I’m leaving early on Monday for my first trip of the school year. First stop: The University of Oklahoma. The band there is playing “Asphalt Cocktail” on October 1 (my birthday), and although I can’t be there for their performance, I’ll be there for their rehearsal on Monday.

Why can’t I be there for the performance? Because on Tuesday, I head from the University of Oklahoma to Oklahoma State. Is that a big rivalry? A few years ago, I had back-to-back visits at Ohio State and The University of Michigan. I made a point not to mention either school to the other. I should probably do the same next week. I’ll be at Oklahoma State — where they’re performing both Asphalt Cocktail and Aurora Awakes — until early on October 2. Their performance (along with 4 others, weirdly enough) is also on October 1. It seems like I’m traveling almost every year on my birthday.

I’m excited to hear OSU’s performance of Aurora Awakes, as I haven’t heard it since its premiere in May, and this will be the first time I’ll hear it with a college group. (There will be others. The piece has roughly 30 performances scheduled during this year, and those were programmed almost entirely from people listening to the MIDI file. I hope that when I post a recording of actual humans, all of those bands don’t abruptly cancel their performances because they decide that, yeah, it probably works better as computer music.)

A few days ago, I sent the first two movements of the Trombone Concerto to Joe Alessi. He said he’d have some free time starting in about a week, and he wanted to spend it learning his solo part, so I gave him the draft. If you’re curious to see the first two movements of the solo part, here is the PDF. On its own, without any of the accompaniment, the second “movement” is especially bare. (It starts at m. 302. It’s all about harmony and length of line, but without chords, about the only thing you’ll get if you play through it is the challenge of making measures 376-381 not sound like… well, ass.) I sent Joe the full score and the MIDI, but I’m not going to post those here. The next time anybody else hears this piece, it’ll be with Joe Alessi, and an ensemble of actual musicians.

Well, unless he also decides that the piece works better as computer music…

AEJ and I took our friend Liz Love out to dinner for her birthday last night.  It coincided with Austin Restaurant Week, when lots of nice restaurants in town offer discounted multi-course meals. We considered several places, but by the time we made plans yesterday afternoon, most places were booked. Fortunately, we were able to get into Truluck’s, a place we like a lot.

I had crab claws.

Liz Love (with a name like “Liz Love,” you have to call her by both her first and last name all the time) had Proscuitto-wrapped mahi mahi with fava beans.

AEJ had a delicious Niman Ranch sirloin. It was my favorite thing at dinner, but it didn’t photograph well. Boo, dark restaurant. Instead, here’s a picture of an enormous lizard that lived on our window screen for three days. He was easily 11″ long. (Since I’m a male and I’m claiming something was 11″ long, it was probably only 6″, but didn’t it seem huge? Please tell me it seemed huge.)

Sometime before dessert, Liz Love busted out her Bach and Beethoven action figures. She keeps these in her purse. She’s had Bach for some time (he even has his own Facebook page), but Beethoven is a new addition. Beethoven appeared to have been pretty ripped. Who knew?

Here, Bach bows. Or something.

Oh look! The dessert tray is here! Everybody gets to pick their own dessert. Fun!

Hey… These are plastic. And here I thought they made fresh demo desserts every night. I felt so misled.

Uh oh. The composers have discovered the alcohol. This can only end badly.

Dessert came — non-plastic dessert, that is. I’d ordered the carrot cake — I love carrot cake — and as if it weren’t sweet enough already, they poured butterscotch sauce on top of it at the table.

Liz Love had some crazy mocha mousse ice cream thing as big as her head.

The composers, by this time, were pretty liquored up.  (The non-action figure people at the table were of course completely sober.)

Apparently when Beethoven drinks, he gets depressed. Bach tried to console him. “No, seriously, the Grosse Fugue is a good fugue, man. I mean, it’s no Toccata and Fugue in d minor — heh, that was a pretty good one, I have to say, and it’s so spooky! — but yours is really good, too.”

It was a really fun dinner. Great food, company, and lots of tasty cocktails and wine. (Any bottle of wine is 50% off on Wednesdays at Truluck’s!) Of course, the evening ended as any good birthday should. Happy Birthday, Liz Love!

AEJ is out of town for a few days, so I’m putting in 14-hour days just working on the Trombone Concerto.  Somehow, I think I only checked Facebook once today.  I know. It’s crazy.

The current task is orchestrating the 13 minutes I’ve already written. Part of that includes making the trombone solo part, which only existed as a MIDI mess, start to look like a playable part. I’ve created a PDF of three pages of the solo part, and I’d welcome any thoughts about playability. You’ll see a lot of gliss-looking markings before notes, and those are rips. I need to figure out a good way to differentiate between actual glisses between notes, and simply rips up to a note from the furthest-possible position. As of now, there are only a few true glisses; almost everything else is a rip. There are also a few “gliss hits,” which was something that Joe Alessi showed me a few months ago. These are just lightning-fast glisses down from a note. I’ll have more of those in the last movement.

You’ll see that the part is very high and very loud. There’s a stretch of rests after the part you’ll see, and then it’s quiet for a minute before going all ape-shit at the end of the first movement. (That’s the part where Dionysus — the trombone — is brutally destroyed, torn to shreds by his own worshippers.)   I’m a little concerned about fatigue with the part I’m posting. It doesn’t really stop, and most of it is at middle-C or higher. The part before this is relatively subdued, though. Still, it’s three minutes of, well, balls-to-the-walls solo trombone.

I might end up finding a place or two to drop out the soloist for a few bars. Does that seem necessary? I should also point out that this whole stretch is solidly in F. There are some “dirty” notes, but it’s F.  It’s kind of a barn-burner, with a bunch of call-and-response with the band.  (There’s a hint — just a hint — of gospel to it.  In a few minutes, though, this “service” is going to go very wrong.)  I only mention the tonality because on their own, and without the benefit of hearing the accompaniment, these 3 pages feel like a whole lot of F, but it makes it more striking when it goes out of control in a few more minutes.

Oh, and those 17 measures of rest in the middle of page 2: a great big percussion break for tom-toms, timpani tuned flat and muted, cymbals, bass drum, roto-toms, and djembe.

Alright – back to it.