Image: The Sierra Quad at California State University, Northridge, on a cool, overcast December day during finals week, Fall 2024.

Politics aside (if you can put it aside in times like these), 2024 has been a good year in my corner of the universe. This year has largely been focused on my grad school program at California State University, Northridge, in my second and third semesters. I did a big write-up of the Spring 2024 semester in my “Watchwords” reflection essay I posted at the end of that semester, so I’ll focus here on the Fall 2024 semester. 

Over the summer I taught music analysis lessons for one of my students from last year, got to visit Chicago again for the first time since my family moved away nearly 12 years ago, which was fantastic 🙂, and then focused mostly on continuing my writing about life and music on my website.

But the bulk of what I want to talk about here is this past semester, and then at the end I’ll talk about orchestra, which has been amazing this year (perhaps even more than usual, though it’s usually pretty fun!).

I am getting alarmingly close to being finished with my grad school program (two school years is not a terribly long time in my life these days!). I still have most of the significant graduation requirements coming up next semester, including my composition recital, my master’s thesis paper, and the final oral examination, but the bulk of my classwork is done now (though somehow I’m still doing 9 credits next semester…).

This semester had two main themes emerge - teaching and orchestra. I’ll start with teaching, because that has been a big focus for me this semester (or at least tutoring, a kind of teaching).

I got hired as a student assistant by the music department as a music theory / musicianship tutor last year, and then re-hired this year. It has actually been one of my favorite parts of my grad school program, and certainly one of the most rewarding (even if sometimes one of the most frustrating!). Last year I worked with about 5 or 6 students on a regular basis in the first semester (plus a few others a time or two), and then only 4 students in the spring. This year, the department ballooned in size and tutoring exploded. I’ve been working with about 12 students on a weekly basis this semester, for a total of about 14 hours per week. At the end of this semester I’ve logged more than 100 sessions (just this Fall - more than double either semester last year). I’ve been told there are about 600 total music majors at CSUN this year, of whom about 200 or so are new. That’s out of around 35,000 students - CSUN is huge! Many of those students were transfers, and of course some continued from last year such that Harmony 1 (a sophomore level class, or transfer class pending the placement exam) had quite a few students, many of whom needed some extra help. That was the main class they gave my name in this semester, and about half of my students were primarily there for harmony tutoring. I also tutor Musicianship classes, and at this point I’ve tutored at least one student from every class from level 1 to level 5. I'll probably cover 6 next semester, which will make all of them. Harmony 1 and 2 primarily go with Musicianship 3 and 4, so that’s where the bulk of my students have been.

But I’ve also offered tutoring for any music theory class offered by CSUN at the undergraduate level (and I even had one student last year from the graduate theory review class), such that over the past three semesters I’ve also tutored at least one person from Music Analysis (form class), Tonal Counterpoint, Beginning Composition, Orchestration 1 (Instrumentation), Orchestration 2, Advanced Media Orchestration, Keyboard Musicianship, and even Songwriting. I also tutor music software as applicable to what my students bring me, so I’ve tutored mostly Sibelius and Dorico notation programs when students bring me projects in those programs. I’ve also done some light tutoring in Pro Tools and Logic Pro (Digital Audio Workstation / recording software).

What I’ve learned from doing this much tutoring is A) that I really like teaching and this really is something I want to pursue once I have my master’s degree, B) that I actually like teaching the basics more than I thought I would, though it would be nice to have some students who understand the topics as we go through them to balance out the ones who struggle with the concepts (recognizing that that’s the point of tutoring), C) that people really are different from each other, and even when 5 or 6 students bring me the same assignment they have different issues and different questions, such that it wasn’t really boring doing the same thing over and over again each week, but also that D) there are many issues that students have in common. (One weird one was a distinct inability to say “Sharp” or “Flat” after note names - I think every student I worked with pretty consistently forgot to say “B-’flat’” when talking about the note in F major, for example. I was told that their professor would also make them say the note name correctly when that came up, and I kept telling them ‘the sooner you guys start saying the words correctly, the sooner your professor and I can stop busting you for this!’ They were beginning to get it by the end of the semester though!). One thing I’ve found interesting as I tutor is how often the issues the students bring me are not actually the issues they have. Frequently we discover when I probe for their knowledge that the actual problem they have is that they missed something earlier, and when I explain that the issue they thought they had makes much more sense.

I’ve also had reinforced for me this semester something I mentioned in my write-up last semester, which is the role that “hands on the keys” time has played in my musical development learning these skills (both for musicianship / ear-training and for harmony / theory). I’ve told several of my students that I think that if they spent more time playing through some of the examples and exercises on the keyboard, even slowly, they would make much more progress. They have a class called “Keyboard Musicianship” that they have to take for up to four semesters if they aren’t otherwise piano students, and that gives them some of the skills, but the way CSUN teaches things, Musicianship, Music Theory, and Keyboard Musicianship should all come together and reinforce each other to create the “whole” musician, making music something you can see on the page, hear in sound, and play on the keyboard (and on their other instruments through Applied Music - instrumental / vocal private lessons and ensembles). We had all of that at Berklee too, though in a somewhat different configuration, and I think that has helped me develop into the musician I’ve become today.

One other thing I’ve really liked about tutoring is that I really feel like I’m making a difference in people’s lives. I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I like about being back in school again is the social aspect, and while tutoring certainly isn’t the same as hanging out with friends, it does feel like more of a personal connection than I’ve had for a while before coming back to school. I’ve worked at very small companies for most of my career to date, with sometimes as few as three or so people day-to-day (and in a position where it could be hard to see the real-world impact we were having, if any), and then I’ve played in large orchestras with 60-80 or more people, where it’s harder to form a more personal connection with a lot of people. But tutoring is one-on-one (mostly) but part of a larger community, and the nature of what I’m doing really seems to make a difference. The heartfelt way the students thank me after my sessions tells me how much they seem to get from it, and the faculty and staff have also thanked me for working with the students so much. I hope it makes a positive difference - I’m certainly trying to help everyone as much as possible! Sometimes it can be hard to tell, but then there are the days where students have what I’ve taken to calling “Lightbulb Moments” where you see them viscerally light up when they actually understand something, and the feeling I get from that as the “teacher” is also really good!

So that was my experience tutoring this semester, but of course I’m also here for my own work! I took 4 classes this semester (plus CSUN symphony for no credit due to schedule conflicts.

My two main “classroom” classes were both about orchestra this semester - Advanced Orchestration (also known as Orchestration II as a joint undergraduate / graduate class), and Symphonic Literature as an elective class. Both were good, though I did know a lot of the material already having played in some kind of orchestra for 27 years at this point and having studied orchestral analysis and composition for about 20 years (!). 

I told some people that it sometimes felt like I was tutoring Advanced Orchestration while I was taking it, particularly in the beginning of the semester when we studied Beethoven’s 7th Symphony and Brahms’s 4th Symphony, two pieces I am intimately familiar with at this point both from analysis and from performance. I did do some actual tutoring for that class with one of my tutoring students as well. As we got more into the semester and started looking at more 20th century works, I was less familiar with them from before but still able to follow what was going on looking at new pieces. We looked at Till Eulenspiegel by Richard Strauss and Ravel’s Rhapsodie Espagnole, two pieces I’ve studied previously but not played, and then we got into the pieces that were new to me - pieces by Webern, Dutilleux, Berio, and Thomas Ades. Seeing different ways to treat orchestral instruments was interesting. The primary assignments we did were “tests” (really one day projects) where we had to orchestrate a few bars of piano works by some of those composers in the style of their approach to orchestration - an Intermezzo by Brahms (Op. 117 No. 2 for anyone interested), Ravel (from Valse Nobles et Sentementales), and the opening of a piano piece by Olivier Messiaen for our final test (that one had some interesting range problems for a small chamber orchestra).

Then we also had to give a 20 minute presentation on a topic related to orchestration, so I chose to analyze the orchestration of Jupiter from The Planets by Holst, one of my favorite pieces and a piece I got to perform this semester in the CSUN Symphony. I was joking when we picked topics that “I could probably talk for an hour about every movement in that piece and still only scratch the surface”, but I actually probably could! I decided to call my presentation “How to Study a Score (feat. Jupiter from The Planets)”, and used it as a way to talk about what to look at when studying a score, something our professor demonstrated through his lectures but never really explained out loud. Apparently, once a tutor, always a tutor! 

The presentation went well, but wasn’t quite what I had in mind in the end, as I only had 20 minutes for my presentation. I had a hard time getting it down much below 30 minutes even after cutting some of it, and if I’d had a full hour, it wouldn’t have been hard to fill! If you’d told me when I was in jr. high or even in high school that one day I’d be freaking out about how little 20 minutes was for a presentation, I’d have thought you were crazy 😃.

Symphonic Literature was taught by Tomasz Golka, one of the conductors we worked with last year in the CSUN Symphony for our May concert, and also the conductor in residence with the Riverside Symphony right now. This was a lecture class, so it mostly consisted of coming each week and listening to him talk about the historical development of orchestral music, coupled with listening assignments each week to get familiar with some of the standard repertoire. There were a few new pieces for me on the list, but I’ve actually played about 2/3 of the pieces we looked at myself at this point and studied a few others with the score. What I got from the class was primarily different ways of organizing the study of orchestral music history - we didn’t just go in chronological order the whole semester, but he had categories like Nationalism, French Music, Impressionism (which also came out of France), etc. We also had several forays into music theory, because a lot of music history looks at the theoretical development of music, and music theory is how we talk about music so at some point it all comes back around again. As a theory nerd, I thought that was cool, though I could tell that some of the students in the class were perhaps not as into the theory aspects as I was 🙂 The assessments for that class were a couple of tests and a very short paper (by my current standards - only two pages double-spaced). I wrote a short analysis of Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite.

My other two classes this semester were my composition classes - my private lessons with Dr. O’Malley, where I am knee-deep in preparing the pieces for my recital next semester, and Composition Seminar (Advanced Composition to the undergrads in the class) with Dr. Marinescu, our area department chair. I wrote several pieces for my recital this semester, with another 2 or 3 to go over winter break and early next semester before we begin rehearsals and put on the performance in April (April 9th at 7:30!). This is a chamber music concert, and I’m featuring viola heavily in this show of course! I’m playing in most of [all of?] the pieces, and then I have a few other string players and a pianist. The musical concept is “fiddle music meets art music”, and the codename for the show is “Between Worlds” (which will probably wind up being the final name too 🙂).

Composition Seminar is usually a nice class - it’s the group class for the comp majors (along with other interested students), where we share what we’re working on with the group and get feedback from Dr. Marinescu and the other students. It’s always a little intimidating on the days you present your own piece - sharing your music with anyone is a bit of a nerve-wracking experience. Given how much of yourself you put into the music you write, it can be hard to separate other peoples’ reaction to your music from how they think about you as a person, and doing it in a room of other composers adds to the intensity. It’s gotten a little easier with time and experience but I’m still usually semi-dreading those days. It usually winds up being great though, and the feedback I get is generally helpful. Given that everyone seems to have similar feelings about sharing pieces, the other students are generally respectful and everyone is interested in helping each other out.

That’s about half of that class, and the other half is a series of lectures on some topic related to composition. Last semester we looked at the intersection of art music and film music, and famous art composers who lived in Los Angeles (Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Erich Korngold, etc). This semester the lecture topic was the life and works of György Ligeti, so we looked at about a dozen pieces by Ligeti over several weeks. I think my favorite piece was “Hungarian Rock”, which he apparently wrote as a bit of a joke because his students were more into rock and pop in the 1980s than advanced art music. So he wrote a piece that used many of those traits but in such a way that it’s extremely difficult to read and play. But it actually sounds amazing and the parts that were the “solos” really did sound like they could have been improvised in those styles even while he was extremely specific about what they should be. He also wrote it for harpsichord, which is even crazier / cooler! I also liked his viola sonata (of course I would!), which was quite different from most of his other pieces we looked at. Played entirely on the C string (the lowest string), it has a haunting, folk-like quality that also appealed to me, and it uses the natural harmonics of the C string all the way up to the 16th harmonic, which is crazy! I can sometimes get the first 8 out of my instrument, and getting any higher than that gets much harder rapidly.

So that’s what I’ve been up to at CSUN. It’s been really fun so far in my first three semesters, and I’m looking forward to my final semester as well 😃. Next semester I’m taking the graduate conducting class required for my degree as my primary classroom class, and then private lessons and comp seminar for composing, and a class called MUS698 “Graduate Thesis / Project” which will encompass all the final graduation requirements like my recital and thesis paper, and also Symphony Orchestra. We have an interesting semester planned for that next semester, though I won’t spoil it yet! But it’s going to be fun. That’s a good segue into orchestra, which as usual is the other big thing I’ve been doing this year!

I’ve played with the CSUN symphony every semester as a violist, and had some amazing times and made good friends in the other viola players at CSUN in my time here! This semester was a little weird - I mentioned earlier I did it for no credit, because for whatever reason my Advanced Orchestration class was put on top of the orchestra rehearsals. We worked it out so that I could get to all of the Monday rehearsal and at least half of the Wednesday rehearsal each week, but it was still frustrating to miss that much of the rehearsals. But they let me do both classes anyway, and I’m really happy they did because my highlight concert of the year was our first Fall concert this year where we got to play the complete set of Holst’s The Planets, something I’ve been looking forward to doing for quite a long time now! I wrote a little thing about that on Facebook on my October concert post, but it really meant a lot to me to get to do that concert at CSUN, and even more to do that in The Soraya, CSUN’s premiere concert venue which also attracts high-end international pros to come perform here in the San Fernando Valley. I’ve seen both the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and the London Philharmonic play on that stage among others, and to get to play there myself with my CSUN friends is special. Just on its own merits, it has become my favorite concert hall I’ve played in here in Los Angeles, and the rest just makes it that much more special.

I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of pieces I want to play someday, which I call my “bucket list”, for most of the time I’ve been here in LA. My conductors sometimes ask if we have any ideas for repertoire we want to play, so I can just send them that and then I get to do some of them. More recently, I’ve also discovered I have what I’ve started calling my “Shadow List”, a list of pieces I never thought I’d get to play in the community orchestra world, but that I’ve wanted to play anyway, and now that I’m at the semi-pro level in addition to currently being at the university level, I’ve gotten to do some of those pieces too. The Planets was actually on my official bucket list, as were several other pieces I’ve done this year, but pieces like Shostakovich 5 that we did at the San Fernando Valley Symphony back in January were on the Shadow list. Other highlights from this year include both Peer Gynt Suites 1+2 at CSUN (I’ve played 1 before but not 2), and Night on Bald Mountain at the San Fernando Valley Symphony - that one feels like one I should have played by now but my groups haven’t been big on Halloween concerts and it’s harder to do that in other contexts. We also did Sorcerer’s Apprentice there this year which I’ve played before. It’s a weirdly hard piece to play, but it’s a lot of fun if you can work it out. As the acting principal violist at SFVSO right now, I also got to do the viola principal solo at the end of that piece! 

I’ve also now completed the standard collection of violin concertos that you’d be likely to learn while working on a performance degree (to be clear, I mean I’ve played the orchestral violin / viola parts, not the solo part!). We just did Brahms’ violin concerto at the Symphony of the Verdugos in December, which was the last of the major concertos I needed - I’ve done Mendelssohn, Bruch G Minor (3 times), Sibelius (twice), Beethoven (twice), Tchaikovsky (a whopping 4 times!), and now Brahms. We’ve also done Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and the full set of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, along with several other lesser performed violin concertos, but those were the major repertoire concertos. I’ve also found several times in the past few years where I go from not having played a piece to doing it twice in one year - this year that honor goes to the Brahms Double Concerto for Violin and Cello, first with David Park and Cathy Biagini at Verdugos this Spring, and then with Ken Aiso and Jerry Kessler at the Topanga Symphony this fall. 

By the numbers:

I played 20 orchestra concerts this year in 5 different orchestras, mostly on viola and then with the Crown City Symphony on first violin. This makes 142 total orchestra concerts on my orchestra spreadsheet, which starts just after the end of 8th grade (over the past 20 years at this point!). About 60 of those concerts have happened since 2021, and there is a non-zero chance that by the end of next year fully half of my concerts since the end of 8th grade will have happened in just the last 4 years.

I also performed with the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles again this year, and the highlight of that was our main show in April featuring Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas, two of my favorite performers in that world. That was a heady experience! We also got to play two arrangements of mine in that show, one featuring the winds of SFLA, two tin whistles and two flutes plus rhythm (with me playing lead whistle), and one duet line I wrote for a tune written by Jan Tappan, our director (which I also used in my counterpoint tutoring as an example of applied counterpoint today 🙂).

All in all, it was quite a year, and it’s exciting and also weird to realize that by this time next year (really just a few months from now) I’m going to have my master’s degree… Looking forward to more great experiences down the road, in this incredible journey we call a life in music and with my friends! See you all next year!