chris sivak

As much as I hate hearing the sound of my own voice on a recording (still?), I feel like I should post it here because it features both some of my dots and a polite conversation with minimal swearing in which the finer points of dot-making are discussed.

Simply follow  this feed to hear me ramble on about everything from applause at concerts to alternate names for favorite 80s hair metal bands.

Sadly there will not be enough time for our secondary topic due to our feature presentation.

Shuffle out quietly.

Here we are once again preparing for spring concerts.  Often at this time of year I’m in a state of near-hysterics as I furiously  revise and mail, mail and revise, revise and mail and re-revise before re-mailing.  This year is different somehow.  When I go to clutch my skull in frustration I find that not only am I lacking in frustration but I no longer have large clumps of hair suspiciously similar to my own in my hands.  It’s good.

Let’s break it down.

I’ll be doing an interview/roundtable discussion tomorrow on CITR‘s radio show “The Rib” at 4pm.

Friday the 9th will find me/us hearing the Nu:BC ensemble perform a revised version of “A Perfect Focus” for cello/clarinet/piano/flute.

Saturday the 10th is Savage Parade, a recital put together by SongDrama.

On Sunday the 11th, Paolo Bartolussi and Rachel Iwaasa are workshopping BlisterCuffs which I clamored about in a previous blog entry.

Last but certainly not least is a performance on May 2nd of A Cruel Circumstance by a collective of Eva’s devising.

….and then in May I leave for Hungary to sun myself in a cafe in Budapest.

Eva Tidlund recently asked me to write a piece for a choir concert she’s putting together in April.  After some hemming and hawing I settled on this text, by my friend Alison:

I can’t for the sake of popular voice
detach myself when I write
that a fire of grief and desire
is scaling my throat and parching my voice,
evaporating my tears before I cry.
This is a cruel circumstance
that we may tempt but we may not try.

I like how a lot of the text seems to relate to the mechanism of singing.  The line,  “that a fire of grief of desire is scaling my throat and parching my voice” is especially suggestive of a musical concept.  It made me want to make the main motive some sort of rising pattern that could easily be extended into a longer line that brings the text to life.  So I wrote this melody:

The first bar contains the motive I use to build the long line that, “scales my throat and parch(es) my voice”.

The other part of that phrase, “a fire of grief and desire” also begged for some special treatment.  I wanted the words fire of desire to really sting so I used a really nasty chord built of a perfect fourth and a tritone (It has a really wailin’ major seventh pinch on the outer voices).  It’s in the second beat of the second bar below:

(Note the slur missing on the word grief in the alto part.  I would kick my copyist’s ass if imaginary people had butts attached to them.)

The concert is slated for the end of April.  Exact times and locations will be divulged when there are times and locations to divulge.

I just finished writing a piece for flute and piano called Blister-Cuffs.  It’s comprised of four short movements following the predictable fast-slow-slow-fast formula.  Here’s a passage from the last few bars of the first movement(Which bears the expressive marking “Mocking” at the top):

The third movement has the tempo marking “Comatose” and only has two notes, a B flat and B natural, until the end where the flute plays a little flourish before the piano reprises the semi-tone relationship with the last flute note.  It’s only a page long! Excerpt:

In a way, Blister-Cuffs has a program involving some sort of a pummeling match between the flute and the piano.  I had no concept in mind when I started writing the piece and it wasn’t until I wrote the tempo marking “Berzerk” at the head of the fourth movement that I had any inkling of what it’s about.  It’s good to know I’m not too jaded to be surprised by my own music.