S3E10: Math Nerd to Music Nerd: Composer and IOCSF Tenor Nicholas Weininger
On this episode, a conversation with IOCSF’s very own, Nicholas Weininger. Nick started off in IOC as a member of the tenor section, but it wasn’t long before his talents as a composer emerged. Nick then became IOC’s version first Composer in Residence, with ten of his pieces performed over the years!
Edited by Fausto Daos
Music excerpts
“Rise Up, My Love, My Fair One, And Come Away,” by Nicholas Weininger, performed by IOCSF
“I like my body when it is with your,” by Nicholas Weininger, performed by IOCSF
“It May Not Always Be So,” by Nicholas Weininger, performed by IOCSF
“As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” by Nicholas Weininger, performed by IOCSF
“Ve hayah ba-'acharit hayamim,” performed by Choral Chameleon
Episode references
Theme Song: Mr. Puffy by Avi Bortnik, arr. by Paul Kim. Performed by Dynamic
Episode Transcript
Intro [00:00:07] Hello! And welcome to In Unison, the podcast about new choral music and the conductors, composers and choristers who create it. We are your hosts: I am Zane Fiala, Artistic Director of the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco, and I'm Giacomo DiGrigoli, a tenor in IOCSF, the Golden Gate Men's Chorus and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. And this is In Unison. (I like being in unison!)
Zane [00:00:35] On today's episode, we're chatting with IOCSF's very own Nicholas Weininger. Nick started off in IOC as a member of the tenor section, but it wasn't long before his talents as a composer started to emerge. He then went on to become our very first composer-in-residence and, in total, we have performed ten of his works over the years. Nick is actually one of the many composers that are also singers in the choir. Let's start off by hearing something Nick originally wrote for IOC back in 2012, but then revised in 2018. Here is "Rise Up, My Love, My Fair One, and Come Away", set in the original Hebrew and performed by the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco on their new album, Hope in Times of Disquiet. [00:01:20] [Music Excerpt: an undulating melody issues forth from the soprano and alto sections of the choir, as if recalling an affectionate conversation. The men enter and sing a gentle melody entreating their beloved to arise for the winter and rain have dissipated - giving way to a lovely day.]
Zane [00:03:46] Joining us today on In Unison is a longtime member of IOCSF and a close friend of the pod, composer Nicholas Weininger. Nick is actually a software engineer by profession, but a passionate choral composer and singer by avocation. His choral works have been performed by choirs across the United States, ranging from the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco and the New York City based ensemble Choral Chameleon, all the way to the West Genesee High School Chorale and the Germantown Friends School Concert Choir. Nick's works are published through Personage Press and SMP Press. Nick holds a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from Rutgers University. He worked as a software engineering manager at Google from 2005 to 2020, and is now an independent consultant. Nick has sung with IOCSF since 2007, before I joined actually, and began composing for the group in 2011. In 2015, he was named IOCSF's inaugural Composer-in-Residence, and we have performed ten of his works over the years, which is always a joy!
Zane [00:04:57] Nick's 2016 setting of "As Kingfishers Catch Fire", which was commissioned by IOC, was awarded second prize in the Ithaca College Choral Composition Competition and was a finalist for the 2020 American Prize. It's also one of two of Nick's pieces featured on IOCSF's newest album of live recordings, Hope in Times of Disquiet, which (shameless plug here) is available in the Apple Music Store [laughter from Giacomo]. Initially a self-taught composer, Nick took up private composition study with Joseph Stillwell in 2014 and now studies with Vince Peterson of Choral Chameleon. Nick lives in San Francisco with his wife and son, and we are so happy to have him joining us today. Nick, thank you so much for being here!
Nick [00:05:38] Well, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me!
Giacomo [00:05:41] Nick, we're so glad to have you and it's funny because we know you so very well that finding an ice breaker for you was a bit of a challenge, to be perfectly honest [laughter from Nick]. I'm like, "What? How could we bend his brain a little bit?" So, we found one for you that we think you might enjoy. Here it is: if you had a time machine, would you go back in time or into the future? And why?
Nick [00:06:04] I would go into the future. Ahh... So specifically, I would go about 50 to 100 years in the future - long enough that it would be no longer than I might perhaps hope to live, but a short enough time that I could hope to understand what was happening. And, and the reason is that, when I think about the 21st century ahead of us, I am a short term pessimist, but long term optimist. I think we've got some rocky years ahead of us for a bunch of well-rehearsed reasons: climate change, political turmoil and the rest. But I think that the new technological advances and institutional and cultural changes that are in progress now ought to make the longer term future, the decades from now, a future really much better than the present. And I'm interested to see if I'm right and I'm interested to see just how that unfolds. And that's why I would take the time machine into the future.
Giacomo [00:07:03] How'd we do on climate change, Nick? [laughter from Zane]
Nick [00:07:06] Yeah, how'd we do? That, that's... that's a big part of it.
Zane [00:07:08] That's a good question.
Giacomo [00:07:09] But more importantly, how did I age? [laughter from Zane] I feel like that's really important. [laughter]
Zane [00:07:15] So, I think we should start kind of at the beginning, Nick, and we want you to tell us a little bit of your story. You know, how did you go from being a big ole' math nerd to being a big ole' choir nerd? But first, what the heck is pure math?
Nick [00:07:32] Sure. Ahh... so, pure math is distinct from applied math, which is math that you would use for engineering, that you would use for physics or for finance, or one of the other sort of math-heavy fields. But that actually sort of produced concrete things for people in the real world.
Nick [00:07:51] Pure math is investigating mathematical properties of objects for their own sake, for the sake of what can we learn just through logical reasoning about how the mathematical world works. And I'll give you an example. So, in the field of math that I studied in graduate school combinatorics, one of the famous, long, open questions was about coloring. And it's as follows: suppose you have a map on a flat sheet of paper that, you know, has some territories in some configuration, right? Like the map of the states of the United States, that kind of thing. Right? You can envision giving each territory a color such that no two territories that touch have the same color, right? So that you can distinguish the territories by color at the boundary. And the question is: how many different colors does it take to color the map like that? And you can quickly come up with a situation where it needs four colors, right? You can't do it with just three different colors. You need four different ones. And the question is: is there ever a situation where you need five or more different colors to do a map coloring this way? And it was proven a few decades ago that, no, you don't. This is the so-called four color planar graph theorem, that, you know, an abstraction of a map, which happens to be called a plane or graph, can always be colored in this sort of adjacency-satisfying way with, at most, four different colors. And so, this is the kind of abstract question about mathematical properties of things that pure mathematicians investigate.
Zane [00:09:33] So, what you're saying is you're the king of math nerds! [laughter from Giacomo and Zane]
Nick [00:09:41] [laughter] I didn't feel that way in grad school. But I suppose, in a larger perspective, it's something like that [laughter from Zane]. But to your question about math nerd to choir nerd, "the journey", I would say I have always been both. So, on the math and computer side, I have been programming since I was a kid. I've loved computers and interesting mathematical questions since I was a kid. But I've also been singing in choirs since kindergarten. And that has always been, you know, my extracurricular when I was in school, my hobby in the center of my social world when I was out of school. And, you know, I would first and foremost credit my amazing elementary school music teacher, Cindy Hall, who unfortunately passed away recently. But she taught me to read music. She taught me good breathing technique for singers. She taught me really the love of the choral art and the passion of the choral art. And it's stayed with me all my life since then.
Nick [00:11:01] And, I would say, I had emphasized the mathematical and computer science side more as a career, partly... frankly, because there's a lot more money in it than there is in music, partly because I had more role models of people doing that as a profession than I had of of people making a profession and a life out of music. And so the, you know, "the journey", to the extent there is one, is a story of like seeing that "Oh, yes, there were people doing these wonderful musical things" and, "Huh... Maybe I should try doing those or more of those myself.".
Nick [00:11:50] I was in concert choir in high school, I think, when I first really got the taste of serious musicianship that would influence my composing technique. Another shout out to a role model there to Steve Kushner, who is my high school choir director. Umm...
Zane [00:12:08] Where did you grow up, Nick? Did you grow up in California?
Nick [00:12:11] I grew up in upstate New York, umm, and I went to high school actually in New Hampshire, Phillips Exeter Academy. And Steve Kushner was the choir director there at that time. And he... He had us do tremendously ambitious and difficult, major contemporary choral works and would push us to really polish them and to memorize them. So, my sophomore year in high school, we did Benjamin Britten's "Rejoice in the Lamb".
Zane [00:12:45] Yeah, OK.
Giacomo [00:12:46] Wow!
Nick [00:12:47] [laughter] And I can still sing the entire tenor part to "Rejoice in the Lamb" from memory nearly 30 years later. [laughter from Zane]
Giacomo [00:12:56] Is that, is that a trauma or a... [laughter from Giacomo and Zane]
Nick [00:13:00] No! It's a wonderful, wonderful thing! Umm... because, you know, what I learned from that is, number one, how effectively choral music can express the deepest, most kind of ecstatic, but also traumatic emotion. You think of the, if you know the work, you know the movement "For I am under the same accusation with my Savior" [from "Rejoice in the Lamb"]. That's still, to me, one of the most emotionally powerful works of choral music that there is. But, he also opened me up to the power of playing with meter as a way of expressing the passion in a text. If you think of [singing the melody from "Rejoice in the Lamb"] "Let Nimrod, the mighty hunter, bind a leopard to the altar, and consecrate his spear to the Lord." Right? What I remember looking at that as a kid [laughter], you know, my first really serious choir and, you know, like "This measure is 7/8! And that measure is 11/8! And that measure is 3/8! What the hell is going on here?".
Nick [00:14:02] But you realize, you know, when you're taught it really brilliantly, Britten's intention of bringing life to the text, making it both natural and in some sense more than natural in its passion through the way he varied that meter. And so that, yeah, that made an impression on me that's, that's never left.
Zane [00:14:25] Let's listen to how Nick was influenced by Britten's ecstatic and traumatic emotional expression and how he brings life to the text in "I like my body", one of his first compositions performed by the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco on the album, The Unknown Region. [00:14:41] [ Music excerpt: an insistent and repeated declaration of "I like my body" issues forth from the men, qualified by the following "... when it is with your body." The rest of the song sounds as if we are privy to the most intimate of pillow talk between two lovers - intertwining melodies, with both partners interrupting each other and completing each other's thoughts.]
Nick [00:16:48] Gosh, the journey to, like, adult choral serious person probably begins after grad school. So, I went to grad school in math, but I got lured away by Google. I was gonna be a math professor. And then I decided, looking at what, you know, Google software engineering seemed like as a career at that time, that it was a greater adventure. And so moved here to San Francisco in 2005 to take a job at Google. And the amazing thing, one of many amazing things about Google is for almost any kind of interest you might have, any hobby, any pursuit, any niche, any creative endeavor of any kind; there are a whole bunch of people at Google who do that thing, often at a very, very high level - often at a professional level. And who organize, you know, at work and talk about doing this thing.
Nick [00:17:49] So, there was a music-making mailing list that I joined where people talked about their musical endeavors. And one of the folks on that list, in I think it was '06 or '07, posted a post about the Chanticleer in Sonoma Choral Workshop. Now, for those who aren't familiar with this, this is kind of like rock and roll fantasy camp for choir nerds [laughter from Giacomo and Zane].
Nick [00:18:18] [laughter] You get to spend five days in Sonoma, making music with Chanticleer. And if you were the sort of person who looks at this and says, "Wow! That sounds completely awesome." It is, in fact, exactly that awesome [laughter from Giacomo and Zane]. The rehearsal schedule is intense. The programs you do are always quite ambitious. And not only do you get to sing with Chanticleer, you get to party with Chanticleer and, boy, can those guys party. But it's the sort of place where you can, you can... and I actually did literally this... at midnight, drunk off everybody's asses, you can bring out a bunch of copies of the Josquin "Ave Maria" and say, "Who wants to read through this?" And a whole bunch of hands will go off. Like, where else do you have the social environment... A whole bunch of fans will go up and say, "Me, me, me!" And you get a group together and you hand out the scores and people will do an incredibly good rendition of the Josquin "Ave Maria" - drunk off our asses! [laughter from Giacomo and Zane]
Nick [00:19:23] [laughter] Right? And in the midst of all of that, someone else who is at that Chanticleer in Sonoma Choral Workshop actually went to the length of bringing a great big trunk full of scores of motets for us to go and read through. And I thought, "You know? Somebody with that level of devotion and that level of nerdy interest, that person will know what choir I should sing in." Because, you know, I was new to San Francisco. I didn't know anything about the Bay Area choral scene. I didn't know what good choirs there were out there. But I said to her, "I would really like a recommendation. You seem to be plugged in to the Bay Area choirs. What choir should I sing in?" And she said, "You should sing in International Orange Chorale.
Nick [00:20:14] And so, she sent me contact information for Jeremy Faust and Paul Kim, who were the co-directors at the time. I think I auditioned in Paul Kim's sister's house, or some relative's house in Mountain View. You know, that was another incredible sort of compositionally-influencing moment for me. It was actually my very first IOC rehearsal in '07 because we walked in and we warmed up. And Paul led us through a rehearsal, the first movement of the Brahms "Warum ist das Licht gegeben?" - this incredibly intricate motet and also an incredibly, deeply passionate motet on really quite a somber text from Jobe. And that, again, made such a huge impression on me emotionally and in the sense of "I really want to know how this works, I really want to know how this is put together." That I think that started me down the road, sort of ticking in the back of my mind, "I kind of want to think about music more seriously. I wanna make music more seriously."
Nick [00:21:29] And then the thing about IOC was, over the next few years, we started doing more and more new music. We started getting more and more composers in the choir. I think a big watershed moment for that was 2010, doing the Conservatory Composition Competition, and suddenly performing all of this new music by composers who were, you know, students and who we could just meet and talk to you about the music and having some of those folks actually join us.
Nick [00:22:00] God, I remember, too, the first time we did Josh Saulle's piece, "I am a little church". Still to this day, one of my favorite pieces that IOC has ever done. And thinking, you know, "Gosh! These really fun, interesting, smart folks are writing new choral music and maybe this is a thing I should try."
Zane [00:22:24] So, you started to compose in 2011 for IOC, is that right?
Nick [00:22:29] Yes. Yes. Well, that after about a year of trying to teach myself, more or less. And that, in itself, is interesting 'cause, in all those years, I had never taken music theory class. I had sung and sung and, you know, eventually started taking voice lessons as well. And learned a bunch of music theory and musicianship, to this sort of extent you have to, to sing well enough at that level. But I had not studied it in the way that composers typically studied it. I had the good fortune that the father of a friend of mine was a professor of composition.
Nick [00:23:12] There's another role model to name check, composer named Errol Gay, who taught in Canada for some decades and also passed away recently. He recommended to me the Paul Hindemith book, "A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony". And I started teaching myself to compose out of that book, out of its practical rules and exercises. And, because I had joined IOC several years earlier, I had this group of friends who I could call upon to read through my drafts. And so that was the first great lesson that I took from my composing experience was people to workshop your draft music are just absolutely worth their weight in gold. There is no faster way to figure out what works and what does not than to have people just take a draft to the score and try and sight read it.
Nick [00:24:09] So, I learned a tremendous amount from that process, and, you know, I think from all of the years I've been singing in choirs, I at least started with a good sense of when choral music sounded good and when it was satisfying to sing. So I could sing through parts, I could play through things on the computer, and I could sort of triangulate between that and my friends, you know, sight reading through things to get a sense of how it sounded and whether it sounded any good. And the first thing that I wrote that sounded any good, that I thought really sounded any good, was "it may not always be so". And so I sent that to you in early 2011. And then in the Fall, when we first rehearsed that piece, I remember we were at a retreat up in Larkspur as it was at that time. And Jeremy was there and we ran through the whole piece and he patted me on the back afterward and said, "Wow, Nick! You're a real composer." And that meant a lot 'cause I certainly had imposter syndrome relative to him, to Josh Saulle, to a bunch of the folks who I got to know by that time, who had had a lot more formal training, who had had a lot more of that kind of experience and that that they really liked the piece and thought it worthwhile, that meant a tremendous amount to me and showed me that I could go on.
Nick [00:25:55] Let's hear the composition that marks the beginning of Nick's composer journey. The work that started it all. Here is "it may not always be so", performed live way back in 2012 by IOCSF. [00:26:09] [Music excerpt: a wistful tune issues forth from the entire chorus, expressing perhaps regret and lost love. The song builds to a gentle climax and a halting end - finding consolation in the fact that a lost love cannot be recovered.]
Zane [00:29:09] For our audience, we just got part of our choir, the International Orange Chorale, together for a little weekend retreat just this last weekend. And Nick was there along with about 20 other members of the group. But one of the things we did was just for fun. We had a little singing session and we sang a bunch of music from IOC's past and we broke out "it may not always be so" and we sang through it. And for me, as the conductor and the one who first brought that piece into life back in 2011, it was such a lovely moment of remembering my first experience at that piece and seeing how it stood up and just being reminded of the talent that you have, just kind of innate within you to write some really beautiful music. It was just a lot of fun to be reacquainted with that piece. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about "it may not always be so", like, give us a little bit of a description of the piece and, Giacomo, if you have anything you want to jump in about...
Giacomo [00:30:09] I do, actually. I was gonna say, I mean, the piece is lovely and it was a thrill to sing it and to hear it again. And you said it. It's the poetry. "It may not always be so". It's the poetry of E.E. Cummings, which is so evocative of fluid meter and rhythm, which is just a really fun thing to play with, like you were talking about before with the Britten. How did you work with that to set the text so rhythmically in your piece? I mean, what did you do when you were playing around with setting that, setting that text?
Nick [00:30:36] Yeah. So, the thing about "it may not always be so", which is an early... not quite a love sonnet, a post-love sonnet perhaps, of E.E. Cummings is that I... In a way, I set it as if it were a hymn text because I think of that piece, I think of that poem, as something which one might read somewhat somberly and with some reverence and almost prayerfully. And so, the musical setting expands some of the lyricism in the text to fill the space, I think, that the meter gives it. And in particular, it does that in a way I think is influenced by Russian Orthodox liturgical music, that's another of my favorite genres of choral music to listen to because it has such depth of emotion to it and such numinousness, such a wonderful sense of the transcendent. And, and I wanted to bring those things to that text, to that secular text, and make it new in that way.
Giacomo [00:31:56] Was there anything you discovered recently or... I mean, that piece was from an earlier time in your sort of compositional history, which is pretty amazing. How did you feel hearing it again so many years later?
Nick [00:32:08] Well, I felt with the sort of perfectionist's feeling, "Gosh, I would write that differently today!" [laughter from Giacomo] I think a lot of us, not just in music, in any creative endeavor, probably have the desire to continually revise what we've written, as we learn more, as we mature more as artists. I still like the piece a lot, but I would write it differently today and I have to resist the temptation to try to revise it and to say to myself, "No! This is good enough as it was. This... No, your taste wasn't wrong 10 years ago. This actually is still a good piece. It's just different from what you would write today!" So, that's, that's how I feel about it. It's kind of a mixed feeling.
Giacomo [00:32:58] I wanna ask maybe a little bit about your evolution as a composer, from that time sort of moving forward, and specifically about working with the Choral Chameleon Institute, and working specifically with Vince Peterson. What did you gain from that experience? How did that transform your thoughts as a composer? What did you get from that experience?
Nick [00:33:21] Oh, my gosh! I got so many things from that experience. And I went to the institute twice in 2017 and 2018. And, it's kind of the distillation of the... what I said earlier about having people read through your music is just a golden opportunity, because it gives you several rounds of that golden opportunity with the most skilled readers you could possibly imagine, right? Vince brings in his professional ensemble to read through a draft of your piece, which you've been working on in collaboration with composing faculty at the institute. And then, in response to what you hear there, you revise it. And then, they read through the revised draft and you learn more and then you revise it again. And then, finally they go and read through and rehearse the draft that they ultimately perform at the concert at the end of the institute. So, you know, you see how your piece evolves through that kind of revision process. You see how everybody else, who's at the institute with you, have their pieces evolve through that revision process. And it teaches you an enormous amount about the difference between theory and practice in choral singing, between, you know, what what can be put together by some really, really incredibly skilled and talented singers in a very short time versus what you might put on the page and how you might think it's gonna sound in the hands of such an ensemble. And, it's also just an extraordinary community, the institute is. I've made several friends through it. I got to it through the good offices of a couple of other friends. And then, Vince himself has become this incredible mentor and teacher to me. I think, you know, he maintains the relationships with his students so well. And, you know, when he announced that he was beginning to offer private composing lessons, I jumped at the chance to continue to work with him in that way. And it's been terrific.
Zane [00:35:50] Yeah, Vince is a good friend of ours now as well. We interviewed him on an early episode of In Unison, but we've also been in conversation about how In Unison can be involved with the Composer Institute as well, moving forward. And so, there are some things that are in the works. We haven't established anything for sure. But, you know, we're definitely looking forward to working with him. So, you would say... you'd say it was a good experience and you would definitely recommend the Institute to other composers?
Nick [00:36:17] Oh, absolutely. Absolutely! It's a tremendous growth experience and it's also just tremendous fun.
Zane [00:36:26] But, there's nothing like that on the West Coast, is there?
Nick [00:36:29] Not yet!
Zane [00:36:30] Not yet. [laughter from Giacomo]
Nick [00:36:31] Not that I know of. [laughter from Zane]
Zane [00:36:34] You mentioned Benjamin Britten as an early, influential composer on you. What other composers would you say stand out, your top three or so, that have had a significant influence on you as a composer yourself?
Nick [00:36:49] So, yes, Britten is one. I would say Poulenc is another.
Zane [00:36:55] Mmm...
Nick [00:36:57] Ahh... his Lenten motets influenced me very, very deeply. And then, also, in terms of metrical material and textual material, the other major work that we did in high school was work by Robert Convery called "Songs of Children", that is a series of settings of poems by Jewish children who were interned and ultimately murdered in the Terezin Nazi concentration camp, poems that they wrote in the camp. So, you know, as full of pathos, and as full of emotional content as you might expect of that subject matter and yet set in a childlike enough style in a free and open enough style to create a great deal of joy. And that, that kind of juxtaposition of joy and sorrow, right, I think a lot of great art can thrive on that. But that taught me a lot about how choral music can thrive on that. And I think Brahms does, too, not just in... in "Warum ist das Licht gegeben?", but in some of the secular songs, some of the a cappella choral repertoire of his that I think is understudied. He brings the knowledge of mortality face to face with a determination to enjoy life. And composers who do that, their work often really, really resonates with me.
Giacomo [00:38:51] I have to say, I mean, it's clear to anyone who's listening to this conversation or heard your pieces before, you don't shy away from tackling really hard texts, or problems of the heart or mind or... You sort of dive in, your inspirations feel like they're very deeply rooted and deeply passionate. And one of the pieces that you've mentioned to us that you've worked on at the Choral Chameleon Institute, I think, is I think quite illustrious... uh, illustrative of that. Pardon my Hebrew, this is gonna be a disaster. So, you're gonna have to fix this for me. But the piece is titled "Ve hayah ba-'acharit hayamim". How'd I do?
Nick [00:39:29] That's actually quite close. I am not a native Hebrew speaker myself, so I'm not a great judge. But that's pretty close to how I would pronounce it. Yes.
Giacomo [00:39:39] How would you pronounce it? Just so we have it.
Nick [00:39:43] "Ve hayah ba-'acharit hayamim".
Giacomo [00:39:43] Great, thank you! Not too bad, OK. So, tell us about writing that piece at the Choral Chameleon Institute. What is it about?
Nick [00:39:52] Gosh, yes. So the back story...
Giacomo [00:39:54] And what does that translate into, by the way? Just so folks can know...
Nick [00:39:57] So, it means "and it will happen in days to come".
Zane [00:40:00] Before we hear Nick's story about this piece and its inspirations, let's go ahead and have a listen. Here is the world premiere performance of "Ve hayah ba-'acharit hayamim", performed by Choral Chameleon at their Summer Institute in 2018. [00:40:17] [Music excerpt: a choir sings a gentle song, expressing their strong conviction in their faith. Short, melismatic outbursts underline the hope of redemption through forsaking swords and spears and by studying war no more.]
Nick [00:45:55] So, this piece is actually the third movement of the cycle called "Songs in Time of Peril" that I wrote between 2016 and 2018, on a number of biblical texts. I had been getting more into reading this new translation by Robert Alter of the Hebrew Bible, learning from his commentary and then going back to the original Hebrew text to really get a sense of the sonority of the Hebrew, and loving the sonority of the Hebrew poetry. And I had, had really wanted to set something that was a progression of darkness to light over the course of the whole cycle of songs that would have both sorrow and hope. And, and so for a hopeful end to the cycle, I had chosen this text, which is from the prophecy of Micah. And it's... it goes on to have some of the fairly famous verses.
Nick [00:47:01] It sets, for instance, the verses "and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation and men shall study war no more." And so, the whole piece is organized around that kind of vision of a more hopeful future, right? The future I would go into the time machine to see, right? [laughter from Giacomo and Zane].
Nick [00:47:25] And, and so, the other thing about the piece, and this ties back to my mathematical interests, is that it is based around one of the Messiaen modes of limited transposition. So, a brief bit of extreme music-nerdery here: if you think about the whole tone scale, right, you divide the octave into six equal whole tones. And, one of the things about that is that, if you shift up by, you know, a tone or two tones or however many, you still get the same scale. Right? It's invariant under transposition, in a way that the standard diatonic scale is not, right? And so, it doesn't have a kind of tonic ground in the way that a... that a diatonic scale does. And there are other scales that are like this, other subsets of the chromatic scale that are like this that Messiaen realized. For instance, if you divide the octave into four equal minor thirds and then each minor third you divide whole step, half step, you get the so-called octatonic scale, which he used a bunch... Messiaen did, Stravinsky did, and has some roots in the 19th century as well. But, which has this similar kind of shifting property and which lends itself to diminished harmonies a lot because of the stacked minor thirds that you naturally get out of it, you know, make your diminished chords.
Nick [00:48:56] And then there's another scale, which is you divide the octave into three equal major thirds and then each major third is half step, whole step, half step. So, it's a nine-tone scale. And it's... it has the same symmetry of shifting at the major third now and lends itself naturally to augmented harmonies, right? - the augmented triad being composed of these stacked major thirds. And so, I got to play with that kind of structure and with its kind of kaleidoscopically rising and lifting property that it often has. There's a section of the piece that has a canon at the third where, you know, the starting notes just keep going up and up and up. And it's, it's thematically appropriate because it's actually setting the text and many people shall flock to the mountain of God and say, "Come and let us go up to the mountain of God".
Nick [00:50:01] And so, I had a lot of fun, you know, making all of the puzzle pieces fit together with that, like, tight structure of the symmetrical scale and also making it a really satisfying emotional expression of the drama of that text. And the thing that the Institute really allowed me to do, again, was to understand what pieces of that worked in practice with real human beings singing it and what did not. But, ultimately to come out with what I think is the most difficult and the most complex piece that I've done that's really satisfying as music. Right? You know, you try and do kind of high concept things if you're a composer with a particular direction of ambition and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, right? You got to take that risk to try and make something new. And that was one of the times that I think I've taken that risk at the same time intellectually and emotionally, and made something new worthwhile.
Zane [00:51:12] What, uh, what can you remember that surprised you, that you wrote, that you thought for sure was gonna work just fine and then it turned out that it didn't work at all? [laughter from Giacomo and Zane] Do you remember any specific moments in the piece, where you're like...
Nick [00:51:26] Uh-huh.
Zane [00:51:27] "Oh, this is gonna be amazing!" And then, they got it in front of them and then it just was a train wreck and you're like...
Nick [00:51:31] Uh-huh, yes!
Zane [00:51:31] "OK! I learned something new today!"
Nick [00:51:34] Yes, yes! Umm... So, yes, there was a section where it actually shifted back to octatonic for a while to get the, ahh, umm... To get some motifs reprised from a prior movement and had people kind of riffing on that in a, in a fast staccato way. And then, had a few measures where there was a mixed-meter transition into another musical idea that I thought made some sense to me and made sense on paper. And, you know... here was Matt Oltman, as accomplished a conductor as you could possibly ask for, conducting these professional singers. And, they were just missing it and missing it. And it was like, "What the hell even is this, Nick?" Right? They were saying, "What is it that you mean us to do?" And I was trying to explain it. And I realized, if I have to explain it in that detail to this group of singers, it doesn't work. And so, I had to just go back and make some of the rhythms a little bit more regular, some of the tonalities in the transition a little bit more regular, so that transition would actually land.
Zane [00:52:51] What about the inverse of that? What about a moment that you were kind of unsure of? And yet when the singers got it, it just worked beautifully, like for... right out the gates. Can you think of any moments like that?
Nick [00:53:04] Aah, yes. OK... There were a couple of moments where you have a kind of blooming through a quite abrupt modulation up major third. And I, when I was singing through the parts myself as I was composing, right, this is the classic choral or vocal composer's good practice is to sing through every part of yourself, I was having a little trouble hearing how some of those modulations went. But in rehearsal, they clicked, and it bloome, and it was amazing and it was awesome because especially because that was the part where I was setting maybe my favorite verse from the whole setting, which is the verse from Micah that says "and they shall dwell, each one under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.".
Zane [00:54:08] Hmm.
Nick [00:54:09] And I mean... [laughter] This is even more resonant now post-pandemic. But even a few years ago, with all of the turmoil in the world at that time, all the reasons we already had to fear at that time, that is the vision of the hopeful future, was something that I cared a lot about, about bringing out beautifully. And, and... I think I managed to do it. And it was... it was so rewarding to hear them do it.
Giacomo [00:54:41] It sounds like this is maybe one of your more complex pieces, along your journey as a composer.
Nick [00:54:47] Yes!
Giacomo [00:54:47] But you've also written some pieces which were... which are, I think and I've gotten the opportunity to sing, a bit more accessible.
Nick [00:54:53] Yep!
Giacomo [00:54:54] Like, "The Lamp".
Nick [00:54:56] Yes.
Giacomo [00:54:56] Tell us a little bit about that piece. Where did that piece fall along your journey as a composer?
Nick [00:55:03] Yes. Yes, that's a great story. That was the last piece that I wrote in my autodidact phase. I had had several years of writing pieces for IOC and trying a bunch of things, you know, again, some more complex than others. Some worked less well than others. And then, I found this text by Sara Teasdale, who is a perennial favorite of choral composers for very good reason, and decided to just set it in the most homophonic and straightforward way that I could bring myself to do so. And I thought, "OK, this draft came out well." I saw, sometime in early 2014, a call for scores for a reading session put together by the Resound Ensemble, which I think, you know, is a San Francisco based ensemble that also has done a lot of interesting new and contemporary things. And so, I jumped at that chance to go and get them to read through. And they, they read it through, learned a lot always from what they could get and what they couldn't.
Nick [00:56:25] But also, David Conte was there as a kind of commenting faculty member at that workshop, and he gave me a great deal of very insightful feedback along the lines of, "Well, I can see from this piece that, you know, you've taught yourself well in some areas. And here are some gaps you have, right? Here are some things that, you know, I notice as somebody who is steeped in the craft of composing." And it was, that was at a time when I was already thinking, "Gosh, I really should try to get a teacher to learn more about that craft of composing." And so, I went up to David Conte after the session and said, "Thank you for your very useful comments. I've been looking for a teacher who, you know... Here is my situation, who would you recommend?" And he said, "Great! You should go study with Joe Stillwell." And so, I did. And that... that put me on a path that made it possible through, I think, a more theoretic, thorough theoretical grounding through doing the boot camp and species counterpoint, doing the boot camp and keyboard harmony in the Boulanger style, right? - Those sorts of things, to have a much better toolset, to tackle the more complicated things I want to tackle. So, you know, but "The Lamp" is something that's at that transition point owes a lot to my simple autodidact instincts, but also a lot to David Conte's great feedback. And I... it serves to me, also, as a reminder that sometimes you just want to keep it simple. [laughter]
Zane [00:58:15] Let's listen to that transitional piece now. Here's Nick keeping it simple with "The Lamp", performed by the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco on the live album, The Unknown Region. [00:58:27] [Music excerpt: a choir tenderly sings together, sharing their conviction that there shall be no fear of darkness, nor cries of terror if they are to hold aloft a love like a lamp before them. The song explores the wide range of a choir, from the deepest bass to the soaring sopranos, as if to express the profound depth of love that a lover provides - like a lamp in darkness.]
Zane [01:01:03] What was one of the most impactful things that David said to you at that time?
Nick [01:01:09] Sure. So, he pointed out a couple of cases where my lines were not following, you know, what he called the principle of contrapuntal gravity and therefore would be harder to sing, right, that the sequences of intervals were not according to, you know, the traditional rules for sequences of intervals, and that there was a reason for those rules to be traditional. And that reason was that the ear, you know, finds it easier to hear certain intervals, one after the other, than others. And so, we went back and forth about, "OK, well, here is... Here's what I'm trying to express with this." Right? What are my options for accomplishing that expression, accomplishing that artistic goal that actually are in keeping with these rules and that are therefore going to sort of work more smoothly as crafted music?
Zane [01:02:06] If "The Lamp" were a wine... [laughter from Giacomo] what wine would it be?
Nick [01:02:16] Mmm...
Giacomo [01:02:16] By the way, our listeners need to know that both Zane and Nick are just huge wine nerds. So, we can't pass up the opportunity to have them talk a little wine here.
Nick [01:02:24] Yeah!
Zane [01:02:25] If Nick is the king of math nerds, I am the king of wine nerds. [laughter from Giacomo and Zane]
Nick [01:02:31] Yeah, yeah. So... I would hope that the... "The Lamp" would aspire to the status of a kind of really solidly made "cru bourgeois", right, from Bordeaux. Right? A bistro wine that you would drink that might not have the full flavor profile of, you know, a beautifully aged, you know, first growth Pauillac or something [laughter from Zane]. But that it would be a wine that would be... that would express the direct joy of what, you know, the Bordeaux varietals can do and be, in such a way that you'd be glad to drink it any time.
Zane [01:03:15] I love that. That's a great analogy. What about "Ve hayah ba-'acharit hayamim"?
Nick [01:03:23] "Ve hayah ba-'acharit hayamim" is, sort of, an experiment in natural biodynamic wine [laughter from Giacomo], made from an unusual blend of grapes that people haven't put together before, but really should be put together. And, you know, let's try a bunch of things until "Aah, yes! Now you can see that, you know, when I have 30 percent Mourvèdre here [laughter from Giacomo and Zane], right?" Of course, it's a surprising note. Umm... and you've got to walk the fine line between "Ooh! Really interesting!" And "Oh... Really interesting..." [laughter from Giacomo and Zane]
Zane [01:04:01] [laughter] That's fantastic! That's great... this might be a new segment on In Unison. You have to have composers compare their, ahh, their compositions to either food or wine. [laughter]
Giacomo [01:04:10] I feel like we should all be having a glass of wine at this moment.
Zane [01:04:13] Yeah...
Giacomo [01:04:14] If we're going to do that.
Zane [01:04:14] ... Except for... it's a little early in the day [laughter]. Oh, my God.
Giacomo [01:04:19] Nick... Nick, tell us about one of the other two pieces, which is you've performed with IOCSF and is actually now on the recording, our most recent recording, Hope in Times of Disquiet, now available on iTunes and Spotify, called "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" with the text by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Nick [01:04:40] Yes!
Giacomo [01:04:42] Why... Why this piece? What was it about the text that, that drew you? And where did this land in your compositional journey?
Nick [01:04:51] Yeah, OK. So, this was a piece that I wrote, I believe, in early 2016, while I was studying with Joe Stillwell, who gave me immensely important feedback on it. And, the piece is perhaps my most Britten-esque, for a variety of reasons. First of all, it has that same mixed metrical sensibility I talked about, that I learned from "Rejoice in the Lamb". Second of all, one of the other Britten pieces that influenced me very deeply was a cycle of songs called AMDG - standing for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam - "to the Greater Glory of God" - which is a cycle of Gerard Manley Hopkins settings. One of the ensembles I was in at the Chanticleer and Sonoma Workshop had performed under the direction of Matt Oltman. And, you know, Matt is a great Britten expert and taught us a lot about how Britten sets texts, but also about the kind of rhythmic interest of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry. He had a whole theory of how he constructed his poems metrically, which he called "sprung rhythm". And that's really important to this piece, in particular, and how I chose to set my mixed metrical setting of it.
Nick [01:06:27] But the other thing about this particular text is that I kind of wrote it on a dare. So, a friend of mine, who is also a great composer, who I've known since college, a guy named Paul Cantrell, he was talking with me one time about how much he loved Hopkins' sprung rhythm and, you know, his practice of putting accents in the poem texts on some of the words to indicate how he wanted them to be declaimed, what syllables he wanted them to... he wanted the, the speaker of the poem to emphasize. And he said, you know, "This is an example of a poem I absolutely love whose musical density, just in and of itself, is so great, which is so gnarled in its structure and so full of of its own layers of music, that I can't imagine how you would set it to music." And I read the poem and I said, "Paul, this is the perfect kind of poem to set to music."
Zane [01:07:35] "Challenge accepted!" [laughter]
Nick [01:07:35] I accept the challenge. Yes, exactly!
Giacomo [01:07:38] "Gauntlet thrown, sir!"
Nick [01:07:38] I'm going to set this text.
Giacomo [01:07:41] "Pistols at dawn".
Nick [01:07:42] That's right. That's right [laughter from Giacomo and Zane]. And so I worked on it. And the thing about Hopkins, which is challenging, is not only are the shapes of the lines and the shapes of the semantics, the things he's saying, often very complex, but that the streams of consonants. Right? [laughter] One of the, one of the most difficult things in my setting, is the way I set... "like each tucked string tells". Right? I have the sopranos and altos up there, at not a slow tempo, you know, having to spit out "cked - str" between "tucked" and "string" to make that diction work. And so, Hopkins throws you a lot of those challenges. But, his own passion for what he is saying shines through so much and his choices of words are so powerful, both in their imagery and in their alliteration, their sonority, that you can easily, to my mind, drive very powerful music off of that power.
Zane [01:09:02] Let's listen to the result of Nick accepting the challenge of setting the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Now, here's "As Kingfishers Catch Fire", performed by IOCSF on the live album, Hope in Times of Disquiet. [01:09:18] [Music excerpt: a choir sings a fragmentary melody - as fleeting as the light captured by a kingfisher's plumage, or the iridescence of a dragonfly. The choir sings a frenzied rush of words until they sing a gentle comprehension of the denouement of Hopkins' poem - the loveliness of limbs corresponds to the loveliness of one's soul.]
Giacomo [01:11:37] Nick, what are you most looking forward to musically in the next several months?
Nick [01:11:42] So, there are a couple of things. One, of course, is IOC resuming rehearsals in September.
Giacomo [01:11:48] Woo-hoo!
Nick [01:11:48] I can't wait to do that again.
Giacomo [01:11:50] Cannot wait!
Zane [01:11:50] You know, Nick, this weekend you were mentioning, in a new piece that you're writing, that ECMC on the East Coast, a men's choir on the East Coast, also directed by Vince Peterson, is gonna be working towards premiering, I think, in 2023. Can you tell us a little bit about that project?
Nick [01:12:06] Yes. Yes. So this is... this has been the main musical thing that I was doing through the pandemic. Like, I think, a lot of composers out there, I was trying to draw inspiration from that time. And, I think there will be a lot of musical works coming out of this period that do speak to this time. But the angle that I took on was to, again, try to go back to the liturgy for texts that would be apropos. And, I remember that the time when I really started the piece was when I was reading the Book of Lamentations. And the very first verse, first chapter of Lamentations, is "how she sits alone, the city once great with people". And I said, "That's just too on the nose! I have to, you know, I have to work that into the pandemic work.".
Nick [01:13:05] And so, I started from there, started thinking about setting that. And it's grown into what's going to be, I think, a ten-movement cantata for TTBB chorus and soloists and chamber orchestra. Hopefully, no really firm plans, but hopefully to be premiered in New York in 2023. And the... The great thing about it is it allows me to capture in music another text that I find very, very meaningful, which is the beginning of the book of Ecclesiastes. So, Ecclesiastes repeats this phrase over and over again, which, in Hebrew, is "hakol hevel ur'ut ru-ach" and, which we typically know in English, as "all is vanity and vexation of spirit", because that's what the King James version says, right? You... If you learned Ecclesiastes in English, you've probably learned "vanity of vanities. All is vanity and vexation of spirit.".
Nick [01:14:08] But Robert Alter, the great contemporary translator, says, no, that's not what "hevel" means. "Hevel" means "breath" and he translates it as "all is mere breath and herding the wind". And that's... "All is Mere Breath" is the title of the cantata because it resonates with me, has in this past year, on so many levels, you know... breath as the thing that we fear, because it spreads COVID, breath as the thing that people with COVID are short on and struggling for, breath as the metaphor for, for the transience of life, for ephemerality, for fragility, you know. This is... 'cause that's what Ecclesiastes means, right? He goes through all of the things in the world that he has seen under the sun. And after cataloging a few of them, he says again and again, "and this, too, is mere breath and herding the wind. And this, too, is as fragile as breath" is what it means. Right? And so, bringing that to life and also bring to life the whole sort of emotional arc of living through the pandemic is the modest ambition of this cantata [laughter]. And I hope that it will prove satisfying and resonant to people who have been through all of this when it finally does get performed.
Giacomo [01:15:32] Nick, in closing, where... we'll put this in our show notes, but where can folks find you and your work online if they'd like to commission a piece or get copies of scores? Where can we find you?
Nick [01:15:43] Yes! So, the starting point is "nicholas weininger dot com". That is my composing site, which has some excerpts and links to other excerpts of my pieces, which has links to where you can buy the pieces that I have available for sale. Several of the best of them, by the way, including "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" and the "Ve hayah ba-'acharit hayamim" are available from Personage Press. So, "personage press dot com" is another good starting point. Those are the main places to go, to learn more about my music.
Zane [01:16:19] Well, this has been a really great conversation. It's so inspiring to see someone who just decided that composing music is something they want to try out and then to see that that can become something that's so meaningful. And I mean, as a person myself who has been able to perform and study your scores for, you know, 10 years now, it's been amazing to see your development and to see how you've learned from the past and have pushed forward in the future, but also just the beauty of your music. And something that struck me, as you were just now describing, you know, the texts for this new cantata, is how highly, how very intellectual it is when you're thinking about how you're gonna write music. Or maybe, actually, I should say that it's... The inspiration you get is so deep within the texts and that is so impressive. It's... And then, and then the outcome is such beautiful music, even though there's this deep meaning and it's very intellectual, it's also really satisfying on an emotional level. So, kudos for being a really talented composer. I guess... A long way of saying that. [laughter]
Giacomo [01:17:36] Maybe it's... Maybe it's just Nick, though, because I'm also inspired to go and check out pure math [laughter from Zane]. I don't know. [laughter]
Zane [01:17:46] Maybe!
Nick [01:17:46] Well, that's honestly a lot of what the joy of mathematics is, right? You contemplate it as a thing of logic, but you also contemplate it as a thing of beauty. A good proof of a theorem in math should be beautiful.
Giacomo [01:18:01] Well, Nick, you have created many, many things of beauty for IOC and beyond, and we are absolutely thrilled to have had you today.
Zane [01:18:08] Yeah.
Nick [01:18:09] Thank you so much!
Zane [01:18:10] Can't wait to have another bottle of Barolo with ya. [laughter from Giacomo]
Nick [01:18:14] Indeed, indeed.
Zane [01:18:14] All right. Take care.
Nick [01:18:16] Take care.
Zane [01:18:17] If Nick's piece, "The Lamb", was a qualifiable cru bourgeois, this final excerpt is a big, bold Barolo for sure. Here is Nick's setting of Russian romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov's poem, "Parus, meaning waves. Nick's setting is programmatic, capturing the sentiment of each phrase while using a lilting ostinato in the accompanying vocal lines to represent gentle waves. This is the world premiere performance from 2015, by the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco. [01:18:50] [Music excerpt: a lilting melody issues forth from the men's sections of the chorus, contemplating a ship off in the distance and what it could have left behind. This lilting melody is replaced by a more dissonant section that depicts heaving waves and whistling winds - before the song returns to the lilting melody to depict the storm breaking and the sun piercing the turmoil with its golden rays.]
Outro [01:22:26] Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the In Unison podcast. Be sure to check out episode extras and subscribe at inunison podcast dot com. You can follow us on all social media @inunisonpod. And leave us a review on Apple podcasts to let us know what you think!
Chorus Dolores [01:22:43] Virtual choir rehearsal tracks organized by Chorus Dolores, who is flirting with the idea of starting a Fantasy! League! Choir!
Credits [01:22:54] In Unison is produced and recorded by Mission: Orange Studios. Our transcripts have been diligently edited by IOCSF member and friend of the pod, Fausto Daos, and our theme music is Mr. Puffy, written by Avi Bortnick, arranged by Paul Kim, and performed by the Danish vocal jazz ensemble Dynamic on their debut album, This is Dynamic. Special thanks to Paul Kim for permission. Please be sure to check them out at dynamicjazz.dk.