Jay C. Batzner (b. 1974) is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida where he teaches music composition and technology courses as well as coordinates the composition program. In his first year, Jay received two prestigious grants: one to create collaborative works with visual artist Carla Poindexter and the second to initiate electroacoustic music concerts in Orlando. Prior to this position, Jay was an active adjunct professor at several colleges in the Kansas City area while he completed his D.M.A. in Composition at the University of Missouri – Kansas City Conservatory. While at UMKC, Jay received honors including a Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship and a Dean's Doctoral Scholar Fellowship.
Jay's music ranges from instrumental chamber works to electroacoustic compositions. He has participated in numerous national and international festivals including the Wellesley Composers Conference and the International Young Composers' Meeting in the Netherlands. His music is published by Unsafe Bull Music and has been recorded on the Capstone and Vox Novus labels. Jay is a frequent contributor to the new music website Sequenza21.com and a founding member of the composers organization The Collected.
Jay is a sci-fi geek, an amateur banjoist, a home brewer, and juggler.
I typically hate writing program notes. They seem somewhat artificial to the process of composing or listening. If it weren't for all that brooding Romanticism from 150 years ago, I don't think we'd be burdened with the expectation that I the composer must tell you what everything in my piece "means." Why not say nothing and let the listeners, you know, listen.
Anyhow, I write program notes. They are brief, they don't tell you much, but today I wrote what is probably the single most honest program note I've ever done. My Songs of my Youth are finished, ready to go out in the mail tomorrow morning. Here are the notes:
"Each of the five movements in this suite were inspired by various pop songs from the early 1980s. I decided to take short, memorable, and in some cases iconic, licks and hooks from these songs and abstract them, mutate them, hide them, and embrace them. For a while in my musical development, I shunned and hid any of my earlier musical tastes. I carried my pop music history with shame as I set out to become more erudite and sophisticated. In recent years, I’ve realized how wrong it was for me to have that attitude. All my musical tastes, from Spike Jones and the City Slickers to Witold Lutoslawski, from John Luther Adams to Huey Lewis and the News, from Faster Pussycat to Elliott Carter, make up who I am as a composer. The hardest part about writing these pieces was choosing and limiting myself to five songs. Invariably, you the listener will want a different song added to my collection. I can’t help that but I can encourage you to take that song and let us hear it synthesized through your years of experience. In other words, go write your own piece! These were tremendous fun to compose and I hope that they are fun to perform and to hear."
I'm looking back on the last 18 months and I find myself in a much different space. I like where I am now. I wonder where it will take me.
posted by Jay C. Batzner
5/07/2008
Deadline
Hey everyone,
The Submission deadline for Electronic Music Midwest 2008 is May 15! To submit works, please visit http://www.emmfestival.org (choose "Call for Submissions").
Just wanted to keep you all informed...
posted by Jay C. Batzner
5/04/2008
Tribute
I'm done with the semester. I need not return to my office until August unless I really want to (and I don't). This semester was particularly roller-coasterish. The composition degree was put in "abeyance" in early March, meaning that the crop of interested students were having their degree plans aborted by the administration. Well, in early April, based solely on these composers' music, the administration reinstated the comp degree. And they decided to un-cancel Composition I.
My teaching load is going through the roof. In addition to the 3 classes I was scheduled to teach I'm now teaching Comp I (which is full and was pretty much full 3 days after it was restored) in addition to 3 new composition majors, all with tremendous potential and skill. I volunteered to take on this much teaching since it was either that or no composition instruction at all.
So, I've been thinking back to my own composition instruction. Charles Hoag, now retired from KU, was my teacher. I studied comp with a few others before I went to KU, but Hoag was the first that really made any kind of impact on me. One year, I compiled a list of his sayings. Here is a short version of the list. It gives you some idea of my own pedagogy, which frightens me more than you might think.
The Quotable Hoag
Everyday Phrases “Whoa! Scared of that!” “...which is why you have retained me at great expense...” “You will go into the library with gun and camera...” “Clear as mud?” Pot of Jack- (noun) French for “jackpot” “Shuck and bop”- (verb) doing your own musical thing (i.e. “shuck and bop all over the National Anthem.”)
Steinbeck: “...was a pinko from the word ‘go.’”
Elliott Carter: “The last of the crusty old men.”
Aaron Copland: “It is safe to say that awkward voice-leading doth a style make.”
Cellists: “Boy, those cellists always think they know where the fish are.”
George Crumb: “The Dead have Mossy Wings?? That is an image I would rather not have, thank you very much.”
Brahms: “Yeah, you musicology types think Brahms is new music.”
Stravinsky’s Le Noces: “This piece is Orff-ly familiar.”
Schoenberg: “You see, not everything that Schoenberg did was wrong!” “The great thing that Schoenberg had that Hitler did not was that Schoenberg was not crazy.”
Beethoven: “Sometimes I’d like to go back in time and break Beethoven’s hands with hammers. And I’d do it out of sheer professional jealousy...” “You know, those historians like to say that Beethoven ‘didn’t have a lot of melodic gift.’ Boy, I’d sure like to ‘not have a melodic gift’ like that!”
Libretti: “A bad libretto is like bone disease.”
Conducting: “More wrist, less ass!”
Tristan und Isolde: “Wagner knew that the key to musical eroticism was putting the resolution off until the last possible moment.”
Jazz: “Yeah, that vintage age jazz is too old for me, which makes me happy.”
Supporting the arts: “Somebody had to go out and shoot the bear so someone else can stay back and draw on the cave.”
Geography: “I’ve met a lot of nutcases from Petaluma, California.” “I wouldn’t retire to Benington, Va, but it is a good place to buy socks.” “Russia was not famous for movie technology.”
the Diminished Major 7: “That’s a heavy chord.”
the double dotted quarter note: “...is the greatest thing since axle grease.”
Instructions: “Here is a barrel. In it are fish. Here is a gun. Shoot the fish.” “I don’t need a page full of melodies, just give me one that sounds like Pucinni...”
Student Compositions: “You write it and I tell you how bad it is...that’s my job. No fair you guys cutting down your own music, what the hell am I here for?” “You can change it ‘til the cows come home and it’s still going to suck.” “Just finish the damned thing!”
Music in General: “There is something wrong with all the music out there...except maybe Brahms.”
posted by Jay C. Batzner
4/23/2008
Pre-Reviews
Ok, I'm starting to get some reviews from one of my compositions. The great part is that I haven't even finished the piece yet! Here are some initial reactions to my solo marimba suite (in progress) tentatively titled Songs of my Youth.
from Ryan Churchill, longtime friend and band, erm, Wind Ensemble director: "You and I both are probably headed for hell anyway, this just puts you on the fast track."
from Heidi Parker, my sister: "Shame on you! Shame! Shame! Bow your head in shame!!!"
Strong stuff, eh? The thing about Songs is that each movement is an abstraction from some early 80s pop tune. They are incredibly fun pieces to write. I don't know if they are fun to listen to but based on these reactions I think I am going in the right direction.
I almost forgot to mention the tunes: 1. Come on Eileen 2. Don't Dream it's Over 3. Careless Whisper (which yielded the above comments) 4. Always Something There to Remind Me 5. Take on Me
posted by Jay C. Batzner
4/11/2008
Quote of the Day
From my wife, listening to David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion.
"I like this. This isn't what I expected from a Pulitzer winner. I really like this."
posted by Jay C. Batzner
4/10/2008
I do love teaching
I had a really good energizing day today. My comp students invaded Music Forum, our twice-a-week performance venue. I wrangled an entire forum last semester for the Comp 1 class so the whole class could take a piece from idea through performance. It worked well. This semester I had fewer students but they each had 2 short pieces or 1 longer piece. The whole thing was well attended and well put together. I'm very proud of them all.
Also, in my freshman theory class, I gave a composition project assignment. Some students have stopped by with their pieces and I'm really pumped about what they are doing! I love looking at their scores, seeing potential, and offering my own humble suggestions. I tend to shotgun out a lot of options, often contradictory ones, to get the students thinking of their own ways to navigate their pieces.
For some sadistic reason it is much easier to see potential in my students' works than it is to see in my own. I have several short marimba pieces to complete in the next month and I'm just stuck. I know what I want to do but it just isn't happening. Maybe I need to ask my students for help. Come to think of it, that is EXACTLY what I am going to do!
posted by Jay C. Batzner
4/07/2008
Opening Acts
The animation Carnival Daring-Do that I did with Carla Poindexter is getting its first screening this weekend at the Palm Beach International Film Festival. Next weekend, Fresno. In Fresno we are opening for Jellyfish, which won the Camera d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Quite an interesting pairing, if you ask me, which you didn't, and I'm honored that they have put our film with something that people might actually go and see.
That is good. I like that.
posted by Jay C. Batzner
