Messier

Written in 2019 for flute, bass clarinet, percussion (x2), violin, cello (180 minutes)
Open-Instrumentation version also exists - contact me for info

Original Program Note

Charles Messier (1730 – 1817) was a French astronomer who had a particular talent as a comet hunter. Through the course of his career, Messier discovered several fixed objects in the night sky easily mistaken as comets. Marking them down as not to waste time with repeated observations, Messier compiled a catalog of 110 unknown objects that were distinctly not-comets. Unknown at the time, Messier itemized a beautiful collection galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae. Today, we know several of these objects by their new names, such as the Crab Nebula, the Eagle Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Whirlpool Galaxy. More recently, M88 (Messier Catalog No. 88) was directly observed to contain a black hole, providing our first images of such a titanic event.

With this piece and in this space, I invite us to work as Messier: thinking in the vastness, always searching. Here, we are not hopelessly swimming in the void, rather, peacefully bathing in it, and taking away any teleological movement; it’s going here, there, and there, and even there! At times, taking diversions, taking suggestions, and introducing a new dynamic energy into this vast expanse.

You will not hear 110 discreet sections, although they are somewhere in the space. Rather, you will hear the structure described by Messier placed into several situations of varying length, instrumentation, texture, and harmony. We have a surface structure here; there are pitch areas, harmonic material, considerations on performance practice, etc. However, the deeper structure is in an engagement and communication across time. There’s evanescence here; this coming and going, subtle interaction, and a patient atmosphere.

We are all connected to the timekeepers of the universe; we are rarely given the authority to decide how long a moment lasts, or where a situation might take us. Still, we have decisions to make; our actions in the periphery effect the environment in our socio-collaborative (or cohabitative) spaces. We must give time and bathe in these experiences. 

Thoughts on the Piece

This was my first excursion into long-form work; the first of a series that I call my duration pieces (Messier, A Timeshare, and Vespers) You can read about this in a dissertation in chapter 1.

This one took a long time to get off the ground: and I had actually sketched it out as far back as early 2016. After the premiere of my piece Liturgy – about 50-minutes long for choir, string quartet, percussion ensemble, and piano – I wanted to make a piece that was even bigger.  

Studying with Anthony Donofrio, we talked a lot about and learned I learned a lot about time and form and structure. At the same time, I was watching a lot of YouTube, especially “edutainment” YouTube, particularly content made by Brady Haran, such as Numberphile, but I really loved Deep Sky Videos, and his long-term plan for making a video about every object in the Messier Catalog. To come up with some sort of formal structure, I did a lot of research on the catalog, the objects and what they are, and when he found them, etc. So, a formal plan was there, and to compose the piece, I only needed time and ideas for the music, which didn’t and couldn’t really come – I was just about to graduate with my BM, so I had other things on my mind. I was about to move away from Nebraska for the first time (I haven’t lived there since) and I was much more focused on spending time with friends; moving to Lincoln for a few months, a little adventure to Europe to see some friends, and partying for a few months were all way bigger priorities than this huge piece.

Even then, once I got to Ohio, I had to start my creative life over in a completely new community and by that point I realized that I hadn’t really written any music that wasn’t extremely cumbersome and difficult to program, so this piece had to sit on the shelf for a long time. Still, it would keep coming back to my mind and I would think about it, and I would think about writing longer and longer duration pieces again and again, but at the time I had a lot to learn about the ”career” side of being a composer: I didn’t know anything about academic festivals, getting performers, trying to make it a name for yourself, or how the bigger world of composition worked. I’d spent the last five years touring in a hardcore band and really only focused on that side of my creative life for a long time. Only in the last year of undergrad had I really realized that this is what I wanted to do, and that composition was my main goal. So, I felt like I was coming from behind; even though I had written some good music that I’m still proud of, I need to focus on my catalog and career-building and not spending all my time working on a three-hour piece that probably wouldn’t get performed anyway. It just didn’t seem like the best strategy at the time.

So, the piece sat there for a long time until 2019 when I was with Antoine Beuger in Haan. We talked a lot about it and long-form pieces in general, but especially notation and how composers and performers interact with one another in different ways. Maybe a huge piece doesn’t need to act like a Feldman piece; maybe the String Quartet No. 2 is actually rather violent and constrictive. What if I tried something different? So that got things moving: it is my first major piece with extensive text-scoring and verbal-scoring because of those conversations. After discussing these ideas and talking about what thinking and thinking about what I wanted to do with this piece, he asked if I could have it ready in six weeks to be played at the end of his Klangraum festival - I did not want to pass up an opportunity like that, so rather than letting the amount of time the piece had sat on the shelf bother me, I just made the piece happen and put it together in a way that made the most sense to me. Thinking about texture, instrumentation, what are the characters doing in this situation (the players, the human beings that are going to be performing the work). Through that, the piece became a text-score with a fixed harmonic framework, but so much is left for the performers to explore.

I wasn’t there for the premiere performance and the performance wasn’t recorded, but I received a lot of emails from people that were there from a lot of people that I really respect, discussing the piece and what they thought about it, all which was extremely affirming and very exciting. But I knew that if this piece wasn’t recorded, then it functionally didn’t exist for me, so I needed to put a recording together. That recording session is the one on my Bandcamp and the one on this page now. Again, this was an extremely exciting opportunity to make music with my friends and I really believe that this recording, coming out after my Wandelweiser album brought a lot of attention to my work, and brought a lot of attention from people that I look up to and probably lead to many opportunities to collaborate with on some extremely stellar projects. This is an important one that opened up so much.