, which of course didn’t have any challenges in terms of technique or musicianship. After the second time it was played, I decided that anything I didn’t like about it was my fault, not the players’ fault, so I withdrew the piece.
Matthew Tommasini: I’ve written primarily for chamber winds. I wrote a piece called Taking Sides, which was commissioned by a consortium of the Detroit Chamber Winds, the University of Michigan, and Oberlin Conservatory. It was premiered by H. Robert Reynolds in 2008, and it’s been performed quite often. I also have a piece called The Tree Grows Again and a piece called Torn Canvases for chamber winds. All of those pieces have been performed pretty regularly.
Joshua Hummel: Haiku Symphony no. 4 was the first piece I ever wrote for winds. The same year as the ASCAP/CBDNA Fennell Prize, I also won a choral competition with a big choir piece called New Splendor Arises, which I then scored for wind band. Then I wrote a piece called Firestorm, which is in my catalog but no one has ever done it. I also have a piece that was premiered by the Metropolitan Wind Symphony in Massachusetts called The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. It will eventually be a large collection of pieces, but right now I’ve got I-84, I-40, and I-80, and [the series] finishes with a little two-and-a-half minute piece, I-77. Growing up in North Carolina, that was my favorite interstate because it goes right through the mountains of Tennessee through the Smoky Mountains. After I wrote that piece, there was a conductor in South Carolina who was doing a fanfare program, and he said if I changed the name, he would do it. That became I-77: Fanfare for the Appalachians, which just won the Merrill Jones competition.
Kathryn Salfelder: As I got to know the wind band community after this award, people started approaching me for pieces. I’ve had a steady stream of wind ensemble pieces on my docket that someone has commissioned, which has been great. I was a band kid growing up and I’ve always enjoyed writing for winds. Other pieces include Crossing Parallels, Ungrounded Base, Stylus Phantasticus, Shadows Ablaze, and Prospect Hill: Flourish for Brass.
Takuma Itoh: I am working with Kaiser High School here in Honolulu to compose a short band piece based on the various themes that the students composed themselves. I wanted to show high school students what it means to be a composer and give them an inside look into the creative process. I’ve gone into their class throughout the year to show them where the piece stood, starting from harmonizing their themes on the piano, stringing together their themes to make a coherent piece, and showing how a short score gets orchestrated. They’ll be premiering the work next year when they go on tour to Japan.
Shuying Li: Slippery Slope was my first, and so far only, piece for winds.
Nathan Stang: Riffs on “the Red and White” was written for the Vero Beach High School Band and premiered in 2015.
What Is Your Approach to Writing for Winds? Are There Models or Composers You Look Toward When Writing for Winds? (See Appendix)
Michael Djupstrom: I grew up playing saxophone in band. I also played piano, but the first “social” instrument I played was saxophone. And I played it all the way through high school, and I also added oboe. When I got to the University of Michigan, I had the opportunity to play piano in the Symphony Band when there were parts. So I heard band a lot growing up as a musician, and you could say band was part of my musical DNA from an early age. When I first wrote this piece, I didn’t consciously think I was going to draw upon any particular models, but the sound and the overtones of band were in my head. An example is the way that the upper winds, when scored in a nice tutti, make the lower and middle register shine. That kind of “on-the-job training,” so to speak, comes through any time I write for winds.
Yotam Haber: I really think about registers and tone in the different registers. I especially love how a timbre changes over the course of one very long breath. So I write a lot of passages that require very long breaths and swells. To me, those are aspects of listening to wind music that I especially love, rather than quick, fast figurations. And I am really influenced by one of the touchstone pieces in my life, the Stravinsky Symphonies of Wind Instruments. The way that Stravinsky uses collections of instruments to make one big meta-instrument is very important to me. I also like this idea of panel construction. Rather than moving in a very finished and elegant way from one idea to the next, putting them side by side and moving from one panel to another in a block-like fashion is an aesthetic that I really like. When I decided to write this band piece, I spent a lot of time listening to what was out there. The piece that I absolutely adored that has started a long decade-plus friendship and mentorship was David Rakowski’s work Ten of a Kind. It’s a piece that had been a Pulitzer Prize finalist and was written for the Marine Band. I felt like he solved some problems that are present when you write for really large groups of the same instrument, like 10 or 12 clarinets. How do you deal with the problems of intonation? That piece is so masterful, so that was really important to me.
Matthew Tommasini: I really don’t have any particular models, but I grew up playing in bands; I was a flautist and a trombonist. I started playing in band in middle school so I’m pretty familiar with the repertoire, not just from a composer standpoint but also from a performer standpoint. But I also felt like I wanted to find ways to put my own stamp on the repertoire, so whenever I’m writing a piece for winds, some of that standard repertoire unconsciously finds it’s way into the piece. I’m also trying to find some unique way to get into different combinations. Torn Canvases, for instance, was just setting up three different ensembles and then seeing what would happen if they were all talking to each other. That piece also draws upon other styles that wind instruments are regularly associated with, which is also something I’m interested in. I like the jazz, funk, and brass lines that are all in a collage against each other. For me, it is about finding some kind of hook or some new way of putting the ensemble together to create a different sound.
Joshua Hummel: The thing I love about wind writing is the potential for color. There is no medium like it. And I love that the band world always wants new music; it’s really wonderful in that regard. If you attend a band concert, it is almost all new music. And I love that the standard of the wind playing is not just the professional ensembles, because there are so few. It is all these college groups that are just stellar. And there is this wonderful youthful energy that you get. And let’s just face it, there is some amazing playing out there. So knowing who I’m writing for now has influenced me immensely. There is something special about band music because it has the potential for more extremes. If you want to get soft, you can be so delicate, and if you want to get loud, you can knock people out of their seats. There is something about winds that is really remarkable.
Kathryn Salfelder: I studied the repertoire pretty thoroughly as an undergraduate student. Since then, I haven’t looked quite as much, but I tend to go back to the Holst, Vaughan Williams, and Hindemith models rather than looking at more contemporary models. I’ve also spent time looking at music scored for winds in an orchestral manner. I essentially think of the wind ensemble as the orchestra with the strings never coming in. An example would be Michael Tippet’s Concerto for Orchestra, specifically the first movement, “Mosaics,” which doesn’t have strings. So I spend a lot of time with that kind of repertoire. I write one on a part with the lovely label “doubling is at the discretion of the conductor.” It took me several years to figure out this strategy, but I saw it in a piece by Michael Daugherty, and I thought, “Yes, that is the solution.” You write one on a part so you can orchestrate and balance in a way that you know will be successful. When I write this way, I feel I have better control over the orchestration, timbre, and sound of what I’m creating. I certainly don’t mind if others double in a way that works with their ensemble.
Takuma Itoh: I definitely don’t think of the wind ensemble as an orchestra and just try to substitute for the strings. I try to bring out the colors of each instrument, so I don’t double very much. I like to give solos to a lot of instruments to bring out their uniqueness. The way I write any large ensemble work these days is that I have a lot of notes, but there is room for error. I like to try to avoid overexposing certain things in the solos or within each family, so it gives the performer some level of comfort when they’re performing something that’s relatively difficult rhythmically or note-wise. I take from different composers, so depending on the texture or style that I’m writing, I might look at an orchestration from John Adams, Steven Stucky, or William Bolcom. I’ll also look at other established band, orchestra, or chamber works and hope that it translates for wind ensemble. And most of the time, it is not a problem.
Shuying Li: Usually, I like to explore different textures and timbres using winds. This also applies to other instruments, but I like to put extra emphasis on textures and timbres. I like to explore the various colors. Another important element is structure. I like to have the whole structure ready before I start the first note. I find these elements very important when writing for winds. I was really into Joseph Schwantner’s . . . and the mountains rising nowhere when I was writing this piece. That was a great model for me, and I still admire that piece a lot.
Nathan Stang: This is not specific to winds, but I tend to develop my pitch material first when I’m composing a piece. I find collections of pitches that have interesting properties and find ways to showcase those and do interesting things with them. I tend to like writing for winds because they can so deftly and very solidly demonstrate a horizontal continuity. I almost think of them as laser beams because they’re very direct. There’s not a lot of additional noise in the sound, and I feel like the winds really highlight, without a lot of distraction, what I think is the most interesting part of my music—the pitch content. I think wind instruments can do that better than some others, and it is just very exciting to have these kind of large-scale pitch constructions executed in a way that is very clear and transparent. One piece that I spent a lot of time listening to was Karel Husa’s Music for Prague. I also like Christopher Rouse’s writing for winds, and his percussion writing in particular was very helpful for this piece. There’s a little percussion quote of his in it, because Undertow originally started out as being only for winds. The goal was to make it a companion piece for Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, but I quickly realized I needed percussion. So in trying to develop a way to write for them, I looked a lot at Christopher Rouse’s music, and it was a big help. But I’m also attracted to a lot of the big band standards such as Vincent Persichetti’s Divertimento, and other pieces like that.
What Are Some Challenges You Find in Writing for Winds Alone?
Michael Djupstrom: I think that string instruments, in a certain sense, are more flexible. You can ask any of them to play in any register—even the low strings can play extremely high—and they can do anything at almost any dynamic level because of the flexibility of the bow, but winds have a more distinct character. I think that forces you as a composer to be a little bit more demanding of yourself. You can’t just expect the players to make it work because there are more limitations. The flute, for example, in a certain register will sound a certain way. The flute in a different register will sound completely different. So I think that writing for winds sort of forces you to be more specific about what you want as a composer, and I think that’s a real draw. The biggest challenge is coming up with a way to score tutti sounds in different ways that will still have high register expressive qualities. If you have a beautiful tutti where the upper instruments are bringing out partials from the middle, that works once, but you can’t do it over and over again.
Yotam Haber: I love writing for winds, and if I had the opportunity I would definitely write more wind ensemble music. I think that when you leave to chance how many of each wind you can use, you are running into problems with the composer. But Espresso is really written for wind ensemble rather than symphonic band in that I specify exactly how many of each instrument there should be. So I think that’s a good way of solving the problem. As soon as you allow the freedom of any number of players to play a part then you’re losing some compositional control over how the piece is going to work. But I think that wind ensemble music has gotten so far in the last 20 years that this is almost a nonissue. I think that serious composers who are writing wind ensemble music are mostly writing music where they specify that. I think another problem is that the absence of the string section makes you feel like you need to write a lot of dense music for winds, and sometimes that texture becomes overbearing. But I think that’s a problem of the composer, not a problem of the ensemble. And I think you should be able to solve that. It’s not that there is an inherent flaw in the instrumentation itself. I think composers who dismiss the ensemble are doing so perhaps because they are not familiar with the great literature that is already written for it. It is also a young genre, so there is great music yet to be written for it. I tell my own students that if they have the opportunity to write for wind ensemble, they absolutely should because the chance of getting multiple performances of it is much better than writing an orchestra piece. There is a culture in wind ensemble of admiring and wanting contemporary music that many orchestras don’t have.
Matthew Tommasini: I grew up playing in band so I don’t really see any limitations. There are so many possibilities. As you can tell, I use percussion pretty heavily, and I think that’s one way in which I try to fill in for the role of the strings. But I think with winds, there are so many colors at your disposal, and I think that’s what makes it really fun to write for.
Joshua Hummel: I don’t feel that the challenges are terribly great. What you miss without strings you make up for in color and textural potential. I suppose the sheer amount of editing it takes in a score for so many instruments is challenging, but then you shouldn’t be a composer if you’re afraid of editing.
Kathryn Salfelder: I don’t feel like I’m losing anything by not having the strings, except maybe the ability to score a melody in a high register at a quiet dynamic. That’s really the only thing that I miss when I’m scoring. Even if it’s not a melody, being able to score sustained sound or an ostinato pattern in that register in a nonpiercing way is really difficult. Obviously piccolo and E-flat clarinet can be pretty shrill. You can use mallet percussion for this effect, and I do, and there is certainly a delicacy that you can get with the glockenspiel or bowed vibraphone. On the other extreme, the very low register is also a struggle. Without the tuba playing, it’s difficult to have a bass line that’s really supported, especially if you’re using just the woodwinds of the ensemble. If you have just two bassoons, one baritone saxophone, and maybe a contrabassoon or string bass, it’s really difficult to support a tutti woodwind section at a forte dynamic. So that’s the other thing that I struggle with at times. But generally speaking, I don’t think that scoring for wind ensemble is any more difficult than scoring for any other ensemble.
Takuma Itoh: I do miss the high soft registers. But then again [band] does have a lot of low instruments that are very agile. I guess there are a lot of special effects on the strings nowadays that composers like to take advantage of like shimmering effects and harmonics that are harder to recreate, but I think those are fun challenges to work around. I like to think of ways to incorporate new sounds from the wind instruments instead of trying to figure out how to substitute those exact string sounds into the winds. Thinking of the winds differently than strings and being happy with what you have is really important.
Shuying Li: Slippery Slope is for symphonic wind ensemble. I like to think in a symphonic way of presenting the ideas. In this case, I did find myself wanting some prolonged sounds in the piece, but I think I found a way to achieve this without the strings. I tried to look for alternative timbres that could make up for the lack of string sounds.
Nathan Stang: I actually feel like writing for winds alone is easier in a lot of ways. Aurally, I have a hard time imagining how loud the strings will be in relation to the orchestra or in relation to the winds. I don’t have a lot of experience writing for orchestra and then hearing the piece and learning how to improve upon it. I guess since I spent so much time playing in bands I have a very good “mental band,” and I can pretty easily hear how things will sound.
Which Living Composers Do You Most Admire?
Michael Djupstrom: One I really admire is a Russian composer named Rodion Shchedrin. He has continued the midcentury Russian lineage of Shostakovich in that he is still concerned with voice leading, melody, and harmony and all those things that some other composers have let go by the wayside. And he has supreme talent; he can pretty much do anything he wants. Another composer I admire, but who is no longer living, is George Enescu. He wrote one dectet for winds, but nothing else. I think his ideas about how music develops and the way that his music unfolds is way ahead of its time. For example, when his motives come back they don’t always come back in a recognizable form. But on some kind of deeper level, you recognize as a listener that it makes sense. Honestly, I don’t know a lot of composers in any era that have that kind of really long-term flexibility with their material.
Yotam Haber: David Rakowski made a great impact on me when I was writing Espresso. Two composers that I’m currently really infatuated with are an Italian composer named Pierluigi Billone. He is a student of [Helmut] Lachenmann, an Austrian composer who revolutionized the idea of extended technique in a very impressive way. Billone has taken up that mantel of writing extended techniques for wind and string instruments. The other composer I admire is another Austrian composer named Georg Friedrich Haas, who is on the faculty at Columbia right now. He comes from the latest generation of spectral composers. He wrote a piece called In Vein, and I think that piece is maybe the most important piece that has been written this century so far. It’s a piece that operates on a different level of time and approaches harmony in a new way.
Matthew Tommasini: That’s always a tough question because we tend to gravitate toward certain composers because of their style, but then we grow out of it or move on to someone else. But I was a big fan of John Corigliano’s work for a long time. John Adams helped create a new kind of language after postmodernism in a way. I’m based in Hong Kong now, and I’m the associate artistic director of a festival called the Intimacy of Creativity, and the artistic director is Bright Sheng. We’ve worked together for 7 years now, and I’ve gotten to know his music really well. He’s been a good influence. For me, it’s less about being inspired by one particular composer, but rather it’s about understanding the creative process in general. In the case of [this festival], we invite composers to come to Hong Kong; in many cases, I don’t have any relationship with or affinity with their style of music making, but there is still something there that we can all pick up on and share in a discussion.
Joshua Hummel: He is not still living, but Gerald Finzi is one of those slightly unsung English pastoral composers; I think if anyone has inspired me, it is him. His ability to write contrapuntal music with ever-interesting harmonies is always fascinating and deeply beautiful. But even greater than counterpoint and harmonies, his melodies are just gorgeous. They are soaring and lovely, and have immeasurably inspired a love of melody in my own music. I am currently in love with Aaron Jay Kernis’s On Distant Shores; the second movement in particular is just stunning. I am also a huge Arvo Pärt fan. My music sounds nothing like his, but I love the simplicity and how each note matters. I would say in the band world, one of my favorite pieces is Jonathan Newman’s My Hands Are a City. That is just a lovely piece. And I love Morton Lauridsen. And also Hannah Lash. And of course John Luther Adams.
Kathryn Salfelder: I find a certain intimidation factor in listening to what other people are currently doing. While it can be really inspirational, especially when you hear something you like and can borrow, it is not something I spend a whole lot of time actively listening to. I am certainly aware, and I follow the “top twenty” of what’s going on, for example, the new pieces by Kaija Saariaho, John Corigliano, and Sofia Gubaidulina.
Takuma Itoh: I always admired William Bolcom’s music. I admire Sebastian Currier, George Tsontakis, Magnus Lindberg, and John Adams quite a bit. I’m always fascinated by composers that are perhaps more “trendy,” but whenever I come back to listening to these composers, I remember why I keep coming back to them. And then there are so many composers in my generation producing great works now. Several composers that I met when I was at the Aspen Music Festival have had a big impact on me and have made quite a name for themselves, including Anthony Cheung, Sean Shepherd, and Sarah Kirkland Snider. Some of my classmates at Cornell like Christopher Stark, Eric Nathan, Jesse Jones, and Taylan Cihan have been very influential to me as well.
Shuying Li: I really like the Korean composer Unsuk Chin, who also happens to be a female composer. I also like the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Of course Joseph Schwantner is on my list. I played a number of his pieces as a keyboard player. Also my teacher, Michael Daugherty, writes a lot of band music that is really interesting. His style is really different from mine, but I learn a lot from him.
Nathan Stang: Probably the most prominent composer I am following right now is Hans Abrahamsen. He was a recent winner of the Grawemeyer Award for his piece for soprano and orchestra called Let Me Tell You. I feel mystified by his music because it is everything my music isn’t. He’s very concerned with color, timbre, and all these acoustical nuances. He will try to emphasize certain overtones of a very colorful sound, or he’ll ask for multiple tunings of instruments. In the end of his piece Schnee, all 11 instruments are at different tunings—some are at pitch, some are up a sixth tone, and some are down a sixth tone. It has a very fluttery effect, and I’m mystified by how he does it because it is territory I’m not quite comfortable with yet. I actually had a lesson with him on Undertow when he was a visiting professor at Eastman.
What Musical Projects Do You Have on the Horizon?
Michael Djupstrom: The next piece I’ll be working on is a string quartet, to be premiered in March 2018. There is this great string quartet called the Dover Quartet, and the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music has commissioned a full-length quartet from me for them. I also just finished a small song set.
Yotam Haber: I just finished a piece for the Kronos Quartet that’s going to be premiering in Washington D.C. in March of 2017. And the biggest piece I’ve ever written, called New Water Music, is going to be premiering in April of 2017, and that is a commission by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. It will be played by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and hundreds of community string, winds, and brass players. That is going to be played on a parade of boats here in New Orleans. It’s sort of a companion piece to Handel’s Water Music.
Matthew Tommasini: In terms of winds, I continue to have these pieces performed pretty regularly. It’s always fun for me to see who is performing these pieces. Three Spanish Songs is the most performed piece, and I would say Taking Sides is probably next after that. I don’t have any wind projects in the works right now, but I am definitely really interested in writing for the whole large ensemble, so that’s something I’d be looking for an opportunity to do.
Joshua Hummel: There are a couple of pieces I’d love to write if I can get consortiums together. One is called Fractal about the concept of inner motives contrasting bigger motives. I’d also like to write a “Hummel Trumpet Concerto.” Since that happens to be my last name and it’s also the most famous trumpet concerto in the repertoire, I think a new one for wind band would be perfect for our new century. And I recently finished a commission for a tenor in Minnesota who had done an oratorio of mine a year ago.
Kathryn Salfelder: I am finishing my Requiem for string orchestra, choir, and organ, which is my dissertation project. It’s different for me because there are no winds, which was somewhat intentional. I wanted to stretch myself to write for an instrumentation that is different for me. I also have a piece for the University of Nebraska coming up in 2019. And I have a piece for Frank Battisti’s commissioning project that was organized by Fred Harris. Harris commissioned me, Michael Weinstein, and Ken Amos to write a trio of pieces for wind band. Frank Battisti is going to write a fugue subject, and we are all writing contrapuntal pieces based on Frank’s fugue subject. I will write a piece for elementary band based on this fugue subject. At the end of this project, there will be a trio of pieces: elementary, middle, and high school, all based on the same fugue subject. So, hypothetically, a student could progress through their band program and get to interact with the same musical material in different ways at different levels.
Takuma Itoh: In Hawai’i, where I teach, we write a lot of music for Asian instruments, and I’m currently writing a piece for a Korean instrument called a gayageum, and electronics. A gayageum is a horizontally laid out instrument with strings that you pluck, so it is somewhat similar to a harp with fewer notes to play. Overall, Asian instruments have a different set of priorities than Western instruments, with less focus on intonation and more focus on coloring each note in unique ways. It’s quite challenging to notate since our notation system isn’t great at depicting timbre, but it has opened up a whole new way of thinking about my compositions in general, including how I write for Western instruments. I’m also writing a string quartet for a group based at University of Texas at Austin called invoke. They are a normal string quartet of two violins, viola, and cello, but one of the members doubles on the mandolin and another doubles on the banjo. I’m writing a piece for them, but I’m going to ask them to play ukulele instead so that I can bring some of the sounds of Hawai’i into their repertoire.
Shuying Li: I received a commission from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which will have its Carnegie Hall première in December 2017. The piece is going to be about “baby blues,” also known as postpartum depression. I would like to share some really personal emotions, as I just had a baby last March, so this is a piece about that.
Nathan Stang: The thing taking up most of my time right now is my dissertation piece, which will be performed next year sometime. It will be a monodrama, and it will be a setting of a Sherwood Anderson short story for baritone and chamber orchestra. Anderson was of the generation of American authors before Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, and he was actually responsible for getting some of those authors published earlier in their careers. His short stories were really wonderful, and there is one in particular called “A Death in the Woods”; it is told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator. So my dissertation is a setting of that short story, and I’ve adapted the text to be performed by the baritone soloist.
