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COMPOSERS' CORNER

with Brett Abigaña

VOL. IV

July, 2016


Piece of the Month:
Press
 

by Vince Oliver

This month's installment of Composers' Corner focuses on a piece I first heard at the 2014 Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic: Press by Vince Oliver. Written for the Saratoga Strings from Saratoga High School in Los Gatos, California, the piece is rated as a Grade 4, and is written for string orchestra and electronics.

The first thing that captures the listener is the intense, driving groove. From the very first pizzicato note to the final glissando, the groove is a powerful force, pushing the music inexorably forward while also roaming freely through influences of funk, hip-hop, and EDM. But don't be fooled: this is no gimmick piece! The music in the strings is decidedly the focus of the work, and the electronics never become redundant, repetitive, or predictable. But of course you can hear the piece, look at a sample score, and read the composer's description here. Instead, I'd like to explore how to go about teaching Press, and by extension, how to use it as a teaching tool in the classroom.

To begin with, this can be an excellent way to drive home the point that not all contemporary music operates on a plane separate from the world of pop music. As it turns out, composers don't just listen to classical music! At the same time, a piece like this can persuade a whole new generation of young musicians who wouldn't otherwise be interested in contemporary music to go and investigate it.

Perhaps the most difficult part of learning and performing this piece is feeling the groove. This is something that many string players have difficulty with, given the relatively specific ensemble settings they may find themselves in (as opposed to a trumpet player who may, over the course of a typical day, play in orchestra, concert band, jazz band, marching band, and even rock band). Learning to connect a style of music they've no doubt heard with their own instrumental playing can be a challenge. To that end, I might suggest simple rhythmic exercises over a drum beat. If the size of the orchestra permits it, a simple call-and-response approach would work, wherein each player invents a 1-measure rhythm before the rest of the group repeats it back. This can lead to other ear training exercises based in rhythmic dictation and notation, canonic rhythms, and syncopation. Of course, feeling the groove is much more than just playing with rhythmic precision. Vince Oliver says, "It's not simply just playing in time, but it's landing on the strong beats with authority, perhaps laying back a bit in certain moments, moving forward in other moments."

Another potentially new hurdle is the use of a click track. Within any performance, there is always some variation in tempo, but when recorded electronics are involved, that flexibility is usually not there. Musicians therefore have to be quite strict with their rhythmic performance, and of course the conductor can't adjust his/her tempo to accommodate them. Fortunately, the pattern-based structure lends itself to rhythmic accuracy, especially when at full tempo. In addition, if the musicians really feel the groove, and especially if they feel it in a kind of hyper-metric two beat-per-measure setting, this kind of consistent tempo is easy to achieve.

Finally, there are moments in the piece where the composer explicitly does not want pitch accuracy, favoring instead a kind of aggressive sloppiness. This kind of chaos will no doubt need to be planned, at first. But with time, when students feel comfortable with the intricacies of playing the piece, they will no doubt relax in those sections, and the tone clusters will come through. This can be a good introduction to the concept of gestural and aleatoric music.

In teaching this piece, the composer suggests starting with a metronome or click track at half-tempo, just to get the notes and rhythms firmly in hand. Then gradually increase the tempo until the ensemble can play with the performance+click track. This can be distributed to students so they can practice at home with the aid of an iPod. Then transition to just the performance track while the conductor has the combination on a headset.

I've heard so many comments about Press from people who have heard it in performance and students who have played it. Across the board, they have been full of excitement and enthusiasm for this new sound, for the combination of classical and pop music, and the overall effect of the piece. Check out this and many more pieces in the World Projects Publishing catalogue, and as always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].

Stay tuned next month for "How to Work with a Living Composer"!

 
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