Flatland

Written in 2022 for wind ensemble (8 minutes)

Commissioned by and performed by the University of Nebraska at Kearney Wind Ensemble, conducted by Duane Bierman live recording in Kearney, Nebraska

From the score:

I’ve been very fortunate to have had opportunities to travel, and we’ve all experienced an easy question of small talk - “where are you from?” I am from Nebraska: born and raised within 40 miles of my great-grandfather (himself born in Nebraska in 1897). Especially when outside the US, folks often haven’t heard of my home state or have very little frame of reference for what is there or what life is like in Nebraska. It might be true that many of us have grown used to the description “nothing” when asked what there is to do in Nebraska, and the State certainly has developed something of a stereotype as a flat “fly-over state.” However, when asked about your home in earnest, “nothing” is not a good enough answer. The more I’ve had this conversation (especially after moving away), the more I’ve developed a real love for my home-state. For starters, it’s not flat. Even if it were flat, so is the ocean; at least I can walk out on the grass... This piece is something of a meditation on that landscape and its subtle beauty that will always be home. Tones cascade, fade in and out from silence, and push and pull around each other in the blurry harmony. It is at times dense, and sometimes thin. It is at times a summer storm and then a gentle breeze.

The orchestration for this piece is goofy, but by necessity. The seed for this piece comes from an orchestration class I took at UNT in which we were assigned to arrange an already-existing orchestra piece for wind ensemble. The instrumental forces asked for in this assignment were well beyond any wind ensemble I had ever played in. Coming from rural Nebraska, there wasn’t always an abundance of oboes (let alone English Horns), so I emailed my undergrad wind ensemble conductor Duane Bierman asking for a little input on this situation. I was not so much interested in asking for a piece, but more about the realities of directing an ensemble that can’t always cover the expected instrumentation and what composers should think about. Through these conversations, we ended up working out an agreement for a new piece, but I learned a lot about the material realities that come up for directors.

 If you’re writing this for someone specifically, find out what they need or what their resources are. If not, do what you gotta do, just prepare to be flexible. Small ensembles, high school bands, division 2 university bands are the bread and butter of this genre and it’s exceedingly rare that they will have the perfect or ideal instrumentation ready to go. For this piece specifically, the ensemble didn’t have bassoons or oboes, and only had 2 horns, for example. Directors deal with this however they need to; they will literally just not play parts sometimes and they will give parts to various instruments to fill the space (in my piece, the bassoon parts went to two tenor saxes, for example). They gotta do what they gotta do.

I think this is similar for orchestras because not every orchestra can pull off triple winds and brass and have like 6 horns and a contrabassoon, for example. My advice is to just write what you wanna write how you wanna write it, but be prepared for changes. You can curb this by starting from a point of practicality and going a little conservative just to be safe, but also by not being too precious about the particulars. Can the essence of a piece still be there, even if you’re missing the 6th clarinet?

Partially written as Artist in Residence of the Everglades National Park.