Performed by I-Jen Fang, marimba
Recorded by Travis Thatcher
August 29, 2020 at Old Cabell Hall, University of Virginia
---
Like many composers and artists I know, I didn’t do much creative work during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Getting through each day was enough of a challenge and accomplishment. But in late May, as a participant in the Yarn/Wire International Institute, the opportunity came up to write a piece for a percussionist using only the instruments she had in her home. One of those instruments was the marimba, which I had never written for and, in fact, had long told myself I didn’t like.

Somehow, in this strange pandemic time, writing for the marimba suddenly seemed like an opportunity to ask myself - what would happen if I embraced something I didn’t think I liked? Might it yield something more fruitful than simply making the same old choice? And do our thoughts always know best anyway? Don’t they sometimes push us into directions that aren’t always that good for us, especially if we aren’t paying close attention to them?

Following this line of thinking, I stumbled across a new writing process while beginning this piece, a way to remove my rational, thinking brain, with all of its desires and ideas, from the process of creating musical material and structure. To do that, I generated each of the three movements in a single focused session, following material wherever it led in the moment. I did no conscious planning, shaping or decision-making during this generative process. I simply made something and left it to my later self to understand it, tease out its implications, and figure out how to communicate it to a performer. I found that, when I took my conscious mind out of the process in this way, what was left was a deeper-felt, richer, and more surprising music.

Self-Portrait (You Are Not Your Thoughts) is very different from anything else I’ve written. It’s fluid and free-flowing, constantly transforming, turning material over, introducing new ideas suddenly, and moving away from them just as quickly. It moves organically and unpredictably, like the perception of time in a dream. Above all else, it is built out of melody - everything in the piece comes from the melodic lines and their shapes, desires and implications.

This is not a piece that I would ever sit down and try to write, consciously. But that’s why it feels more deeply and eye-openingly ‘me.’ In John Kabat-Zinn’s seminal book about mindfulness, Wherever You Go, There You Are, he speaks about “doerless doing” in creative endeavors, a “capacity to let execution unfold beyond technique, beyond exertion, beyond thinking. Action then becomes a pure expression of art, of being, of letting go of all doing.”

Trusting my intuitive mind and ear and accepting whatever came out, no matter how different or strange it felt, totally changed my relationship to my creative process. And it started by realizing that my thoughts are not always right - and in fact, they aren’t really who you are. There is so much more to you than just what you think.

---

Self-Portrait (You Are Not Your Thoughts) is in three unnamed movements: the first is sparse and simple, moving from long spans of silence to a kind of blossoming of expression. The second movement is the shortest and quickest, moving through a few different ideas without looking back. The third and longest movement gently but persistently explores a simple melodic phrase, taking it through a series of transformations and detours before an unrelated, becalmed ending suddenly settles over the piece.

This piece would not exist without the invaluable input and support of four percussionists: I-Jen Fang, to whom the second and third movements are dedicated with friendship and gratitude; Jessie Otaiza, to whom the first movement is dedicated; and Russell Greenberg and Ian Antonio. Many, many thanks to all of them.

Self Portrait (You Are Not Your Thoughts)

(2013 revised 2015) for flute, vibraphone, piano & cello

Seven Songs is a re-arrangement/re-conception of a piece I wrote in 2011, originally scored for soprano sax, acoustic guitar, harp and percussion. In that original version, each of the seven movements really was like a song, with a simple melody, accompaniment or motive.

This new version retains many of the features of the old, including the order of the movements, the general structure of the piece, and the simplified harmonic language. But it distills and fractures the melodies and rhythms of the original: sometimes that means greater rhythmic detail and complexity, sometimes it means creating different ways of playing together, and sometimes it means eliminating everything from a movement except one small gesture, and exploring that gesture in much greater detail. The resultant set of songs is, hopefully, still emotionally direct and clear, but also freer, more elusive and continuously transforming. The piece now seems to be more like a set of spaces or empty rooms than a set of songs, each movement opening up onto the next space, the light slowly changing.

Performed at the nief-norf Festival 2016. Joshua Weinberg, flute; Aaron Gochberg, percussion; Daniel Schreiner, piano; Sophie Chang, cello.

Seven Songs (2015 version)

(2009-15) for flute, clarinet, vibraphone, piano, viola & cello

iv. hudson
vii. timp brook
viii. mohonk

Performed by the University of Tennessee Contemporary Music Ensemble on 10/20/16. Directed by Andy Bliss.

Overlooks is comprised of eight short movements, each named after a specific geographical location. An original set of three (recording above) was written in the summer of 2009, and the following five were written in between other projects over the years, acting as a kind of journal of places I've been and memories I have of being in those places with specific people.  Any number of movements may be played in any combination or order.

Though one can certainly be struck by the physical beauty of a certain landscape, our memory of place is much richer than just a recollection of physical attributes. In this way, Overlooks is not an attempt to represent or depict landscape literally: rather, it is an attempt to capture moods, emotions and the pace of passing time I experienced in these places, my interior life mapped onto the wider, indifferent geography.

Overlooks 4, 7, 8

(2010) for 2 piccolos, 2 trumpets, 3 percussionists, piano, 2 violins, 2 cellos and handbell quartet

There's a famous quote by the great American experimental composer Charles Ives. Purportedly, after hearing a music critic scoff at a particularly dissonant piece during a concert, Ives turned around and admonished him: "Why don't you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man!" 

Like a Man is scored for, among other things, a handbell choir and strings playing only harmonics. Certainly these delicate, crystalline sounds aren't like those that displeased the music critic nearly a century ago. But a century of extroverted dissonance is enough to ensure that that dissonance no longer shocks, surprises or is enough in of itself to create interest. I've heard enough of empty, sabre-rattling, outwardly "masculine" music. The music that offers the greatest challenge to me as a listener looks inward, asks for my focus, calls attention to small details I've never considered.

Like a Man

(2011) for soprano sax, guitar, harp and percussion

7 Songs for Empty Places was written in January and February 2011 for the Performance 20/20 program at the Hartt School. Its seven movements are brief, quiet reflections on loss and loneliness, each one a private space, a different room in an empty house.

7 Songs for Empty Places

Andrea Violet Lodge. piano
recorded at Spectrum, 4/9/17

bird's eye is the end result of a long, forking process. It began in 2013 as a song for voice and piano. Later, I used that song as material for an expanded instrumental piece for Pierrot ensemble. Sometime in the process of working on a solo piano piece for Andrea, I had the idea of condensing the ensemble piece back down to just a single piano while trying to keep as much of the counterpoint as possible.

The piece is structured in two slowly cresting sections, building an expansive, wide-open space out of layers of ringing melodies, overlapping lines and a simple repeating harmonic progression (you could call it a chaconne). It requires great control from the pianist to layer melodies and lines so that each part maintains its own character while maintaining the larger structural momentum. In that way, bird's eye both takes the long view and minds the small details.

The keyboard has always been the place where my own music begins. When I was a young piano student I spent many hours improvising and writing music at the keyboard. But this is the first solo piano piece I've written outside of composition classes in college and pieces I wrote as a child. So I wanted to make something grand for Andrea, an inventory of all of the sounds and features of the piano that I love. But, as is often the case, there was a yawning gap between I intended to make and what actually came out: this piece is more modest, more melodic, more song-like than I originally envisioned. Working on it has been like greeting a long-lost friend.

I am so grateful to Andrea for asking me to write her a piece. I admire her musicality and her virtuosity in equal measure, and I hope that this piece gives her meaningful and worthwhile work.

bird's eye

(2009-15) version for flute, clarinet, vibraphone, piano, viola & cello

i. anthony's nose
ii. taconic
iii. adams
iv. hudson
v. macedonia
vi. skyland
vii. timp brook
viii. mohonk

Overlooks is comprised of eight short movements, originally written for viola and piano, each named after a specific geographical location. An original set of three was written in the summer of 2009, and the following five were written in between other projects over the years, acting as a kind of journal of places I've been and memories I have of being in those places with specific people. Any number of movements may be played in any combination or order.

Though one can certainly be struck by the physical beauty of a certain landscape, our memory of place is much richer than just a recollection of physical attributes. In this way, Overlooks is not an attempt to represent or depict landscape literally: rather, it is an attempt to capture moods, emotions and the pace of passing time I experienced in these places, my interior life mapped onto the wider, indifferent geography.

Brian Simalchik Senior Recital

Overlooks (Ensemble Version)

(2012, rev. 2018) for solo vibraphone and distant pre-recorded vibraphone

La - cu - na n. pl. -nae, -nas : a blank space or missing part : an unfilled space or interval : a small opening : a gap or vacancy : a hiatus : an absent part, especially in a book or manuscript : any minute cavity, as in the substance of bone : a space visible between cells, allowing free passage of light.

'Lacunae' began its life as a piece for solo handbells and tape. It was written for Casey McClellan, who was actively building a repertoire (where none had existed) for solo handbells. I've re-worked the piece for solo vibraphone and tape. Though this version loses a bit of the drama of watching one person navigate a set of handbells, I think it retains the essential arc and resonance of the piece.

Lacunae is a set of 16 cells with proportional spaces in between each cell. The cells and the spaces both get longer as the piece progresses, and the spaces gradually fill with the haunting sound of a prerecorded vibraphone, working through the same material but slowed down by a factor of four. The tape sound, which was near silence at the beginning, becomes an equal partner with the live vibraphone by the end of the work.

The live part starts simply with a simple pulse, then a polyrhythm of 5 on 4.  But it becomes an increasingly tricky tangle of stacked pulses (in the 13th cell, the performer has to execute 3 on 4 on 5 on 6) before capitulating, in a way, and ending in a becalmed, resonant haze, fully integrated with the tape sounds.

What's the effect of all of this? To me, it goes something like this: you feel a kind of struggle and striving as the player executes a series of increasingly complex cells, pausing after each one as if to catch his or her breath and regroup before proceeding. There is a kind of intensity to it, and a kind of steady accumulation of mastery, as they move from the simple to the difficult. But at some point they sit back, content that they've proven themselves, and they start listening more, letting the resonance of both the tape and their own ringing sounds speak for themselves. By the end they are able to let themselves fade away, their sounds subsumed by the placid, quasi-eternal sounds of the tape, all struggle over, nothing left to do but listen.

Performed at the 2018 Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival; Matthew Gold, vibraphone (live and pre-recorded).

Lacunae (Vibraphone Version)

(2019) for vibraphone and piano
performance by Devon Cupo, vibraphone; and Dax Avery, piano

This piece was written in memory of composer David MacBride, who passed away in September 2018, and who I worked and studied with during my graduate studies at The Hartt School. The program note that accompanied the premiere, in October 2019, is as follows:

"I worked closely with David as co-director of the Composers' Ensemble during my time as a graduate student at The Hartt School (2010-2012). We listened to music together, planned concerts, and talked about ideas. He was lucid and idiosyncratic, in the best possible way. What left the greatest impression on me was the depth of his listening - it resounded as clearly and forcefully as the intensity of his expression. In The Utterance and the Space, I have tried to honor this quality of David's by writing as much silence as sound."

I won’t add much here, except to say that David’s music is remarkable in its emotional and intellectual directness, as well as its willingness to explore complex ideas about community, faith, time, and politics. We shared a deep love of the music of Morton Feldman and John Cage. Working with David to program and prepare a three-day festival celebrating Cage’s centennial in 2012 gave me a newfound appreciation and understanding of the breadth and depth of Cage’s music, an understanding that permeates the ways I write and think about music to this day. I like to think that something of Cage’s sensibility, as well as Feldman’s, made its way into this piece.

On a personal note, this piece marked my return to writing music after a period of time away. A few months after David passed, my father died as well, from complications of alcoholism. The last few years of my father’s life were painful to witness, as he slowly but steadily spiraled into his addiction. After his death, I felt wiped clean of any urge to ever write music again. But that feeling gradually changed over the months afterwards, and now I find it hard to comprehend doing anything but making a life in music. Writing this piece for David helped me remember the joy and satisfaction that writing music gives me, the way that it turns my personal and specific thoughts and feelings into sounds that, I hope, communicate widely and deeply. For that rediscovery, and for many other reasons, I am grateful to David. I offer this piece as a small token of gratitude for and remembrance of him.

The Utterance and the Space

for solo piano and pre-recorded voice
poems written and read by Lawrence Raab; used with kind permission of the author

1. "The History of Forgetting"
2. "After We Saw What There Was to See"
3. "Three Wishes"

duration: 12 minutes

This is a set of three pieces for solo piano, accompanying the recorded voice of poet Lawrence Raab reading three poems from his collection "The History of Forgetting."

Each of the three pieces looks at forgetting and memory from a slightly different angle: the first considers Adam and Eve leaving the garden of Eden, learning, for perhaps the first time in human history, to forget the past. The second is a more personal reflection about family and the speaker's father; the final poem moves outward, considering nostalgia, childhood, and the impossibility of wish fulfillment.

The music for the three pieces also charts a course of ever-increasing focus on the resonance of the piano. The sustain pedal on the piano is depressed for the entire first piece, letting all notes ring freely. In the second, pauses are introduced in the prerecorded voice, letting accumulated piano melodies ring for a few seconds as vertical chords. And finally, the third piece focuses on the sympathetic resonance of the piano strings using the sostenuto pedal, as an increasing number of undamped strings catch the resonance of stuck notes.

Many thanks are owed to poet Lawrence Raab for giving me permission to work with his poetry, for reading and recording his poems for this piece, and for his attention to, consideration of and discussion about the resultant music.

Performed by Brian Simalchik, piano; Lawrence Raab, voice

Forgetting Pieces

for viola & piano

i. Anthony's Nose
ii. Taconic
iii. Adams

Overlooks is comprised of eight short movements, each named after a specific geographical location. An original set of three (recorded here) was written in the summer of 2009, and the following five were written in between other projects over the years, acting as a kind of journal of places I've been and memories I have of being in those places with specific people.  Any number of movements may be played in any combination or order.

Though one can certainly be struck by the physical beauty of a certain landscape, our memory of place is much richer than just a recollection of physical attributes. In this way, Overlooks is not an attempt to represent or depict landscape literally: rather, it is an attempt to capture moods, emotions and the pace of passing time I experienced in these places, my interior life mapped onto the wider, indifferent geography.

Overlooks 1 - 3

Like many composers and artists I know, I didn’t do much creative work during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Getting through each day was enough of a challenge and accomplishment. But in late May, as a participant in the Yarn/Wire International Institute, the opportunity came up to write a piece for a percussionist using only the instruments she had in her home. One of those instruments was the marimba, which I had never written for and, in fact, had long told myself I didn’t like.

Somehow, in this strange pandemic time, writing for the marimba suddenly seemed like an opportunity to ask myself - what would happen if I embraced something I didn’t think I liked? Might it yield something more fruitful than simply making the same old choice? And do our thoughts always know best anyway? Don’t they sometimes push us into directions that aren’t always that good for us, especially if we aren’t paying close attention to them?

Following this line of thinking, I stumbled across a new writing process while beginning this piece, a way to remove my rational, thinking brain, with all of its desires and ideas, from the process of creating musical material and structure. To do that, I generated each of the three movements in a single focused session, following material wherever it led in the moment. I did no conscious planning, shaping or decision-making during this generative process. I simply made something and left it to my later self to understand it, tease out its implications, and figure out how to communicate it to a performer. I found that, when I took my conscious mind out of the process in this way, what was left was a deeper-felt, richer, and more surprising music.

Self-Portrait (You Are Not Your Thoughts) is very different from anything else I’ve written. It’s fluid and free-flowing, constantly transforming, turning material over, introducing new ideas suddenly, and moving away from them just as quickly. It moves organically and unpredictably, like the perception of time in a dream. Above all else, it is built out of melody - everything in the piece comes from the melodic lines and their shapes, desires and implications.

This is not a piece that I would ever sit down and try to write, consciously. But that’s why it feels more deeply and eye-openingly ‘me.’ In John Kabat-Zinn’s seminal book about mindfulness, Wherever You Go, There You Are, he speaks about “doerless doing” in creative endeavors, a “capacity to let execution unfold beyond technique, beyond exertion, beyond thinking. Action then becomes a pure expression of art, of being, of letting go of all doing.”

Trusting my intuitive mind and ear and accepting whatever came out, no matter how different or strange it felt, totally changed my relationship to my creative process. And it started by realizing that my thoughts are not always right - and in fact, they aren’t really who you are. There is so much more to you than just what you think.

---

Self-Portrait (You Are Not Your Thoughts) is in three unnamed movements: the first is sparse and simple, moving from long spans of silence to a kind of blossoming of expression. The second movement is the shortest and quickest, moving through a few different ideas without looking back. The third and longest movement gently but persistently explores a simple melodic phrase, taking it through a series of transformations and detours before an unrelated, becalmed ending suddenly settles over the piece.

This piece would not exist without the invaluable input and support of four percussionists: I-Jen Fang, to whom the second and third movements are dedicated with friendship and gratitude; Jessie Otaiza, to whom the first movement is dedicated; and Russell Greenberg and Ian Antonio. Many, many thanks to all of them.

Self Portrait (You Are Not Your Thoughts), III.

Self Portrait (You Are Not Your Thoughts), II.

Self Portrait (You Are Not Your Thoughts), I.

"The big house represents the atomizing of the American family. Each person not only has his or her own television . . . each person has his or her own bathroom . . . This way, the family members rarely have to interact."

Our Built Environments

Subdivision

Our Built Environment

Contrails

Atrium

Amusement Park

Towers

(2009) for violin, electric bass, percussion, celesta
performed by Teng-Jian Khoo, violin; Charlie Dougherty, electric bass ; Ana Inoa, percussion; Scott Smedinghoff, celesta

This is a little piece I wrote for a collaboration with a choreographer in 2009. It's sectional in nature, partially inspired by gamelan, with a strange but compelling instrumentation and a crystalline and fiercely melodic sense. I particularly love the quiet, still ending, with repeated clusters in the celesta and long violin notes.

Untitled

Brian Simalchik (b. 1988, Danbury, CT) writes music for a wide range of performers, instruments and ensembles. His music embraces emotional nuance and directness, evocative sounds and structures, and the expressive potential of silence and space.

He has had premieres by Roomful of Teeth, the Slee Sinfonietta, Wild Shore New Music, the Berkshire Symphony, UVA Percussion Ensemble, Williams Percussion Ensemble, I/O Ensemble, Opus Zero Band, Foot in the Door, Performance 20/20, Matthew Gold, Andrea Violet Lodge, I-Jen Fang and Casey McLellan. His music has been presented by organizations such as the Talea Ensemble (at The Stone in NYC), June in Buffalo, Yarn/Wire, nief-norf, Wild Shore New Music, Close Encounters with Music, the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, the I/O New Music Festival and Mass MoCA. His piece Seven Songs was a winner of the nief-norf Summer Festival 2016 International Call for Scores. His piece Overlooks was a winner of the Wild Shore New Music 2016 Call for Scores and was performed in Alaska, New York City and Washington, D.C. on a program celebrating the National Park Service's centennial. He has been in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (in 2013 and 2020) and at Mass MoCA, and has participated in June in Buffalo and the Yarn/Wire International Institute.

He has degrees from The Hartt School (M.M.), where he studied composition with Robert Carl, and from Williams College (B.A.), where he was the recipient of the Hubbard Hutchinson Memorial Fellowship in Music and studied with David Kechley and Ileana Perez-Velazquez. He has also studied with Jennifer Higdon and Judith Shatin at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He currently lives in Charlottesville, VA, where he hosts A New Sound, a radio show on WTJU focusing on contemporary classical music.

Brian Simalchik

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