Issue No. 33: Crescent City Postcards
This month my composition Crescent City Postcards turns eight years old. I have been reflecting on that piece and its importance in my development as a composer lately, perhaps owing to the fact that I now live in the Crescent City itself - New Orleans.
Crescent City Postcards was commissioned in 2013 by Tromboteam!, a quintet of trombonists from across the United States (Jennifer Griggs, Ben McIlwain, John Grodrian, Craig Watson, and Sarah Paradis), to be included as part of their debut album Last Lap. Although I had never written chamber music for the instrument before, I was intrigued by the possibilities and knew that I would use the occasion to celebrate a Southern city I loved so dearly.
The piece was also an arena in which I would make a concentrated effort toward meaningfully combining multiple genres of music into a single narrative, a practice I had not experimented with at that point. I had written big band jazz charts, harmonized hymns, created hip hop beats, composed contemporary classical music, and knew folk/popular tunes, but had never attempted to truly synthesize these threads into a long-form creation.
The result - based on performer, critical, and audience feedback (as well as the satisfaction of my own aesthetic standards) - was successful. A light bulb came on in my mind. I didn’t have to choose between genres of music to write. I could find methods of fusion that didn’t ring false or sound watered down. I wasn’t interested in so-called “genreless” music. Rather, I desired my works to be “genre full.”
The spark of invention I discovered in writing Crescent City Postcards ushered in an intense period of composing. Within ten months I wrote seven pieces, each of which in its own way explored bringing together various styles of notated and improvised music: Crescent City Postcards for trombone quintet; Noir Fantasy for wind ensemble; Planetesimal Bump for jazz ensemble; Gallery for woodwind quintet; Remembrance for woodwind quintet; Ondes et Ombres for violin, clarinet, and piano; and Arcanum for solo alto saxophone. All told this amounts to about 85 minutes of music!
Listen to Tromboteam’s album recording here, synched beautifully with the score by Nick Gianopoulos for his excellent YouTube channel. The first movement, “Lake Pontchartrain Waltzes,” is an evocation of the gorgeous body of water to the north of New Orleans, combining Bill Evans and Maurice Ravel. The second movement, “All Last Night Sat On the Levee and Moaned,” purges my feelings of anger and heartbreak in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It is a reverse set of variations on a well-known hymn, beginning with fragmentation and concluding with a full statement of the tune. The finale, “Throws,” is so named after the trinkets launched from Mardi Gras floats during parades; musically it resembles Charles Ives writing a 12-bar blues while drunkenly staggering through the middle of the jubilant crowds.