Good Times in Norfolk, CT

It's a gloriously sunny day today in New York. Hardly a cloud in the sky, a gentle breeze blows through the streets, and the pavements seem particularly crap-free. There's a sparkle in the air and I'm relaxed and happy. Even the asshole truck driver who woke me up this morning by parking outside my bedroom window and beeping his horn non-stop for three minutes to attract the attention of the person to whom he wished to deliver his package rather than go to the bother of actually dragging his obese fanny* out of said truck and waddling up the six steps to the apartment block’s front door couldn’t take the sheen off my mood.  Since I am more neurotic than a busload of Woody Allens I expect this feeling to last for but a short while, and so have decided to document the circumstances surrounding my unusually positive attitude.

"So… Why so cheerful, Tim?" you may ask (or you may not. You self-absorbed jerk). And I shall answer you: I have had my soul nourished by a magical week in a lushly verdant pocket of the world tucked away in the heart of rural Connecticut. A tiny hamlet of lovingly maintained New England mansions, oldey worldey water mills, wide open streets utterly free of traffic,smudgy mists that waffle down from viridian hills,babbling brooks, blarping frogs, floofing birds, and sunsets that would make God weep. I have spent a week in Norfolk, CT. (Also there was free ice-cream).

More specifically, I have been one of the fellows at the Norfolk New Music Workshop, run every year since 1941 by Yale university. The workshop is a residency that is part of a larger music festival that takes place in the Ellen Battell Stoekel estate, a sprawling parkland that was once home to a philanthropically-minded gazillionaire by the name of Ellen Battell Stoekel (duh). Ms Stoekel left the whole kit and kaboodle to Yale university with the specific instruction that the ol' farm be used to host an annual music summer school. Seventy years later, it's still kicking along, and this year I was fortunate enough to attend (especially since there was free ice-cream).

For those of you who don't know what a residency is, it's pretty much a working holiday for artists. You send off an application, saying "look how good I am! Can I come and stay at your place and make some music/art/sculpture/interpretive dance based on the manufacture of dental floss?", and then the people who run the residency go "Sure! We'd love to have you along!" (or sometimes "No f&#king way! Your music sounds like a bagful of drowning cats! Go to hell and take this migraine-inducing crap with you!") and then you go and live there and do your thing and generally have a nice peaceful time of things. I've been lucky enough to undertake a few residencies and they're all different and awesome in their own way, but Norfolk was so great it'll stick in my mind for many years to come. The scenery was amazing, my fellow artists-in-residence were a stellar bunch of people, and the whole thing was run by two of my favourite folks, "nicest composer in the whole world" Martin Bresnick and "rip-roaring pianist" fellow Aussie Lisa Moore (plus there was free ice-cream).

So generally speaking, there are two kinds of residencies: one where you're required to demonstrate some kind of finished product at the end, and one where you're required to just exist and add a certain classy romanticism to the place (much like in the days of Byron when wealthy landowners would go to the length of actually advertising for, interviewing and hiring hermits on a contract to live in purpose-built ramshackle cottages strategically placed in discrete corners of the estate, so when the landowners were out wandering with their entourage they could wave vaguely at this utterly artificial addition and say "oh yes... that's where the hermit lives... poor mad fellow..." because nothing says "thrillingly romantic" like having an unkempt hobo squatting in your backyard. Wait... where was I...? Oh yes. Residencies.) So there's two kinds: ones where you have to do something, and ones where you don't (it's more complicated than that, but in a nutshell, there it is). The Norfolk residency was the former, and for this one we (the composers) had to write a piece before we got there that fulfilled certain criteria: it had to be for a specific ensemble (clarinet, trombone, percussion, piano, violin and double bass, if you're interested), and it had to make some reference to the work of the man who could be arguably called the Grandpappy of American New Music, Charles Ives (however there was no requirement to reference the fact that there was free ice cream).

So Charles Ives was, and still is, a pretty unique composer. He was doing his thing at the beginning of last century, and had this kind of "composer superhero" lifestyle... by day he was a mild mannered life-insurance salesman, and by night he was a mild-mannered composer who wrote some of the most wildly fantastic music you could ever imagine, so much so that of course in his day he was considered a joke, and even now there are some pieces that raise eyebrows. He did a lot of things that were considered bizarre and frankly unmusical in his day, like writing pieces in multiple keys simultaneously, or positioning performers all over the concert hall, but he is perhaps best known for his habit of mashing together pre-existing pieces against a completely whacko backdrop of sound. Essentially he was DJ-ing decades before anyone even thought to put those two letters next to each other (except in very sternly abridged dictionaries**). The man had a love of pastiche that makes the average hipster look Amish. So it was this aspect I decided to focus on my piece (and my free-ice-cream-eating habits whilst at Norfolk).

I also knew I wanted this piece to be for Blair. Blair passed away only a few days after I had started work on the piece, and in the aftermath it became glaringly obvious that this piece absolutely had to be for him, especially since the date of the concert at the end of the residency was June 25th - Blair's thirtieth birthday. I'm not a huge believer in fate or coincidence, but this was too weird to ignore. So I knew this piece was to be for Blair, and I wanted to write a piece that he would enjoy listening to. The problem was that in the entire time I had known Blair he practically never professed a bold love or dislike of any music. Plus he was so unfalteringly positive that I could have beaten him over the head with a trumpet and he would have said "mate, I love it! Totally original and clever! Not so hot on the beating, but what do I know?" The only piece of music I could ever recall him saying he enjoyed was a song I wrote for him for Death's Waiting Room (created by Danielle Harvey, script by Sam Bowring. Friendship obligations satisfied) called "Weed". In this show, Blair played a confused transvestite called Marie Antoinette. Confused because she longed to be a man, despite the fact that biologically she was male. Even though I wrote the music for this song waaaay back in the day before I had even considered composition as a career, I still think it's a pretty kickass tune, and it has an awesomely dark little harmonic progression in the chorus. So I used that as a basis for the piece - pretty much throughout the whole deal this harmonic progression is referenced in a bunch of permutations and guises, all dressed up in Ivesian pastiche to sound like a celebration of an awesome guy (and I'm struggling to think of a way to seamlessly mention free ice cream at the end of this paragraph).

The performance was awesome. The musicians were incredible. The whole concert was brilliant. It was a great day. Amongst the thickly forested hills of Norfolk, in a huge New England music hall made entirely out of Californian redwood, "Good Times" premiered in front of a small but completely devoted audience. This alone is reason for me to feel that this residency was a wonderful success. But there was more... during the course of the week, listening to the musicians work on the piece, and talking to the other composers on residency with me, and having time out just to sit and think about my music and Blair and where I've come from and where I'm going to, I had an epiphany: this was my sound. This is my thing. This is the music that I can write that is completely and utterly me. Unsubtle. Raucous. Theatrical. Like two circuses colliding on an enormous jumping castle, elephants and lions and acrobats and all. For an artist of any ilk this is a wonderful moment. It clears the away some of the uncertainty and gives a clearer direction to head in. It suddenly makes you proud of your work and prepared to defend it to the death. It's like being reborn, and virtually nothing in the world can beat that.

Except free ice cream.


* Before you begin sending me links to wikipedia pages outlining the anatomical difference between men and women, remember that in the USA “fanny” means “buttocks”. I’m trying to blend in.

** I totally stole that joke from Terry Pratchett, but it fit perfectly so I couldn't resist. Totally Ivesian.

I've yet to receive the recording from the concert. As soon as I do, I'll update the blog, so keep your eyes peeled!

This is a fence.

The forest behind the estate

An olde worldey water mill.

The mansion on the estate, known as "The Whitehouse". It was pretty extravagant. The dining room ceiling, for example, was upholstered in elephant leather. No shit.

If ever a picture was worth a thousand words, it's now.

Jaqui Kolek, a mutual friend of Blair's, and I (and Andy, Jaqui's BF) enjoying some post-concert Veuve in honour of Blair.

The gang (from L-R): Me; Preben Antonsen (composer); Tim Hambourger (composer); Julia Seeholzer (composer); Adrienne Pope (violin); Mark Broschinsky (trombone); Victor Caccese (percussion); Gleb Kanasevich (clarinet); Thibault Bertin-Maghit (double bass); Nick DiBerardino (composer); Edward Neeman (piano); Julian Pellicano (conductor). At the front we have Lisa Moore and Martin Bresnick. Good times!