MOZART MEANDERING THROUGH JAVA BEFORE BUMPING INTO BEETHOVEN IN BOSTON

These last few days we are having so much fun preparing for the concert in Jakarta with some woodwind principals of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The original plan was a wind quintet with them, but the flutist & clarinetist had to cancel their trip, so the organizer had to find 2 substitutes. We premiered (well, it wasn't the official world premiere, it was a "teaser" so to say) yesterday at the American Cultural Center "@atamaerica" the piece I wrote, commissioned for this event, and the title was a result of the brainstorming among all of us: me and the Boston guys, just before that sneak peak event at @atamerica. At last we corrected the very long title (even longer if you consider the piece is only 3 minutes long!) into MOZART MEANDERING THROUGH JAVA BEFORE BUMPING INTO BEETHOVEN IN BOSTON. The piece was written very quickly, around 2 days in November : one was on the airplane from Jakarta back to Spain, and another day already home in Cantabria (see my entry last month on November 19th). It's dedicated to the players who premiered it : Katie Zagorski (flute), John Ferrillo (oboe), Erin Svoboda (clarinet), Richard Svoboda (bassoon, father of Erin), James Sommerville (horn) ... and myself ! Thanks to David Svoboda (the nephew of Richard) who commissioned me to do it. I certainly didn't regret writing it, although I was given very short time. Well, my fault. I set my own deadline, since in fact I could just submit the piece a few days before they arrived to Jakarta, and knowing that they are such FUN-tastic players that they could learn and understand the piece very quickly. However, I always would like to give any piece at least 1 month ahead to the players, if possible (this wouldn't be possible in cases like writing music for films, where I had to write the music TONIGHT and give it to the musicians TOMORROW to be recorded THE DAY AFTER). And since the idea of a new piece came up around 6 weeks before the premiere, then .. well, that was what happened. Anyway, the piece is a kind of polyphonic game between Mozart's themes, the West Javanese children folksong "Tokecang" and .. well, you'll hear Herr Beethoven approaching in the end :). ................................................................................................................................. .............

It was in fact a happy accident. I planned to write a "normal" piece; fun, but normal. But I was stuck when I needed a second theme, and time is the only thing I DIDN'T have at that moment! So I thought, well let's be a rather naughty and take a phrase from Mozart, and it should be a famous one. After stealing his symphony's theme, I thought that I should link it with a Javanese song, since those Boston guys are visiting here, so I took "Tokecang", a children folksong from West Java, which I also used in my Rapsodia Nusantara no. 2. And the game went on, stealing from other themes ! If you wanna test your musical knowledge, please check at youtube that looooong title, and see how many themes of other composers you can find. ................................................................................................................................. ............. Apart from the world premiere of that "Mozart" piece, the Boston players are playing 2 of my other pieces : Echo's Whisper (for oboe & piano), and Niobe Weeping while turning into stone (for french horn & piano). Like my other pieces for woodwind instruments and piano, they are all inspired from a (some) characters from Ovid's deeply moving Metamorphosis. The concert will be tomorrow (14th) and Sunday (15th). .............................................................................................................................................. People always ask me, why I love classical music so much. Well, I think any kind of love, if it's sincere and coming from the heart, is inexplicable. I haven't even asked that question to myself, and when people ask me that question, I gotta think ... and still don't have the answer. .............................................................................................................................................. But is it true that everything about music is just wonderful? Well, some people might think so. I tweeted a few days earlier: "If John Lennon imagined a world w/ no religions, countries etc., I just imagine a world w/ no DEADLINES n can take all the time to compose:( " . And some people replied, basically tweeting something like "do composers have deadlines?" . I thought it is quite obvious that we have deadlines all the time, but apparently it is not. Many don't realize that an artistic profession, like any other profession, has its stressful sides too. That "Mozart" piece mentioned above might sound fun 'n funky, but it wasn't so fun writing it being chased by a tight deadline! So, many people (yeah, many! There were about 10 tweets replying to me stating that disbelief of deadline for composers) think that the date of a release of a film can be comfortably postponed, and so do concerts, opening of an exhibition, world premieres .... But when it actually happens, imagine the mess of the hundreds or thousands of people who claim their money back !