Stacy Garrop

CUSO will be joined by the University of Illinois Oratorio Society, Central Illinois Children’s Chorus, and soloists Sarah Gartshore, Betany Coffland, Steven Soph, and David Govertson to give the Midwest premiere of my TERRA NOSTRA on Saturday, March 9th in Foellinger Great Hall.

When I originally wrote the oratorio in 2014-2015, I wrote a series of blog posts about its creation process. I will be re-posting these here in the days leading up to CUSO’s performance, so that audiences can read about its creation process. 

Originally posted on July 24, 2014 on www.composerinklings.com

I have dedicated this spring and summer to working on Terra Nostra, my oratorio commissioned by the San Francisco Choral Society and Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choirs, with only brief pauses to teach at Fresh Inc Festival and make an arrangement of a traditional Hungarian-Romani folksong (Jarba, Mare Jarba) for Chanticleer’s upcoming season. As of today, I am printing and binding all of the scores for Part I entitled Creation of the World and will mail them in a few days to the San Francisco Choral Society. This is a moment that has been twenty-two months in the making, and I’m psyched to be on the cusp of completing the first stage of this massive project! For those of you not familiar with Terra Nostra, I’m writing a three-part oratorio about our planet earth, how humanity is impacting it, and what we might to do to find a balance that works for us as well as the planet.  I have written two blogs discussing earlier phases of the project: Beginning Terra Nostra and Digging into Terra Nostra.

I often get questions from audience members about what factors go into composing a new piece. For today’s blog, I discuss three general points that greatly impact how I compose, and how these factors shaped Terra Nostra, Part I.

INSTRUMENTATION

The combination of instruments used in any piece comes with its own unique set of balance issues, especially when these instruments are accompanying singers. Some instruments easily outbalance others (i.e. a flute in its low register will lose against a trombone in its high register), so a composer spends a lot of time calculating and compensating for potential balance issues.  I discovered I was having a different sort of balance issue with the project: when the commissioners and I drew up the contract for Terra Nostra, we agreed that the chamber orchestra would be comprised of strings, piano, and three percussionists.  By May, however, I realized that the orchestra could really use winds and brass to balance the choirs at several key moments, particularly when the adult choir is singing at full blast. I also began hearing woodwinds in the accompaniment of some of the lighter movements, which (at least in my head) added some very nice contrast to the ever-present strings and piano.  So, to add more power and increase my color palette, I asked the San Francisco Choral Society if we could reconsider the instrumentation. They were very gracious in letting me swap out two of the percussionists in exchange for four woodwinds and three brass instruments.  This swap has paid off nicely, with far more effective loud sections as well as nuanced quiet moments.

DECISIONS, BIG AND SMALL

Every day, we make dozens, if not hundreds, of decisions: what to wear in the morning, what to eat for breakfast, when to leave for work, and so on. When composing, I become very aware of how many decisions I have to make for every detail: What poem should I set to music? What pitches should I set to a particular phrase of the poem? What rhythms best suit each word in the phrase? How loud or soft should the phrase be sung, and should any of the words be articulated in a specific way? When writing an oratorio, the number of decisions can become overwhelming. To alleviate this stress, I set daily goals of what I want to accomplish; some days, the goal is to compose new material, while on others, it is to flesh out the piano reduction for orchestra. By compartmentalizing the work down into smaller bits, I can handle the day-to-day pressure of working towards a much larger goal. As I progressed through Part I, I noticed that I lost the most time when I waffled back and forth on particular elements of the piece; for instance, I changed my mind multiple times on the instrumental scoring, dynamics, and articulations at two structural high points. In our daily lives, we don’t tend to worry about the small decisions as much as the big. The same is true with composing – I easily made decision after decision on much of the material, but incessantly worked and re-worked several key passages over and over until the music felt just right. While I’m hoping to solve some of these “waffling” issues faster when composing the next two Parts, I suspect that this state of indecision is part of my process, and that sometimes the process just can’t be hurried.

PROPORTION

This is key for all musical aspects of any new piece. On the most basic level, proportion deals with the piece’s structure: is the opening too long, or the ending too short? Does the music steadily build tension to a climactic high point, or did the music stay too relaxed, causing the high point to sound weak?  With Part I of Terra Nostra, these were certainly questions that I dealt with, but there were some other proportion issues as well.  For instance, I needed to balance the number of minutes I composed for the adult and children’s choirs against how many minutes I gave to the soloists.  Part I is 20 minutes long; I allocated a little more than half of that time to the two choirs while the rest went to the four soloists. Proportion is also important among the amount of minutes I gave to each soloist. I couldn’t possibly give all four singers an aria in each of the three Parts, or else the choirs wouldn’t get to sing at all!  In Part I, I solved this issue by writing a four-minute aria for the baritone (“Smile O voluptuous cool-breathed earth!”) while the other three singers have shorter solos embedded in a movement that they sing in combination with the adult chorus (“In the Beginning”). I will follow the same line of reasoning when composing Parts II and III, ensuring that each of the four soloists have an aria of their own somewhere in the oratorio while also joining with the choruses (or each other) in other movements.

I’ll start working soon on Parts II and III; at the moment, however, I can’t wait to finish binding the scores of Part I and send them off to San Francisco! Part I will premiere on November 15 (8 PM) and 16 (4PM) at Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco.

CUSO will be joined by the University of Illinois Oratorio Society, Central Illinois Children’s Chorus, and soloists Sarah Gartshore, Betany Coffland, Steven Soph, and David Govertson to give the Midwest premiere of my TERRA NOSTRA on Saturday, March 9th in Foellinger Great Hall.

When I originally wrote the oratorio in 2014-2015, I wrote a series of blog posts about its creation process. I will be re-posting these here in the days leading up to CUSO’s performance, so that audiences can read about its creation process. 

Originally posted on May 24, 2014 on www.composerinklings.com

I’m digging deep into Terra Nostra, the oratorio I’m composing for the San Francisco Choral Society and Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir. These organizations joint-commissioned me to write an oratorio about our planet. The oratorio consists of three parts: Part I represents the creation of the world; Part II depicts the triumphs of humanity and how our planet is being affected; and Part III contemplates finding a balance between mankind and earth so that we can co-exist. For the past year, I’ve researched texts and assembled them into a libretto, as well as worked on clearing texts still in copyright. Now I’m up to the composing stage – what is the best way to begin?

First up, I took another hard look at the libretto. I’ve known all along that I collected too many texts for the libretto, and that not everything was going to fit into the piece (part of this was intentional – it was highly unlikely that I would be granted clearance for all texts still under copyright, so I wanted some backups on hand). I read through all of the texts again and began imagining how the text might be set, how many minutes each text would take to be sung, and how much time should be allotted to instrumental interludes. Once I did the math, it was time to start cutting out texts; anything that didn’t match the message I am trying to deliver was taken out. Unfortunately, this meant removing texts by the environmentalist John Muir and poet Carl Sandburg. In exchange, I found a wonderful poem by living poet and agrarian Wendell Berry called The Want of Peace, which will work very well at a crucial moment in Part III. Chances are I’ll still need to cut out a little more text along the way, but I hope not too much more – I like the shape that the libretto is taking.

Next, I started sketching ideas for several movements in Parts I and III. As much as I’d like to write the piece from the beginning straight through to the end, composing isn’t a linear process for me. I need to know what motives, gestures, and progressions will be important in Part III while I’m composing Parts I and II, so I can start to foreshadow and develop these over the course of the entire oratorio. This means that I need to compose some of the music in Part III while working on Part I. There is an additional tie-in for Parts I and III: both Parts conclude with identical text from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I introduce the material in Part I sung by the children and adult choruses, and will develop it with additional text from Leaves of Grass that will be sung by the four soloists.  So whatever I write for Part I needs to have enough potential to grow into something bigger to end the entire oratorio.

My sketching process involves pencil and paper reductions made at a keyboard, which I then start to flesh out as I enter the material into a computer notation program. At this stage, I’m mostly composing piano reductions, as the choirs and soloists will need those scores from which to rehearse.  Eventually, these will be fleshed out for the orchestra at a later point.

Suffice it to say, I’m making headway on the oratorio. But with a project of this size and scope, thank goodness I have eight months to complete the entire piece! The San Francisco Choral Society is rolling out Terra Nostra in three stages. People in Northern California can catch the premiere of Part I this November 15 and 16 at Calvary Presbyterian in San Francisco. Part II will premiere in April 2015, and Parts I, II, and III will be performed as a whole in November 2015.

 

 

CUSO will be joined by the University of Illinois Oratorio Society, Central Illinois Children’s Chorus, and soloists Sarah Gartshore, Betany Coffland, Steven Soph, and David Govertson to give the Midwest premiere of my TERRA NOSTRA on Saturday, March 9th in Foellinger Great Hall.

When I originally wrote the oratorio in 2014-2015, I wrote a series of blog posts about its creation process. I will be re-posting these here in the days leading up to CUSO’s performance, so that audiences can read about its creation process. 

Originally posted on Feb. 13, 2014 on www.composerinklings.com

I am currently working on a project two and a half years in the making, and it is the largest undertaking of my career.  In September of 2011, Robert Geary (the conductor of the San Francisco Choral Society, Volti, and the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir) asked if I were to compose an oratorio, what would it be about?  At the time, Bob and I were at the Volti Choral Institute for High School Singers in Occidental, California.  Students from four local high schools were gathered together for a fun weekend of singing alongside choristers from Volti; they were rehearsing one of my Millay sonnet sets that the combined choruses would perform a month or so later in a concert in San Francisco.  Perhaps it was because we were surrounded by gorgeous redwood trees in the middle of wilderness, or maybe because I had recently composed a string quartet based on Gaia (the personification of the earth in Greek mythology) and felt that I had more to say on that subject—whatever the reason, by the end of our three day institute, I pitched to Bob the basic concept of an oratorio in three parts that celebrates the planet, the rise of humanity, and the search for a balance between the earth and mankind.  He liked it, and I sent him a fleshed-out formal proposal after the institute.  It took about a year from that point to be approved by the San Francisco Choral Society and a commissioning contract to be formulated; the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir also came aboard as joint commissioners.  By January 2013, all of the paperwork was in place, and I was green-lighted to commence the project.

The size of the oratorio will be physically big.  I am scoring it for four soloists, the San Francisco Choral Society, one of the choirs in the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir, string orchestra, piano, and three percussionists.  It is also big in duration, containing three parts that will be approximately 20 minutes each for a total duration of an hour [please note that the final duration is actually 74 minutes].  The parts will receive staggered premieres, with the first part premiering in November 2014, the second part in April 2015, and all three combined parts in November 2015.

Additionally, the oratorio is big in scope, involving approximately 22 texts.  I searched a diverse variety of writings for about eight months, and crafted the libretto from a wide range of sources and writers: creation myths from four continents, a passage from the Book of Genesis, verses about the European Industrial Age, writings by John Muir and Walt Whitman, and poetry by Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Woodsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Carl Sandburg, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Edna St. Vincent Millay among others. Some of the passages I use will be short excerpts, some will be set in full; some might not survive the composing process and be left out.  At the moment, I am still waiting for permission on two copyrighted texts; it can be a long, multi-month process that requires a lot of patience.  I have not been successful in securing all of the texts that I wanted, but in my months and months of researching texts, I discovered several poems that can take the place of my first choices if need be.

So here I am, two and a half years after Bob’s and my first conversation.  I’m starting to put notes on score paper for part 1.  Bob and the San Francisco Choral Society are firming up details on their end, such as choosing soloists (it will be useful to know the singers’ ranges as I compose), what percussion instruments will be available (another detail that will impact my composing), and where the performances will take place.  The scores for part 1 will be due in late summer, with deadlines for the second and third parts spaced out over the next year.  I’ll periodically return to writing posts about the oratorio, from its composing process to the rehearsal stages and premiere performances.

Am I nervous?  Heck yeah!  And excited too.  This is the biggest opportunity I’ve had thus far in my career, and I intend to enjoy every moment of it.

This past Saturday, we had a wonderful 2nd full day of our Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra Music Alive Composers Institute! Twelve composers from eight Midwest universities joined us for the Institute.

We had lots of activities: CUSO harpist Molly Madden and CUSO percussionists William Moersch and Ricardo Flores gave demonstrations on how to effectively write for their instruments within an orchestra setting; we had lunch with Maestro Stephen Alltop in which we discussed navigating the conductor-composer relationship; and we had a fantastic reading session of three new works by Midwest composers Stephen Caldwell, Brian James Hinkley, and Hunter Chang. Each of these three composers took part in a Q&A with me prior to the reading of their piece, as well as with our audience at the conclusion of the reading session.

Today was Day 1 of our 2-day Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra Music Alive Composers Institute! I gave three presentations today for our twelve student composers (who came from 8 different universities) on strategies for composing, building an online presence, and music business basics. These presentations occurred over the course of the afternoon at the iHotel in Champaign.

Tomorrow, the composers will have workshops in writing for harp and percussion within an orchestral setting, featuring CUSO harpist Molly Madden, CUSO percussionist Ricardo Flores, and CUSO timpanist William Moersch. We will also have a luncheon discussion with Maestro Stephen Alltop on how to navigate the composer-conductor relationship. The Composers Institute culminates with a reading session of works by student composers Stephen Caldwell, Hunter Chang, and Brian Hinkley with Maestro Alltop the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra. The reading session is at 1:00 – 3:30 PM CST at the iHotel in the Illinois Ballroom, and is open to the public. We are also live streaming the event at: https://www.facebook.com/CUSymphonyOrch/

Our composer participants did great today, and I’m very excited for tomorrow!! Thank you New Music USA and the League of American Orchestras for funding these residence activities.

As part of my residence with the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra, I’ve been giving presentations at several organizations in the Champaign-Urbana region. On Wednesday, I gave my “How does a composer compose instrumental music?” lecture/demonstration at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI for short), which aims to demystify the composing process for general audiences.

I took the attendees through the process of how I composed Bohemian Café for woodwind quintet and double bass, starting with studying videos of street musicians in Prague, then looking at early pencil sketches & how I moved the material into a computer software program, and ending with Fifth House Ensemble‘s premiere of the piece (which you can watch online by clicking here).

The OLLI participants were a great and inquisitive audience! This presentation is the second in my “How does a composer compose?” series, as I previously gave a presentation last spring at OLLI on writing choral music.