nonesuch.reedquintet records After Hours
I count myself as very fortunate to live so close to new ensembles excited to collaborate with composers of new music like myself.
nonesuch.reedquintet in particular (and in addition to helping to fill a gap in professional wind instrument-based chamber music in the pacific northwest) has been an extremely gracious champion of my music, recording my Suite from a Non-Existent Ballet last year and including it on the program of music they are taking on a six-week tour of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam starting next month.
And now nonesuch.rq has done it again—with a lively new recording of my piece After Hours.
Written in the spring of 2023, After Hours was the first piece of music I wrote that wasn’t (just) for saxophone, my native instrument. Writing something for my own instrument felt intuitive, but to make the leap to writing for instruments I didn’t/don’t play I (rightly) felt the need to take a long bath in woodwind scoring, orchestration, and idiomatic wind writing. Getting prepared to write After Hours was a large part of my self-directed training in music composition, forcing me to level up. The studying paid off and I’m proud of the result.
At the time of writing the piece, I still considered music composition a marginal interest in my life—hence the title After Hours, which is when I squeezed in writing the four movements that make up the work. The four movements are only vaguely musically related (a planing chord progression that gently begins the work and recurs in the third movement then becomes the main idea of the propulsive final movement; an unsettled passage in the second movement becomes an interlude in the rondo finale), but they have a deeper connection to my experience of the pacific northwest:
I. Wayfarer pays homage to PNW author Becky Chambers who penned a sci-fi space opera of the same name—one featuring humans, aliens, and interplanetary travel but is really about how beings with different identities, capabilities, and histories succeed and fail to transcend all of that to peacefully get along.
II. Late Spring is about the glimpses of summer we get during spring in the pacific northwest, often dashed by rain and gloom before we can fully enjoy them.
III. Talk Back has no explicit connection to my home but passes a moody groove around that later returns in an unsettling guise with a bucolic trio as an interlude.
IV. Boss Fight is an energetic close to After Hours, related to one of my favorite rainy-season pastimes growing up: playing video games.
The nonesuch.rq recording above is the original version of After Hours, which I later revised with some advice from the bassoonist from Calefax, the founders of the reed quintet as a musical medium.
You can now find the updated score and parts for After Hours for purchase here, along with the full program notes.
For readers in the Willamette River Valley, in the coming weeks nonesuch.reedquintet is looking to give a SE Asia Tour send-off concert—previewing much of the music they will be bringing to Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—including my piece Suite from a Non-Existent Ballet. Stay tuned to their social media for coming details.
Come listen to some of the freshest music around served up by an inspired young ensemble. If you can’t make it but care about their mission to spark love for music among the next generation of musicians, consider kicking in a few bucks to support their touring and educational outreach.
