At some point, I decided there weren't enough easy songs.

I was trying to incorporate what (little) I knew about various music pedagogies, leaning heavily on Kodaly, into a beginner book on flute. I started going through every folk and children's song I could get my hands on, analyzing them for their melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ingredients. There were so few songs that just had do, re, and mi and only used the simplest of rhythms. "Merrily We Roll Along" — that was about it.

Who was going to fix this problem? I could either continue to scour the world for songs or start writing them myself. Option B seemed a lot easier, until I started mapping out a plan of what kinds of songs to write, what kinds of musical materials to use, and what order I should add new concepts and materials. Suddenly, I was looking at writing an unwieldy amount of songs. Better to start and leave it unfinished, than to be overwhelmed by the task. The flute book was abandoned and the songwriting continued.

I’ve never considered myself a songwriter. I love word play, yet I find coming up with lyrics tedious and arduous. Everything is stupid. Most classical composers use other people’s words, for better or worse. Writing your own texts to set is frowned upon. Get a word expert (e.g., a poet) to do that for you. While you can compose a piece and a choreographer will make up a dance for it, you can’t compose a piece and then get a poet to write words to it. Not in the classical universe. About a year or so before I embarked on this project, I got a little gig fluting for an indie-pop gentleman to workshop some songs. Imagine my surprise, then, during rehearsal just as we are going into the third verse, the guy stops us and mutters something about not having finished writing the lyrics for that yet. Wait a minute. You mean, you can write the music first and then put lyrics to it? Imagine how stupid I feel for not coming up with this myself. Ah, the cages we build for ourselves…

Over the years, I have collected a slew of mostly tiny instruments. In my mind, there was always a project on the backburner involving those instruments. Eventually, I connected that imaginary project with this real one. It was time to start the home recording studio, with whatever equipment and skills I had at my disposal (in both cases, paltry). I entered my list of instruments into a randomizer and then simply picked the next 3-5 instruments to accompany the song, until I got sick of doing that.

Sheet Music

Babysat

Triple Stomp

Alone Time

Sleepy

5 30am

Peace And Quiet

I was recently invited to participate in a community outreach educational project spearheaded by akademie : der steg. Architect Matthias Loebermann’s work Unschärfe provided the focus and locus of the workshops on music, dance, photography, and art. The goal of my workshop was to guide Veit Stoß Realschule students to compose and perform a ca. 15 minute piece inside the structure. Here are the (rough) recordings from the two performances on 24 May 2014.

Unschaerfe 02

Unschaerfe 01

Everything becomes tepid rock

Work Song

In which one melody takes its sweet little old time morphing into a rather different melody.
Recorded at National Opera House, NYC 24 March 2017.
Anti-Social Music: Domenica Fossati, flute; Jeff Hudgins, clarinet; Hubert Chen, violin; Pat Muchmore, cello; Will Holshauser, accordion.

what presents itself

Open instrumentation piece, performed on flute and violin over Zoom, so the sound quality is terrible, my child interrupts me, all sorts of crazy. If you'd like a go at the piece yourself, see here:http://reloadsanear.com/composer/composition/dates.html

Let's Exist Zoom Session 27 March 20

23 března 2020 take 2

23 března 2020 take 1

Flutist, composer, and improviser Andrea La Rose makes cute songs, difficult chamber works, and weird noises. She has worked with Anti-Social Music, thingNY, A/B Duo, Lone Wolf Tribe, Mohair Timewarp, and Wild Rumpus. Presently a professional mom and stay-at-home musician in Prague, she formerly corrupted the youth of the world as a Music Teacher at the Franconian International School in Erlangen, Germany. Her music explores how people change roles over the course of a situation and if there even needs to be leaders and followers at all. When it’s not about that, it’s about clapping.

oneraresalad

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