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Hopi and Hope
I had the great privilege of interviewing composer/scholar/advocate Trevor Reed this week for a podcast. It was an amazing experience. I've known about his work for a while. Two years ago, I wrote an article for an online magazine (SquareTwo) that I titled, "Mormon Masterworks of the 21st Century." In it, I described ten Mormon composers' works. One of them was Reed's "Puhutawi."
Why Do It?
I'm not a mom, so I don't know what it feels like to be in labor. I have experienced what it's like to labor on projects though. Not the same thing, of course, but I can imagine that there are moments in both when you say, "Why am I doing this, again?" For me, there's a lot of satisfaction that comes from the end result--the book, the project, the concert, the new friendship. Still, personally I don't need a lot of acknowledgment from the outside to keep going. I just do what I do.
Shepherd
I received an email from Scott Holden recently. He is immersing himself in new music for his Carnegie Hall recital in June, "A Century of Mormon Music." He told me about his reaction to learning a work by Arthur Shepherd, "From a Mountain Lake." Years ago, I had heard about the piece from my friend, the late Grant Johannesen, who was a friend of Shepherd's and thought very highly of his music.
The Dominican Jazz Project
In 2014, Dominican artist Guillo Carias reached out to American (and Mormon) jazz pianist Stephen Anderson to perform with a group of elite musicians from the Dominican Republic at the Jazzomania Jazz Festival. They had such a great time that they decided to continue working together. Anderson, who is also a composer, traveled throughout the Caribbean to document and discover local jazz. But instead of covering their music or simply doing arrangements of the works, the group of seven musicians-- Sandy Gabriel, Guy Frómeta, Guillo Carias, Carlos Luis, Jeffry Eckels,Juan Álamo, and David Almengod--encouraged him to absorb their music and then create his own compositions that all of them could play together.
How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?
That's the old joke: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. And if you are the concert pianist Scott Holden preparing for an exciting recital as part of the 2018 Mormon Arts Center Festival, the answers are: discover and then practice. It had long been a dream of mine to have elite Mormon performers tackle our culture's best music and put it on display in the world's best concert venues. I reached out to Scott Holden and asked whether it might appeal to him to prepare a recital of Mormon composers' works. I knew what a big ask it was. Although Scott plays quite a bit of contemporary music, this would require discovery of many composers and their best music.
And the Winner Is...
On November 1, 2017, the Mormon Arts Center issued a Call For Submissions to approximately 25 LDS composers. We invited them to create a proposal for a new work to be premiered at the Festival in June, 2018. Specifically for a family concert, we wanted a new ...