Composer Blogs@Sequenza21.com
American composer Tom Myron was born November 15, 1959 in Troy, NY. His compositions have been commissioned and performed by the Kennedy Center, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Portland Symphony Orchestra, the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, the Topeka Symphony, the Yale Symphony Orchestra, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Bangor Symphony and the Lamont Symphony at Denver University.

He works regularly as an arranger for the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, writing for singers Rosanne Cash, Kelli O'Hara, Maxi Priest & Phil Stacey, the Young People's Chorus of New York City, the band Le Vent du Nord & others. His film scores include Wilderness & Spirit; A Mountain Called Katahdin and the upcoming Henry David Thoreau; Surveyor of the Soul, both from Films by Huey.

Individual soloists and chamber ensembles that regularly perform Myron's work include violinists Peter Sheppard-Skaerved, Elisabeth Adkins & Kara Eubanks, violist Tsuna Sakamoto, cellist David Darling, the Portland String Quartet, the DaPonte String Quartet and the Potomac String Quartet.

Tom Myron's Violin Concerto No. 2 has been featured twice on Performance Today. Tom Myron lives in Northampton, MA. His works are published by MMB Music Inc.

FREE DOWNLOADS of music by TOM MYRON

Symphony No. 2

Violin Concerto No. 2

Viola Concerto

The Soldier's Return (String Quartet No. 2)

Katahdin (Greatest Mountain)

Contact featuring David Darling

Mille Cherubini in Coro featuring Lee Velta

This Day featuring Andy Voelker


Previous Posts

Free Stuff
Name That Tune 49
C'è musica e musica
A Day and a Night of Berio
Name That Tune 48
Name That Tune 47
Name That Tune 46
Name That Tune 45
Name That Tune 44
Name That Tune 43

Visit Tom Myron's Web Site
Friday, May 27, 2005
Loomings



Last July, when ArtsJournal.com held their "Critical Conversation" to ponder the issue of where the new "big ideas" in classical music were, I posted the following:

Here's my big idea. The belief that it is somehow significant that we have all the music of the past 500-plus years available to us at the swipe of a credit card is a red herring responsible for a massive fit of cultural self-consciousness. If you really want to think big, then the time span that separates John Adams from John Dunstable is nigh on meaningless- trivial in the scientific sense of the word. In a self-conscious age a time-based art form is bound to give us headaches about the future.

Needless to say, my observations did not make a dent in the discussion. Fast-forward to this past week when I started reading Moby-Dick and found this passage in the first chapter:

"...doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

'Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States'

'Whaling Voyage by one Ishmael'

'BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN'

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage I think I can see a little into the motives which induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased free will and discriminating judgment."

I guess it's just me, but 1851 really doesn't seem all that long ago.
posted by Tom Myron

Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Music for a While



Music for a While
(After Purcell)

Against the white wall
Her decent appears a free-fall
Though no mere leap of faith
Closes distance so suavely.

Imagine a clear, slippery sound
Like brushes on cymbals
As she touches down,
Pianississimo, subito presto,
Eight double-jointed beats
Set up the new tempo.

Yellow-green and very fast
Skimming a
Scratched at
Strung out
Staff like a practiced
Eye, rapid, detached.

She's unimpressed.
I'm not surprised.
This music requiring, at most,
One or two eyes,
Three or four limbs, to realize.

Still

She will share this space with me,
Her silk-strung near invisible
Harp tuned to a scale I cannot
Sing, her music
Sounding depths of the room
I have never visited.
posted by Tom Myron

Monday, May 23, 2005
Why I Bother



In response to Jeffrey Biegel's excellent questions today about functioning as artists in our post-9/11 world I'd like to relate a personal experience that, in retrospect, helped me to focus my thoughts on this issue. I wrote this in October of 2001.

On a beautiful summer morning in 1984 two Amtrak trains, one traveling northbound, the other south, were accidentally routed onto the same track north of Penn Station. Shortly before 9am, just after crossing the Hell's Gate Bridge, they collided some 80 feet over the streets of Queens. I was sitting in my seat waiting for my (to use Nicholson Baker's charming phrase) now-wife to return from the dining car with some napkins when the impact occurred.

In the 10 or 12 minutes that it took Jessica and I to find each other the sky overhead filled with police and news helicopters and the surrounding rooftops began teeming with TV crews and photographers.

What had happened was just starting to dawn on us when we witnessed a sight that I will remember as long as I live. Into the bright air on both sides of the wrecked trains massive fire-ladders began rising swiftly and silently. New York City Fire and Rescue personnel streamed off the ladders by the dozen, carrying back-boards, oxygen tanks, fire axes and jaws-of-life. While the most seriously injured passengers were treated at the scene the rest of us were escorted a hundred or so yards back to the bridge embankment. There we saw that still more FDNY personnel had brought in a truckload of lumber and built a staircase through the trees and brush down to the street. One at a time, a fireman led each passenger down this improvised stairway. At street level we were taken to a machine shop that had been turned into a fully staffed field hospital.

I have wondered many times since September 11 how many of the men and women who touched our lives that day have been taken from us. And I have thought long and hard about those left behind, who will live always with the experience of incalculable loss. We owe all of them the very best of what we have to give because that is what they offer to us.

It is good, indeed necessary, for all of us as artists to be thoughtful about what we do and even, at times, to question our 'relevance'. But we must never let that questioning lead us into silence. Because out in the big world, there are women and men who do not for a split-second, in the face of the unimaginable, question the relevance of anyone. They embody the single most awesome dimension of a free society: a social contract that says when you are in the blink of an eye rendered helpless and injured there are people who will walk through fire to be at your side.

This is the opposite of terrorism.
posted by Tom Myron

Sunday, May 15, 2005
Live from the Kennedy Center



An overflow S.R.O. crowd turned out Saturday night at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage to hear the Potomac String Quartet perform works by Quincy Porter and myself. The evening was doubly enjoyable because my piece, The Soldier's Return was dedicated to my wife Jessica on her 40th birthday in 2001 and last nights performance was on her birthday!

To hear & see the concert go to:
http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/archive.html#

Click on:
Saturday May 14, 2005

PROGRAM:

The Potomac String Quartet
George Marsh & Sally McLain, violins Tsuna Sakamoto, viola Steven Honigberg, cello

Quincy Porter In Monasterio

Adagio
Cantabile
Allegro

Quincy Porter String Quartet #3

Allegro
Andante
Allegro moderato

Tom Myron The Soldier's Return

I. Sonorous, intense
II. Rough, energetic
III. Dashing, impetuous
IV. With gathering ecstasy
V. Shimmering, like a mirage
VI. Calm, weightless
VII. Simple and devout, like a prayer
VIII. Heavy, resonant, anguished
IX. With a dedicated fury
X. Fantasia: "And all my passions capture"
posted by Tom Myron

Monday, May 09, 2005
Träumerei



Two or three times a year I'll dream that I've met one of the great composers of the past. Occasionally the dreams are extremely vivid.

****

One Sunday evening in 1985, when I was living in Washington, DC, I was home alone and in a very gloomy mood about the whole business of being a composer. I was writing a big piece for orchestra that had no prospect of performance. I had no professional contacts. What the hell did I think I was doing? The more I thought about it the more agitated I became until I had what I suppose was almost a panic attack. At 2 A.M., utterly exhausted, I fell into bed.

I dreamt that I was standing at the edge of the courtyard between Sage Hall and the Josten Music Library at Smith College. It was a beautiful day. A man exited from the side door of Sage Hall and began walking towards me. I went to meet him halfway. It was Roger Sessions. We stood facing eachother for a moment, then he said "We are men who must express ourselves with the orchestra."

The next day I learned that Roger Sessions had passed away the previous Saturday.

****

I dream that I am supposed to meet Philip Glass somewhere but that the plan has been changed at the last minute. Instead I am to meet Carl Ruggles.

I am walking up the steps of a huge, white, rundown 1880's vintage home. The sky is an eerie whitish-gray. Inside, the rooms are all empty and dusty. I hear an amazing bell-like sonority coming from behind a closed door. When I open the door the sound is overwhelming. Ruggles is seated at a huge grand piano. The instrument has no lid and there are cables, chains and pieces of machinery piled inside the piano and spilling out onto the floor. Ruggles stops playing and says, "What you're looking for is the sound inside the sound."

****

I'm standing outside. It's winter and snow is falling. The features of the landscape are difficult to make out. A person standing next to me says, "Let me show you something." We walk up a small hill. From the top we can see a frozen pond about thirty yards ahead. There is a man skating on the pond. He moves in big, slow circles. He is of medium build but stocky. He wears a heavy looking tailcoat, a scarf and a big top hat pressed to the back of his head. My guide leans over and whispers, "That's Beethoven."
posted by Tom Myron

Friday, May 06, 2005
Free Verse



Klangfarbenmelodie
(For H.C.N.)

Hannah hears herself
And you can tell
It's the sound of her sense
That she likes so well,
The noise of her meaning
Not the meaning of her noise.

She throws her voice,
A boomerang bat
Bouncing sonar,
Taking her readings (but
not too seriously.)

She knows ideas
Are only pictures made of voice-shaped air,
While the klang of her language
Is a wind chime alphabet
Struck hard, bell-bright
And louder than a Cambodian oboe.
posted by Tom Myron

Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Kingsley Amis



For Kingsley Amis a real writer was someone for whom a decent measure of artistic talent was never at odds with being a versatile professional- someone who could turn their hand to a novel, birthday ode, television script, poem or critical essay with equal parts aplomb and enjoyment. He believed that a sure-fire way of judging the relative merits of ones own work was to see how it went over with strangers, a measure of success that has become my personal gold standard.

Among his more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism is what I believe to be the funniest novel about classical music ever written, the incandescent Girl, 20.

In the words of Paul Fussell, "Amis was perhaps the first intelligent British critic to bring his wide command of literature, as well as his wit, to the task of seriously opposing the critical orthodoxy of Modernism. Stuffy critics had been doing it for some time, but Amis was something different, young, clever, militant, funny, non-academic and supremely forthright and courageous."

About Hugh Kenner's 1988 assessment of The Waste Land as 'the century's most influential poem' Amis wrote "If you see literature as a matter of influences and importances of course you are going to fall for International Modernism, with its innovativeness, experiments, developments and echoes, so much more inviting to lecture on than the intractable, unclassifiable qualities of an actual work of literature. Importance isn't important. Only good writing is."

So much more hilarious and terrifying then, when he turns to music. It's a relief to know that the man who could write that "Twentieth-century music is like paedophilia. No matter how persuasively and persistently its champions urge their cause, it will never be accepted by the public at large, who will continue to regard it with incomprehension, outrage and repugnance" also felt that "It is a great blessing to be able to catch glimpses of the world of mysterious, ideal beauty that music offers, even though I cannot truly enter it."
posted by Tom Myron