A pianist from Toronto, Canada

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I just found out that Malcolm Frager is the pianist whose stellar recording of Chopin’s Heroic Polonaise in Ab Major, op. 53 practically inspired me to seriously study classical music. I never knew who he was, and yet he had such a profound impact on my life.

Here he is playing the finale to Mozart’s 5th Piano Concerto:

I’ve been composing an arrangement of the Lord’s Prayer for the St. Maria Goretti parish for the last year or two, and progress has been brutally slow since I started. This was until a few weeks ago when I had a lesson with Alexander Rapoport, my composition teacher for the coming school year. I was amazed at how (in only one lesson) he was able to simplify what I was doing with this piece, to the point where my process became accelerated without compromising any compositional integrity. He did this while simultaneously lifting away from me the hindrances of pretentious academia — the cause of much anxiety to the musical part of my creativity over the last year. How skillful this man is!

In addition to working on this piece, I’ve been reading a ton of scores, lifting jazz, and singing while playing to try and give myself a crash course in listening. My ears have opened up a lot in the last few months, and because of this, my sensitivity to certain sonorities has increased.

While experimenting with part of the arrangement today, I found something interesting in parallel 7th chords, the major 7th interval, and chords that have a particular “crunch” to them (minor 2nd and major 7th dissonances): they all move me emotionally, more so than other types of sounds. I can’t exactly articulate what the feeling is, but it feels powerful, satisfying, and liberating. Is this what it means to be a composer?

A percussionist friend of mine stuck to a wall in his practice room a piece of paper with this phrase on it; he looks at it every day. Seeing as I don’t have a wall that I am near very often, I made a wallpaper that I look at whenever I wake up my iPhone. All musicians need a persistent reminder of this.

I was trying to understand the method behind this artwork, because it seems to have been created as an image, then split up in a grid pattern, re-arranged, and then further split throughout the artwork.

So I broke up the main piece into it’s 36 squares and then arranged them into what I thought was the original.

The verdict: I still don’t get it.

Improvising in PNO DUO often has difficult moments for me. Usually, they arise when I am involved in my own ideas and not listening to what else is happening. The pressure to be creative in the moment, and not let the other musician(s) down, and concerns about what the listener hears all have an impact on my ability to listen. As a result, I don’t react well to what is happening and create musical ideas that may not be best suited to the situation.

On the other hand, listening to the episodes outside of the performance makes it easy to pay attention to everything that is happening and think of alternative ways I (or the other participants) could have contributed; it also allows me breathing room to think of long-term development of those ideas.

Today, I saw the Gryphon Trio perform Robert Rival’s Piano Trio, and at various points in the work, I could hear how the players parts reacted to each other, especially in the first movement: the main theme is tossed between performers (sometimes one instrumentalist states it before another is finished), played in an expanded form on one instrument and contracted on another (sometimes simultaneously I think), and goes through many manipulations throughout the piece.

After witnessing this, I began to wonder what it would happen if improvisation was executed as effortlessly as the Gryphon Trio performed Robert’s piece. If we [PNO DUO] could improvise in a way that created something similar to a developed work, it would sound extremely coherent and organic. This would require that all the participants listen intensely so that we can be prepared to react to each other, but more importantly, it would force us to think as composers. This leads me to the conclusion that when one is able to think as a composer, but in the moment or performance, improvisation can produce some seriously awe-inspiring art.

A while ago, I read about David Braid’s approach to improvisation as a composer and never really thought of it as something I could explore, being a (very) young composer; the Gryphon Trio’s performance has made the strong connection between composing and improvising very clear to me: by focusing on either one, you grow your skills in the other. I am very excited to give this a go in my future improvising.

I have some goodies in my new Downloads page that may be of benefit to music students or nerds: staff paper, staff paper for class notes, and an iPhone document of metronome tempi.

My focus for the last few months has been on composition and shifting my studies towards composing, although I haven’t been composing as much as I should. Nevertheless, I needed pieces for the upcoming application to the composition program, so in December, when the Varsity called for music students interested in creating compositions around the issue of the Harper government cutting funds from arts programs around the country, I was interested. Three fantastic musicians and myself wrote a piece of music that corresponded with a part of this issue; also, we were interviewed and had fancy pictures taken of us, but this is about the music.

The Art of Rhetoric was my piece, and it essentially is a commentary on the idea that politics should not have a place in the creative process of any form of art, because it ruins the work. As a rough guide, I will say that you can follow one of the more prominent themes as it makes its way through the three sections of the piece, hopefully (if I have done my job correctly) noticing that it sounds more pleasant when it does not interact with another theme that resembles politics.

You can listen to it on its own, or among the other pieces by my talented composer friends: Patrick Power, Patrick Murray, and Sam Shahi.

As if all this weren’t nifty enough, I have recently had one of my most exciting experiences as a musician yet: my good friend Trevor and I have started a weekly piano improvisation podcast called PNO DUO; we had a few jam sessions when I went over to his house, and it was way too much fun to not do it regularly. The first four episodes were a blast to do and I’m sure many more great experiences will become of this; I can already say that I have grown as a composer and performer by learning to listen to everything more.

• Hear the latest episode
• Have episodes sent to you in iTunes or via email
• There is a recording of one of our first jam sessions somewhere on the site, but I won’t say where.

Oh, and I upgraded to WordPress 2.7.

As you may tell from the nearly four month gap between now and my last post, school has been my first priority since I started my second year. It is amazing how you realize the true value of your regular sites (Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc…) when you stop using them; in my case, I didn’t miss them much. Of course I still don’t have loads of free time either, but I’m learning to cut down on unnecessary stuff, and get the best of my time on the web: I’ve trimmed my RSS list to the point that I can not check it for a week and get it down to 0 items within an hour, as opposed to the usual 399 or above; this has really left me with time to actually be productive and I highly recommend it to anyone.

So that’s life. Recently, I have been practicing a lot and thinking about my directions for the future, and discovering that I would be better off pursuing an extended career in music, rather than a teaching job at a high school. I’m not discussing that here, but I am referring to it because it is the inspiration of a composition I recently made for my Introduction to Composition class.

Life and Meditation is essentially an outline of the process of stopping your activities in the world for a minute, thinking and wondering about possibilities, and going back into the world with a fresh perspective. It is significant for me because I have never had my own music performed before; this is not especially noteworthy when considering that I only started composing two months ago, but it’s cool to me, so there. The performers are Tristan Durie (Flute), Alex Goodman (Guitar), and Peter Grant-Mackechnie (Piano); I was conducting. The recording is below, along with the sheet music and an obligatory album cover (because there shall never be an album with no cover in my iTunes library). There’s also information about the individual parts of the piece if you are curious.

Life and Meditation (Recording)
Structure
Score

For the past year, my intake of video and audio podcasts has completely superseded my need for TV and whatever radio I listened to. Obviously, podcasts are not new by today’s standards, but I find it interesting that there is more content to be consumed than I have the capacity for. To get around this issue, I’ve created two smart playlists of audio and video content in iTunes that let me access all of my media like a TV or radio channel; it’s a constant flow of awesomeness.

The Audio Channel

Use the rules bellow to get the latest podcasts you haven’t finished listening to yet; I put a limit so that I can sync with my iPod easily. As you listen to podcasts from this list, episodes will be swapped out with as much as is available.

You should also enable the Release Date column for your playlist so that you can sort by newest or oldest: when you’re in the playlist, go to View > View Options and check the box for Release Date.

The Video Channel

This one needs a little more spice, because I don’t just include podcasts, but random long videos from the internet like screencasts, lectures, or stand-up comedy performances from my P2P days. Also, I’m excluding the Tutorials genre because I don’t want to watch photoshop tutorials while I’m commuting or eating.

Don’t forget to enable the Release Date column for this too.

Both these lists are continuously updating with the latest podcasts and movies in your iTunes library, so even if you watch these from an iPod, it all syncs nicely. I waited a week to make these screenshots, so I’m going to go catch up now!