Severance (concerto for saxophone quartet and wind ensemble)

Lucas Petersen and Kansas University Wind Ensemble

Live world premiere recording 11 April, 2023, Lied Centre, Lawrence, KS

POUNCE for Wind Ensemble

The Disarray was inspired by the self-taught abstract and street photographer Olga Karlovac, more specifically her second photography book of the same name, as well her as self-portraits. Her work strikes me as dark and unsettlingly beautiful, and it instills in me a sense of inner turmoil that takes over the outside world. In this piece I aimed to simply capture the feeling of profound grief and inescapable desolation that I find in her photography.

The Disarray

"Bravado" (2023) was written for the Tanglewood Music Festival 2023 orchestral readings and explores the many connotations of the word “bravado,” a descendent of the Old Italian adjective bravo, meaning “wild” or “courageous.” A person with bravado can be seen as bold or reckless, daring or arrogant, confident or overbearing. The orchestra musically embodies this range of traits through the transformation of the piece’s primary melody. Thank you to the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra for bringing "Bravado" to life.

INSTRUMENTATION:
Flute 1-2 (Flute 2 doubles Piccolo)
Oboe 1-2
Clarinet in Bb 1-2
Bassoon 1-2
Horn in F 1-4
Trumpet in Bb 1-2 (metal straight mute)
Trombone 1-2 (metal straight mute)
Bass Trombone (metal straight mute)
Tuba
Timpani
Percussion 1: Suspended Cymbal, Xylophone
Percussion 2: Bass Drum, Glockenspiel
Harp
Strings

PERUSAL SCORE REQUESTS:
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WIND BAND VERSION:
Arrangement commissioned by "The President's Own" United States Marine Band (touring fall 2023: https://www.marineband.marines.mil/Tour/). Perusal score available via Just a Theory Press (admin@justatheorypress.com); available for programming beginning November 2023.

LEARN MORE:
https://www.galaflagello.com/

Bravado - Tanglewood Reading

EDGES is inspired by several events in my life over the period of 1995-97.  Two are near-death experiences, while the third is the sudden passing of one of my closest colleagues and best friends, Professor Robert Cooper.  

The first movement, "BACK FROM THE EDGE", is a chronicle of the battle that I waged with "flesh-eating strep", which nearly cost me my life in spring, 1995.  A fragment of a line from French playwright Jean Genet’s “Prisoner of Love” served as additional inspiration: 

 “perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay in memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh.  A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.”

In a sense, my life has re-emerged from where it lay, for a while, silent, in memory.

Movement II, "POSTCARDS", is inspired by my mentor and friend, composer Donald Erb, who had his own near-death experience about a year later in the same Ithaca, New York hospital (a bizarre coincidence).  I know that he shared many of the mental aberrations I experienced during the recovery process, and POSTCARDS reflects the strange visions, the elusive but more and more frequent moments of clarity, and the eventual return to reality that such experiences create.  For me, in retrospect, these thoughts were like vivid postcards of other realities, sent to me by another part of my mind and filtered through the pain, the fear, and the medications that I had been given.  There was also a highly obsessive quality to my thoughts during the reco-very, which is reflected in the primary melodic material which simply refuses to disappear, though it changes colors, dynamics, and tempos at every turn.

Postcards -- real postcards, that is -- also played a role in my experiences.  While recovering, I received a post card (often of questionable taste) every two or three days from Don.  When it was his turn to be in recovery, it was my turn to send him postcards (equally questionable)...they seem now to me to be a lifeline to reality from people who are eager to welcome us back.

A quote was inspirational for this second movement as well, this time from Hermann Hesse’s Damien:

“In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.”

The final movement is a reflection on the amazing, wonderful, and sometimes difficult life of my colleague, Robert Cooper.  Robert had, without a doubt, the speediest metabolism of anyone I have ever known.  Lunch with Robert could be defined as both of us eating for the first five minutes and Robert watching me finish eating for the last 45.  Robert had two computers in his office and a phone; often all three were busy at once, while he carried on at least one additional conversation with whomever was present.  Yet Robert had great depth too.  He was a living example to students and colleagues, especially in facing life’s travails with courage and conviction.  He was also funny as hell.  I suppose that Robert’s pace was impossible to sustain, and in fact he died suddenly at age 45 on September 18, 1997. 

No quotations needed with this movement.  This one’s for you, man.


EDGES Movement III OhMan for wind ensemble

EDGES Movement II Postcards for wind ensemble

EDGES Movement I Back from the Edge for wind ensemble

Can’t Never Could is a fantasy for two pianos and orchestra. As an alumna of the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra—I was the orchestral pianist—I had a blast thinking about what sort of orchestral colors, techniques, or ideas would have excited me as a young composer sitting in the middle of an orchestra during rehearsals and performances. With this in mind, I decided to give each instrumental family a virtuosic section which challenges what one might normally do in traditional repertoire. These changes in
orchestration trigger the changes in form as the duo pianists (my piano duo, HOCKET) interact in fantastical flourishes around the orchestral material.

Can't Never Could

The United States Air Force Band, Col. Don Schofield, conductor. Live performance on March 6, 2024 at the American Bandmasters Association.

Part 1 from "Deep Down (Symphony No. 1)"

for alto saxophone, electric guitar, percussion, and accordion 

March 26, 2024 - Illinois State University
REDNOTE Composition Workshop

Black Ice

Black Ice - Performed by HYPERCUBE

This work is part of a cycle of four works related to representations of the four elements in the Old Testament. Neshamah means “breath” and is inspired in the following biblical text:
Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature (Genesis 2:7).
This piece was commissioned by the Ibermúsicas Project and was composed at the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras and at the Centro de Pesquisa em Música Eletroacústica of Federal University of Minas Gerais. It received an honorable mention at the Concours International de Composition Electroacoustique de Monaco 2016 and at the Destellos Competition 2016.
Also check the version with video at:
https://youtu.be/RIzLRAQ9h0M

Neshamah

SEVERANCE (concerto for saxophone quartet and wind ensemble)

Premiere: January 10, 2020, U.S. Navy Band Saxophone Quartet, Captain Kenneth C. Collins, conductor :: International Saxophone Symposium :: George Mason Center for the Arts, Fairfax, VA

U.S. Navy Band Saxophone Quartet

Jonathan Yanik, soprano saxophone
Patrick Martin, alto saxophone
David Babich, tenor saxophone
Dana Booher, baritone saxophone

SEVERANCE was commissioned by the United States Navy Band. The title for the piece and for the second and third movements come from a linked collection of poetry called SEVERANCE by my friend Robert Fanning, who has been the muse for several of my recent works. Robert’s poetry often gives voice to my own emotional world in a way that is deeply important to me. In Severance, the main characters, two marionettes, Professor and Grief, sever their wires and escape the play and the theatre in Winterland in “search for a life untethered and authentic, crossing from day into night, from wood into flesh, from wakefulness into dream, from ice into thaw. Severance sings of a way—through the narrows of time and body—toward healing.” (Severance by Robert Fanning, Salmon Poetry).

In the first movement, Clouds of Remembering, I introduce all of the musical material for the piece, but it is often shrouded and ephemeral, always fleeting, like the distant memory of something or someone lost.

The second movement, Every Way Through Hurts, is dedicated to my friend Jovanni-Rey Verceles de Pedro. Jovanni and I met at the University of Michigan while completing our graduate work. He was a pianist, professor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. After graduation, we both moved to Idaho—Jovanni taught piano at the University of Idaho, and I taught music composition and theory at Boise State University. He recorded my Rhapsody for solo piano on his first studio album, and I had planned to write him a new piece, but Jovanni died suddenly in the summer of 2019 while traveling with the global nonprofit organization he founded. When I heard about his passing it took my breath away. At 36 years old—a young, hopeful, energetic musician, a person with whom I felt a kinship and a related musical path—it just didn’t seem possible that he was gone. The outpouring of grief from his friends and family was extraordinary—he had connected with so many people through music. There is no way around grief—every way through it hurts—but very gradually, the waves of grief become smaller and grow farther apart, and we come to know that we can weather them. This music is for Jovanni, and the piano plays a prominent role, often gently tracing the saxophone solo lines like some strange shadow or echo.

The third movement, Follow the threads: Unstrung, begins with metaphorical darkness. The saxophonists play slow melodic lines—threads—that are passed around the quartet and are eventually passed to the ensemble as the quartet’s music transforms into raindrops and then into a peculiar dance. I imagine the marionettes dancing, awkwardly at first, recently untethered and free from their strings, but becoming assured and ecstatic as they dance through grief, through their scars, through the waves, and toward healing.

Robert Fanning’s Severance is published by Salmon Poetry and you can find out more about his work at www.robertfanning.wordpress.com.

www.davidbiedenbender.com

Severance – I. Clouds Of Remembering

Severance – III. Follow The Threads

Severance – II. Every Way Through Hurts

Composer David Biedenbender’s music has been described as “simply beautiful” [twincities.com] and is noted for its “rhythmic intensity” [NewMusicBox] and “stirring harmonies” [Boston Classical Review]. “Modern, venturesome, and inexorable…The excitement, intensity, and freshness that characterizes Biedenbender’s music hung in the [air] long after the last note was played” [Examiner.com]. David has written music for the concert stage as well as for dance and multimedia collaborations, and his work is often influenced by his diverse musical experiences in rock and jazz bands as an electric bassist, in wind, jazz, and New Orleans-style brass bands as a euphonium, bass trombone, and tuba player, and by his study of Indian Carnatic Music. His present creative interests include working with everyone from classically trained musicians to improvisers, acoustic chamber music to large ensembles, and interactive electronic interfaces to live brain data. He has had the privilege of collaborating with and being commissioned by many talented performers and ensembles, including Alarm Will Sound, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Stenhammar String Quartet, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, U.S. Navy Band, Philharmonie Baden-Baden (Germany), VocalEssence, and Eastman Wind Ensemble, among many others. 

He is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at Michigan State University. He holds degrees in composition from the University of Michigan and Central Michigan University, and has also studied at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the Aspen Music Festival, and in Mysore, India where he studied carnatic music. For more information, visit: www.davidbiedenbender.com.

Severance – II. Every Way Through Hurts

davebied

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