Monthly Archive for January, 2008

A few weeks ago in my com­po­si­tion class at PSU, my pro­fes­sor intro­duced us to a piece called OK FEEL GOOD by a com­poser named Jonathan Newman. I was instantly taken back by it. The piece was writ­ten, as Newman states in the notes of the score, dur­ing “a year of some­what intense per­sonal dis­tress, and I was extremely tired of feel­ing bad, so I decided to write a very happy piece.”

To me it’s an amaz­ing work, full of lush melodic color and pul­sat­ing with rhyth­mic motion. I specif­i­cally state this because the motivic mate­r­ial is writ­ten in a some­what odd meter. It starts with a bar of 7/16, goes into a bar of 3/8, back into another bar of 7/16, and then fin­ishes with two bars of a more com­mon 3/4. But it man­ages to flow very well. It has many moods, no doubt due to the fact of his inten­tional tran­si­tion from dark to light, and it’s easy to her his love of jazz rhythms, per­cus­sion, and Gershwin. It’s warm and very ten­der at times, extremely sexy at oth­ers, and it reminds me a lot of a Don Ellis com­po­si­tion. It’s rad.

The seven and a half minute long com­po­si­tion was writ­ten for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and debuted on July 12, 1996 at the Harris Hall as part of the world renowned Aspen Music Festival. The orches­tra­tion is for a small six per­son cham­ber group: Flute (dou­bling Piccolo), B-flat Clarinet (dou­bling Bass Clarinet), Violin, Cello, Piano, and Percussion (Crotales, Xylophone, Vibraphone, Marimba, Triangle, Suspended Cymbal, Conga).

Finally I would also like to men­tion that Mr. Newman is part-founder and mem­ber of the BCM International, a con­sor­tium of four com­posers: Newman, Jim Bonney, Steven Bryant, and Eric Whitacre, who was the artist in res­i­dence at the APU School of Music two years ago. He adapted ideas and themes from Milton’s epic poem to a mul­ti­me­dia opera/dance/stage per­for­mance with live and pre­re­corded music and enti­tled it Paradise Lost. Interesting idea, sort of trendy out­put. Anyway I thought it was cool that they all work together and pro­mote each other. Something of a no brainer but refresh­ing to see for two com­posers that I had no idea were connected.