Let’s Get Cooking!
My partner recently introduced me to hibiscus water, which was a perfect way to cool down during the recent hot weather streak. Pictured here is a non-alcoholic drink consisting of emulsified honey, juice from a lemon, and hibsucs water over ice - garnished with a lemon wedge and a few mint leaves!
Finally, after much delay and moving around of schedules, I am embarking on the New Music Cookbook collection! I’ll be spending the summer catching up on miniatures from the previous months, and I’m excited to share more about the music I’m writing, food I’m exploring, and the lovely people I’m collaborating with. A big thanks to everyone for their patience and understanding as I worked to rearrange this project!
While I may not always end up making them before I write the pieces, I do plan to try every recipe going into the cookbook at least once - I’m not much of a cook, so if I can pull them off successfully, they should be in excellent shape for anyone! If you would like to help test recipes or volunteer to offer edits / tips, you can reach out on my contact page to let me know! You can also read more about this project on the New Music Cookbook project page, which will be updated soon with more information the upcoming recipes! For the blogs, I won’t be going into too much detail for the step-by-step instructions, but will try to highlight the main steps, ingredients, or features that inspired the pieces I’m writing.
Recently I had the chance to visit the L.L. Stub Stewart Memorial State Park for an outdoor movie night - the view was too beautiful not to share!
The Music!
Now, on to the first few recipes! I paired these two together originally because I loved that they were both non-soup foods that incorporated soup flavors. For all of these, I will only be hinting in vague terms about the specific recipes, as I hope to save the full recipes for the final book - but these should provide a few teasers of what’s to come! :)
Entry 1 - Deconstructed Tuscan Bean Soup Casserole (solo violin)
JT Rustad is a violinist I know from my undergrad, Luther College. They reached out with a great recipe for a casserole based on Tuscan Bean Soup. In addition to wanting to write a good piece for an old friend, this recipe in particular holds special meaning for JT. They told me they brought this recipe for a few friends of theirs after their roommate passed away in early 2021. JT said “The pandemic restricted so many ways of grieving and consoling each other, but providing food was still a safe and tangible expression of care.”
The recipe JT submitted had several stages and wide array of ingredients, so I decided to break the miniature into several smaller sections.
Melt butter, cook sausage in pan
Beginning with Sizzling, the opening challenges the player to tackle two challenges at once - slowly shifting double stops with string crossings, as well as slowly moving from molto sul pont to ord. I wanted this to somewhat mimic the movement of swirling melting butter in a hot pan, along with the sizzling of sausage.
Saute onion/garlic, adding spices and spinach / Meanwhile, mix rice and beans, adding lots of spices
The next section, Pinches and Dashes uses short, pulsing notes punctuated with legato and tremolo interruptions. These interruptions become longer, eventually breaking out into the Sprinkling in, mixing section - which continues the idea of phrases becoming interrupted, but this time with longer, more melodic gestures being interrupted by more percussive effects. I also reintroduce the molto sul pont texture during the tremolos, calling back to the sizzling idea from the beginning. This time, the interruptions are pizzicato, and begin to introduce more and more space between gestures - I wanted this to mimic licking one’s finger to taste-test.
Spread the mixtures, pouring tomatoes over the top / Cover in cheese and sprinkle more spices on top
This section echoes the opening passage’s use of glisses, though now - rather than the sizzling tremolo at the start - smoothed into a simple arco texture. This gives way to a return of the material from “sprinkling in, mixing” section, now in a new key and catapulting upward to a high sustain that rapidly shifts between dynamic extremes. These altered callbacks to the beginning allows for the piece to maintain and internal consistency while still moving forward dramatically - used to an even more explicit degree in the next section.
Bake until cheese becomes hot and bubbly
Using the same notes as the “Pinches and Dashes” section, the material returns now with the arco gestures and pizzicato gestures almost exactly reversed. I wanted to emulate touching a hot surface with one’s finger, while still creating a sense of forward direction to the final measures. Starting in the lower register of the instrument not only created a sense of contrast and facilitated a more resonant gesture (since the low G is an open string), but also allowed space for me to build back up to a climactic moment after the long, sustained note in the previous measures. The final few measures call back to elements from throughout the piece - the bouncing rhythm and tremolo of the “sprinkling in” gestures, the pizz and arco play of both “pinches and dashes” and “hot, bubbly,” and the double stops now appearing as a full, rolled chord to end the piece.
Digesting the piece
Having started the piece back in January and stepping away for several months before finishing, I was surprised how much easier it was to see what needed to happen in the second half of the work given some distance. I got through measure 28 (our of a total of 52 measures) before the break, and being able to tie the existing elements in and transform them throughout the second half was a fun challenge! My hope is that the other pieces I work on will all play with form and interpretation in different ways, but I had a lot of fun attempting to do a more literal depiction of the step-by-step recipe for this first mvoement.
Entry 2 - French Onion Chicken Pasta (solo marimba)
Robert Clayson and I met at Indiana University several years ago as students, and I had the great fortune of going to his house for Sunday dinners a few times. In addition to being a wonderful percussionist and educator, Robbie is a fantastic cook - I was so excited to include one of his recipes as part of the series! Robbie requested that the piece be relatively easy to put together and stayed away from sudden jumps / big leaps - he also requested that I try to make this a piece that those without a 5-octave marimba could still play (many schools have marimbas that only go down to an A rather than a low C). His submission was simple but savory, and I had a lot of fun putting together a solo marimba piece for this.
Season the chicken and cook until brown
The opening of the piece is meant to echo sprinkling seasoning and massaging the seasonings into the chicken. I usually find this stage of cooking to be rather relaxing and meditative, and wanted to echo that calm, gentle feeling in the opening of the piece.
Prepare the pasta
The middle section, depicting the boiling of noodles, is appropriately busier and more chaotic. Working with just a few patterns and playing with register and dynamics, the section ebbs and flows in waves as the player moves smoothly between different octaves of the instrument. While at first I wasn’t sure if I would be able to convincingly pull off this big a contrast in such a short piece, I was able to justify it both narratively and musically by 1) remembering that the noodles are an entirely separate food/process than the chicken, so it makes sense that it’s different, and 2) bringing back some of the same patterns in the last section.
Stir in spices and cream / add cheese and serve
The boiling section builds to a climactic arrival that starts to simmer away into rolls that echo the opening texture. As the lower rolls return, however, I decided to break up the typical rolling pattern into a shape that more closely mimicked the gestures from the boiling section. The rest of the piece plays with contrasts between these dictated patterns, ripples, and traditional rolling styles - creating not only a tie to the middle section, but enveloping the opening material in the “noodle” gestures, combining and mixing them together just like you would the recipe!
Digesting the piece
This was another work I had started back in January - though it went through quite a bit more transformation than the first entry. Originally the piece started with the noodling material, and was going to be largley that texture throughout. I ended up making this recipe before I finished writing it, however, and when I was seasoning the chicken I remembered how often I felt that stage was such a calming and focusing step to all the cooking I had done throughout the pandemic. Being able to transform the piece from something high-energy to something more soothing and comforting was such a fun process and I can’t wait to share more of this work with you!
Next Up!
While I still have a lot of music to share from some other projects, the next two pieces are already finished and I’ll be sharing more about them soon! It’s already proven to be a fun summer catching up on these works and trying out the recipes. After the music is written and the PDF of the book is compiled, I will be working on gathering some recordings from those who volunteered their time so we can make a Bandcamp album - the proceeds from which will be donated. It’s a huge project, but I am so grateful to everyone who has been volunteering their time, recipes, and talents to make this happen!
You’ll have to check back to see what the next two recipes are, but both of them made for very “sweet” pieces!
In other news…
I’ve also just started sharing a few sketches on my YouTube channel in a new series I’m calling Sketch and Share. The first video is live now, where you can get a sneak peak of the piece I’ll be writing about later this month - a new trio for flute, viola, and harp called Night Lights. Check out the excerpt at the link here.
In addition to Night Lights and the cookbook pieces, my fall schedule has already been filled up with projects ranging from percussion solos to works for clarinet and soprano, flugelhorn and piano, tenor with viola and piano, and more - so there will be a lot of new and varied content coming your way in the next few months! I hope the channel can help spark new conversations with other composers and music-makers about their creative process and ways to approach different challenges!
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I often share little updates from my writing desk, rehearsals, and adventures in The Nature - including sales / discounts on commissions and sheet music from The Library! You can follow me there to keep up with the latest. Wishing you a great rest of your week in the meantime - thank you so much for reading and listening. More soon!
