{"id":345,"date":"2010-04-20T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-20T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/fisk-university-concert\/"},"modified":"2014-07-06T14:59:05","modified_gmt":"2014-07-06T14:59:05","slug":"fisk-university-concert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/fisk-university-concert\/","title":{"rendered":"Fisk University Concert"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Back in 2007, I met Dr. Gary Nash<\/a> (Professor of Music at Fisk University<\/a>) on myspace.com. <\/span>Our mutual friend, composer Arlene Sierra<\/a>, was the connecting point. <\/span>Dr. Nash is a renowned instructor and composer, and invited me to be a guest artist and composer for the annual Fisk Jazz Ensemble Spring Concert. <\/span>Every year since 2003, Dr. Nash has invited various performing artists to participate in the concert, and he asked me to participate in the 2010 concert. <\/span>Of course, I was honored and enthusiastically accepted Dr. Nash\u2019s invitation! <\/span>Over the following 2 years, I thought about composing for the ensemble, but made no actual effort to compose. <\/span>I assumed that it would be best to wait until I knew the actual instrumentation of the ensemble and to throw myself into the act of composing for the specific instruments. <\/span>In other words, I procrastinated\u2026<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

January 2010 came and went faster than I could have imagined, and still, I had nothing to present to Dr. Nash. <\/span>Dr. Nash had been gently nudging me to submit music, and I had every intention to do it\u2026but procrastination is a strong and seductive excuse for insecurity. <\/span>After all, I hadn\u2019t composed instrumental music since high school! <\/span>Could I actually do this, and do a good job on the orchestration? <\/span>Gulp!!<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

February 2010\u2026Ok, I better get to work on this! <\/span>Back in March 2009, I performed in a concert of music performed and composed by a group of fantastic women musicians. <\/span>I wrote a piece called \u201cAlone\u201d for this event. <\/span>I based the tune on a pretty piano motif that happens to be in 7\/4 (I had been playing music from Romania all week that was in 7\/4, so that\u2019s where my head was). <\/span>I created the melody with the intention of singing the song, but never developed more than a hook lyric. <\/span>So for this event, the piece was performed as mostly instrumental, but with lyrics in the hook. <\/span>I decided that this piece would be one of the works I\u2019d present to Dr. Nash, so I sent him the score and exhaled. <\/span>Ok, one down! <\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

In early March 2010, I knew that I could no longer delay sending more music to Dr. Nash. <\/span>I sat at the piano one night after dinner (which, in my case, is around 1am, as I always eat very late at night) and played out my feelings. <\/span>I was in a somewhat melancholy mood and the melody I created reflected this. <\/span>The resulting tune is \u201cPrelude + Resignation\u201d. <\/span>The “Prelude” is written in 3\/4 time and the \u201cResignation\u201d in 4\/4 time, a nod to the 7\/4 time of \u201cAlone\u201d. <\/span>This piece has a dreamy quality to it, and is actually my favorite of the group. <\/span>The melody is played by flute and piano, and eventually, I may add lyrics to this piece as well.<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

A week before the concert, I kept having a nagging feeling that my work was not complete, and that I should present 3, not 2, works of music for the concert. But the music had not yet revealed itself to me. <\/span>One night, that week before the concert, I had been listening to Thelonious Monk<\/a> and Sergei Prokofiev<\/a>, and went to the piano with an idea: blending the angular rhythms and melodies of Monk with those of Prokofiev in a swinging, simple tune. <\/span>And voila! <\/span>A new tune was born. Imperturbable is my favorite word at the moment. <\/span>How awesome (and mature) would it be to be imperturbable, no matter what? <\/span>Cut off and stuck in traffic? <\/span>No biggie. <\/span>Financial woes? <\/span>So what? <\/span>Can\u2019t think of anything to write as the final piece in a major concert that\u2019s coming up soon?? <\/span>Ahem\u2026you get it.<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

So, I named my new piece “Imperturbable”. I was thrilled! <\/span>I now had 3 pieces to perform for the concert. <\/span>I immediately emailed the new tune and updates to the previous tunes to Dr. Nash, crossing my fingers that he wouldn\u2019t say \u201ctoo late\u201d. <\/span>He didn\u2019t\u2026<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

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Early Wednesday morning, I flew from San Francisco to Nashville, arriving mid afternoon to some of the most perfect weather I could have hoped for. <\/span>After checking into my hotel, I accompanied Dr. Nash to the dress rehearsal with the ensemble, which included myself on piano, Dr. Nash on clarinet, Jon Lauterer<\/a> on drums, Jonathan Hart Price<\/a> on bass, Stuart Naylor<\/a> on trumpet, and students Adrian on saxophone and Karis on flute. <\/span>The rehearsal went relatively well, especially considering I had no idea whether or not my scores were adequate for the other instruments. <\/span>No one complained, so I guess they were ok!<\/span><\/p>\n

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Thursday afternoon, I was the guest speaker for a music business class at Fisk. <\/span>I spoke about my life as a musician, offered advice to the students, answered questions and played a couple of classical pieces and one of my songs, \u201cFaith of a Child\u201d for the gathered audience. <\/span>The students seemed to enjoy my talk, and I had a great time talking about what it\u2019s like to be a working musician.<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

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Then came Thurdsay night! <\/span>Concert time! <\/span>The first half of the concert featured a variety of music, including songs by Michael Jackson. <\/span>My works were after the intermission. <\/span>We started with my piece \u201cImperturbable\u201d (which means \u201c Unshakably calm and collected\u201d, in case you were wondering), followed by “Prelude + Resignation” and then \u201cAlone\u201d. <\/span>The audience was on their feet and cheering loudly after the performance. <\/span>All I could do was smile.\"\" \"\"<\/span>Thanks to Dr. Nash and everyone who played my music for a job well done!<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

Next on my agenda, figuring out the direction of and FINALLY completing my CD project. <\/span>Here I go\u2026.<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

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In the mean time, here’s some of the video from the concert:<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in 2007, I met Dr. Gary Nash (Professor of Music at Fisk University) on myspace.com. Our mutual friend, composer Arlene Sierra, was the connecting point. Dr. Nash is a renowned instructor and composer, and invited me to be a guest artist and composer for the annual Fisk Jazz Ensemble Spring Concert. Every year since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":951,"href":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions\/951"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/victoriatheodore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}