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

The Alchemist

Danler - The Alchemist

Premiered at Ostrava Days, 
August 31st 2023
recorded by OCNH
performed by Ostravská Banda:

Malgorzata Hlawsa, flute
Marta Bílá, oboe
Katie Porter, clarinet
Eszter Krulik, violin
Victor Lowrie Tafoya, viola
Matthias Lorenz, cello

Rhythms No. 3, Glissando for Chamber Ensemble

Beautiful, entrancing set from highland bagpiper, composer and improviser, Erwan Keravec.

In seeking out the more unusual sounds, and ways of playing and listening to his instrument, far from its original cultural setting, Keravec explores improvised music, free and ‘noise’ jazz. With an interest in movement and in settings associated with reinvention, he also writes, plays and improvises for dance.

In this performance, recorded in October 2022, Keravec lets the breath ebb and flow over 40 hypnotic minutes. Dense tones buzz and drone, woozily circling the room, occasionally breaking into brief peels of light before building up into rapturous hamonic clusters and almost-giddy uliulations. With a sound that seems to perfectly fill the room - and make full use of its own sonic idiosyncrasies - Keravec utilises a dizzying range of techniques that makes this solo instrumental set one to savour.

--

Recorded by Billy Steiger
Mixed and mastered by James Dunn
Cover photograph by Nicolas Godin

Erwan Keravec - 23/.10.22 [excerpt]

This is the sound of hundreds of birds sitting on a cable across the street from my hotel in Belize City.

Belize Birds On Wire

I heard these frogs in a flooded lot while walking through Belize City. Recorded on my iPhone. Edited to remove the worst of the wind sound, but some is still there.

Belize Parking Lot Frogs

Projection 1 by Morton Feldman
Realization 6 arranged by j. sinton
originally written for cello

Josh Sinton - baritone saxophone
Nathaniel Morgan - audio recording

Performed live on October 14th, 2019 at Buckminster Studios

performance can be seen at https://youtu.be/w3OU6G2cbUM

Part of the Stone Cold Classics of 21st-century Saxophone Repertoire Series

Projection 1, Realization 6

A guided meditation for all those...SPECIAL people in our lives...

They F%cking Suck - A Guided Meditation

7.–12. 4. 2020

JVK Trio
Johanna von Kuczkowski- vocals, double bass, songwriting
Jonathan Robinson - guitar, drums
Tobias Dettbarn - clarinet

www.johannavonkuczkowski.de
Song inspired by the artworks of Stephanie Barnes: https://www.stephaniebarnesart.com/
Recorded at SAE studios Berlin, 01/2019
Mixing/Mastering www.nadanadi.de

Falling Slowly

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.

Babysat

oneraresalad

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