Land of the “Hee-Honkers”
Quarterly Composition Compilation
May 2025
First off, my apologies for the delay in getting this out! Hopefully this doesn’t come as a surprise, but I have been so busy with grad school that I haven’t had time to muse about my compositional adventures until this week. So here we are, heaving a big sigh of relief and reveling in the fact that I have no homework for 3 months.
But! You don’t really care about that anyway, just about the music I write. 😉 So here is my update after another (very full and insanely busy) semester at BU!
Sorcery Slam!
The game has an official page on Steam now! If you would like to see a sample of how the game runs (and of course the wonderful music integration) check out the FREE demo version here:
I just reached out to my friend Sam (the developer), and the full release of the game has been delayed quite a bit due to some trouble with coding and various interface devices (here’s where I insert some technical jargon about getting games to work with controllers and mouse/keyboard. Pretend like I’m smart and know what I’m talking about). In the game world this is actually quite common, but usually a longer wait means a better version of the game. But in the meantime you should definitely check out the free demo!
My last QCC detailed most of the creative process, and I haven’t written any additional music since then. If the game does well enough, then there’s the potential for me to write some additional music for the game, but only time will tell.
Summary: Game demo is live! Full release happening soon (hopefully).
P.S. Special thanks to those of you who have already wishlisted the game, that really means a lot to us!
Terra Branta Canadensis
A new project has appeared!
This is the title of my Orchestration class final project, and wow was it delightful to write! The prompt was to take real-life audio signals (read: recordings) and then attempt to render them using only instruments in the orchestra. So of course I chose to do geese, because they’re hilarious and the idea of writing a “super serious piece of art music” about goofy fowl was just too tempting to refuse.
This is the part where I would normally nerd out about the process of this piece coming together, but I actually did an interview for an article that did a deep dive on all of that. The article drops early next week, so I’ll make sure to post about it.
However, I still wanna talk about this piece (because it was so fun!), so here are a few things the article likely won’t talk about (as they happened after the interview):
The most not-fun part of this project was the insane deadlines. All told, we had about 2 weeks to write the piece from scratch and then 1 week to incorporate feedback from our teacher, print out the parts and score, tape the parts, and submit them to the music library (to distribute to the musicians). That month was insane, and I was feeling quite burnt-out by the end. Thankfully, we had about 2 weeks to recover before the reading sessions, which gave me enough time to get excited about the piece again. After all, it’s geese, so what’s not to like?
The most fun part of this project was the reading session, which went splendidly! I was fortunate to have one of the better graduate conductors leading my piece, and the orchestra players did quite well with some of the more awkward things I wrote (ask me about box notation sometime…). I did have to encourage them to be a little more…annoying for parts of the piece, but they took it with good humor and excellent execution. My goal with this piece was to get the musicians to smile and laugh at some point, and I am pleased to say that I succeeded. 😊
I then showed this piece to my composition teacher and got some excellent feedback on it. The main takeaway was that the piece is *almost* the best version of itself but needs a few more tweaks and edits to get there. My main complaint is that I had to cut out several sections due to the time limit (supposed to be 5 minutes, but I got away with 5 ½), and there were a few effects I used that didn’t quite work with live musicians (like some of the ways I “rendered” goose honks).
(Quick tangent) What gets us composers so excited about reading sessions is the rush of creative energy they infuse – not only did a large group of musicians decide to take your piece seriously (or in my case, give it an honest effort without being too serious), but the synergetic effect of them playing together carries a power that is hard to imitate with digital instruments.
So what’s next? On the advice of my teacher, I am intentionally filing the piece away for a few months to allow my brain to sort through everything I’ve learned. My hope is to then revisit the piece next semester to incorporate my wishlist/repair-list items, and then see if it’s polished enough to get premiered or recorded.
Anyway, that was my crazy journey with geese, and I now have a hard time looking at Canada Geese without smiling (and pulling out my recording app just in case they make any interesting sounds). I would encourage you to check out the page for the piece (Terra Branta Canadensis) and give it a listen, I think you’ll have a good time with it. 😊
Summary: Version 3 completed, read and recorded. Feedback and refinements noted, mandatory 3-month break in progress. This will not be the last time you see this piece you silly geese…
An auspicious Canada Goose (Branta Canadensis) wondering why this strange human hasn’t left yet.
Riverside
Another new piece? Why yes, it’s been a busy semester! This was a commission by the Rivers School to write a solo piece in collaboration with one of their student musicians, and was a lot more challenging than I expected. I had known about this since last October, but every time I sat down to work on it I got nasty writer’s block (this was partially because I didn’t feel that any of my ideas were “good enough”). Thankfully, deadlines are a great motivator, and with the first draft due soon I forced myself to just spit out ideas. And after a few drafts and revisions, a theme and variations finally began to take form, which then turned into the first draft.
I then sent this to my collaborating student (and his private instructor) for feedback, and had the opportunity to hear them work through after they’d had it for a week or so. This was extremely helpful, as it gave me a good idea of how the piece scaled with his ability level and if any tweaks were needed. Thankfully, this student is incredibly talented, so I only ended up having to make a few minor edits to get my weird ideas to work. After a few more back-and-forths we finally settled on the final version, which was then premiered at the recital on April 4 with several other new pieces.
Overall, this was a positive experience – I was able to have a positive collaboration experience with a talented student musician and along the way get some practical experience writing for clarinet.
I haven’t yet been able to get my hands on the high-quality recording they took at the recital, so for now the page will just have the one I took on my phone from the audience. Apologies for any rustles and coughs you hear.
Summary: Final draft completed, recording uploaded to website.
Miscellanea
Projects that have had little or no progress made:
Taynix Trouble – Still haven’t incorporated the feedback I got last semester, but hopefully soon.
Delvers – No work since last semester. I never heard back on the orchestra competition, so I (naturally) forgot this was a thing. I did have a crazy idea the other day about incorporating the Shepard-Risset tone into the piece, so maybe something will happen there…
Creation Symphony – Had some more conceptual breakthroughs, but still haven’t done any composing. I also realized that I’ll likely need to do a full rewrite of everything to bring it up to the standard my writing is at now, but I’m glad to have so much material to work with. Also considering if I want to tackle this for my master’s thesis/final project (do I dare bite off so much?).
Conducting
Since this is supposed to be a way for me to talk about my composition career, I figured I should probably focus on that and keep the tangential stuff to a minimum. Which is hard when the two are so intertwined with each other…
I had the opportunity to take a Choral Conducting class this semester, and it was much more beneficial than I was expecting. I was definitely the odd one out – the only composition major, the only instrumentalist*, the only one without any formal vocal training – but the professor and my fellow students were more than willing to put up with my weird perspectives and odd ideas. We worked through 2 pieces: Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, and J.S. Bach’s Johannes-Passion (St. John Passion), which were then performed during the semester. I then got to “rehearse” one of my pieces during class (A Ship at Sea) and then hear the top choir sing through it a couple of times during one of their rehearsals.
All that said, I did come to realize that as an instrumentalist* (and one who hopes to primarily conduct instrumental music) I would still like to receive instruction on how to conduct a group of instrumentalists*, and I think my professor realized the same thing. So we’re hopefully going to work out getting me into an orchestral conducting class next year sometime, but in the meantime I’ve learned a lot and excited to hopefully apply some of that soon!
*Here I’m not counting organ or piano (there were 3 others who played these) as my experiences as a trumpet player were so significantly different from the rest of the class.
Looking Ahead
In brief, here are a few things I’m hoping to do this summer:
Work a bunch so I don’t have to stress about finances next year…
Catch up on my Lego design business
Relax
Mull over some composition ideas
Contemplate career choices, see if I can get closer to deciding what I want to do after graduating.
Contemplate my place within the wider world of music composition. See if I can get closer to figuring out what kind of music to write.
Final Musing
I’ll be honest, I got pretty burned out this semester. I’m so glad for the experiences I had, but there was a lot of garbage I had to work through to get those (ask me about the Student Union drama if you want to watch me rant for an hour). The plan this summer is to work as much as possible, but I also realized that I need to take some time off to recharge my batteries. Next year is looking to be quite interesting (new composition faculty and new Wind Ensemble director), and I need to be in a headspace where I can take full advantage of the new opportunities. So I don’t know how much composing I’ll be doing this summer, but hopefully I’ll have at least a couple of things I can cover in the next QCC (expect that around the end of August).
As always, thanks for reading my (often tangential) update!
Until next time,
-JW
