As a flutist, having studied some of the extended techniques in Robert Dick’s groundbreaking reference book, “The Other Flute”, I have a very special appreciation for his personal accomplishments on the instrument. He has cultivated the language of these techniques way beyond their notion as “effects”, into his own vernacular that flows from his horn just as if you or I were playing the simplest melody in C Major.

That fluency allows him the freedom to exploit, spontaneously, all the creative opportunities which will be likely to emerge in such a collaborative context as you will enjoy on Saturday night, 1/31, here in St. Louis at the Kranzberg Arts Ctr. Both dancer, Ashley Tate and highly innovative, multi-percussionist, Rich O’Donnell will be sure to bring to the table their own resourceful battery of inventions to make this event one of the most electrifying of the season. – See below for more info. on the concert, and if you’re not from this area, I hope you will still visit the artists’ websites and explore some of their recordings.

NEW MUSIC Circle 50th Anniversary SEASON

New Music Circle
2008-2009 50th Anniversary Season

I hope you’ve been enjoying my music on Amie St. and all the free downloads. It’s a great way to get to know and support new artists.

For example…… I realize that Cindy Blackman and Cecil McBee have been around for a while, but their new albums on Amie St. sound young and fresh! Cindy has a fired up drumming style that exudes creativity in every measure, and almost all the compositions on Music for the New Millennium are by her  –  advanced, yet very free-flowing.

Talk about a small world, Cecil McBee’s son went to pre-school with my daughter years ago in NY, so of course we remember his wife, Lucia, quite well. He named a piece on his CD, “Unspoken” after her, and it happens to be one of my favorites. All the other pieces are strong, too, with lots of variety and imagination in the horn playing.

Here’s the link to the jazz genre at Amie St. Then you can search in their names. ENJOY!     http://amiestreet.com/browse/jazz-blues/

Remember when I was telling you about all the Olivier Messiaen we heard at the Aspen Music Festival last summer?……..specifically the full performance of Vingt Regards Sur L’Enfant-Jésus (20 contemplations on the infant Jesus)? Well, it’s coming right here to St. Louis this Wednesday, 12/17,  7:30pm at the Pulitzer Foundation, http://www.pulitzerarts.org/events/concerts/idealdisplacements-messiaen/, when Molly Morkoski will perform the 2 hour solo piano work!

If you have never heard this piece performed “live”, let me tell you that it’s quite an experience for both performer and audience: immensely dramatic contrast of dynamics and emotion between movements, with relentless demands of technique and endurance imposed upon the pianist. And most importantly…. Vingt Regards is considered (by me, too) to be one of the greatest compositional achievements of piano writing in the entire repertory.

I hope all St. Louisans will come out to this hear this concert (and people in other towns can just be jealous), but in the meantime, have some fun at this video site of various performers playing movements from the piece http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qt_ZcdwAXo&feature=related One pianist featured here, Roger Muraro, the New Music Circle brought to St. Louis about 10 years ago to perform the work.

Hi Everybody, I wanted to let you know that my music has just been posted on a fun, new site, called Amie Street. (http://amiestreet.com)
(or direct to my page: http://amiestreet.com/music/fred-tompkins/?fms=YwyLH_EauEMx)
It’s different than other music networking sites, because anyone can listen and then DOWNLOAD FOR FREE any piece of music which has been recently added to the site (like mine, for example).
Then, as more and more people download the music (hopefully…. mine), the price of each song gradually goes up to 98 cents, and possibly 5 or 6 dollars for the whole album. Since you are all getting in on the ground level, I should be free….. or at least cheap! Also, it’s in mp3 format, so you can import the music to your iPods  and take it jogging with you.

Win/Win: The music is good for you and jogging is good for you!

Recently, the New Music Circle presented an “electrifying” concert by one of the great innovators of “live” and synthesized music, Morton Subotnick.

The music made a deep impression on me, and I believe I know why: As a composer, myself, I find that I am perennially aware of musical content in direct relationship to musical FORM. Put simply, if ideas don’t go anywhere, they quickly loose their impact and depth.

THIS MUSIC TRAVELS!….. but I encourage you to take the voyage on your own, so I’ll merely direct you to the Morton Subotnick site, where you can read articles and order his music online.

(http://www.mortonsubotnick.com/index.html)

Then, at some point, click on my blog again and let me know what you think by leaving a comment.

My wife, Odile, and I have just returned from quite an experience at the Aspen Music Festival (http://www.aspenmusicfestival.com). If you like to receive your aural medication in multiple doses then this is where to come, at least for next summer. This season is almost over, but during the course of one week in early August, we went to an average of 1.5 concerts a day, several open rehearsals and 2 lectures at the Aspen Institute. We never made it to a master class, but our timing was good for the mini-festival to celebrate the 100th birthday of Olivier Messiaen, featuring many works, such as Quartet For The End Of Time and the seldom performed, 2 hour solo piano work, Vingt Regards Sur L’Enfant Jésus. (As an aside, our New Music Circle here in St. Louis – http://www.newmusiccircle.org – brought in the pianist, Roger Muraro, to perform it a few years ago, so….. get ready for lots of surprises in ’08-’09, our 50th Anniversary Season!).

For those who might be worried about the cost of Aspen Music Festival concerts, know that many events are at a reduced rate, and accomodations outside of Aspen are reasonable. Hope to see you there next summer! Oops, did I mention sports? Everyday: hiking up beautiful mountains, biking, many other sports and activities……sorry, no skiing, not even at A-Basin.

I’m most of the way through writing that piano trio piece I was telling you about, remember, the one with “NO RHYTHM SECTION”?

However…..since I do like to experiment with special techniques (judiciously, of course), I decided to consult with the violinist, Manuela Kaymakanova. It turned out that I had written a few errant double stops that needed to be reined in a bit and a “saltando” that was getting way out of hand.  Also, she gave me advanced warning that most string players don’t like to play “col ‘legno”(tapping the strings with the wood of the bow), and if they see that effect written too frequently, they will flip the bow back over when the composer’s not looking.

As you have been tuning in to my MP3 Jukebox, you may have run across a few sample pieces which I recorded with St. Louis poet, Michael Castro. Well, Michael has recently had two of his own CDs released on the Freedonia Music label, collaborating with two marvelous multi-instrumentalists, J.D. Parran (“Kokopilau”) and the late Joe Catalano (“Endless Root”). Both are really fine albums, and I especially enjoyed comparing Catalano’s interpretations of Michael’s poems to my own – completely different settings, but many interpretive similarities. So enjoy!……and go straight to the Freedonia site, ASAP – http://www.freedoniamusic.org

As promised, here is my latest piece, “Textures”, which you can listen to right now by clicking on the MP3 Player under “Blogroll” in the menu on the right, or just use this link, http://www.tompkinsjazz.com/jukebox, to get you straight to the MP3 Player page. I have also uploaded a relatively new piece, “Voices” and inserted an older work, “Open Green” in between, just for variety. [Actually, the real professionals at Pixel IQ (http://www.pixeliq.com) did the uploads for me, and Charlie Dent mastered “Textures” & “Voices”]

With “Textures”, I have been trying to expand my range of synthesizer sounds, even to the point of employing sampled percussion instruments to create a drum sound. In the process, I hope I was able to mold the effects into a concise and meaningful work. Let me know.

“Open Green” is a short vocal work that we performed frequently in my
group, The Fred Tompkins Poetry & Music Ensemble. I haven’t tried to display the words to any of my vocal pieces here online, but I hope you can understand them ok.

The two halves of “Voices” are almost like two short, separate works, but I tend to hear the 2nd half as a kind of resolution of the 1st. In the first half, I combine the sound of flute multiphonics (producing several notes simultaneously) and sing/play double stops with various synthesizer sounds, sometimes in dialog and sometimes as a chord. With all of this experimentation, I still try to maintain a sense of continuity, so let me know if you think I’m successful. I can always use that imput for my next endeavor.
The 2nd half of this piece holds a special meaning for me. It was written around the time, recently, when we lost several friends who were close to the St. Louis community, and I kept thinking of them as I was playing it.
This movement also makes me think of the real courage it takes to go on in life while battling a serious illness or personal loss.

If you are familiar with my approach to making music (if not, just click on the MP3 Player in the right hand menu under “Blogroll” and have a listen), you probably realize that I tend to focus my efforts on establishing a rhythmic dialog between my notated or composed parts and an improvised drum part.

Well, my latest two projects will venture into somewhat unfamiliar territory: On a synthesizer piece, called “Textures”, I am playing all the drum parts myself with sampled instruments (not that I could ever duplicate the beautiful flow of a Gary Sykes, Charlie Dent or Elvin Jones, but my “Soundfonts” do provide some very natural percussion sounds, and my own artistic goals for a synthesized drum part are somewhat different anyway). I’ll post the piece on my MP3 Player page when it’s done, and you can let me know what you think.

For another project, I’ve been asked to write a work for the Trinity Trio here in St. Louis. It’s a marvelous classical piano trio (piano, violin and cello) w/ NO RHYTHM SECTION. That’s fine with me, because I welcome the challenge of creating ideas conceived within my own rhythmic style but expanded to enjoy all the idiomatically expressive qualities of this new ensemble.

So wish me luck, or at least get back to me with advise for the present and/or possible ways to stay out of trouble in the future.