A motet of mine, written for the Lutheran Summer Music Institute in 2021, has been published by EC Schirmer/MorningStar.
“Hear Our Cry, O Lord” , for unaccompanied SATB choir, is a meditative, delicate work that blossoms into an emotional plea, a yearning for hope and healing.
To preview the score (as well as a lovely demo recording by The Singers of Minnesota) and purchase, please click on the link below:
Yesterday, “Performance Today” featured the Atlanta Chamber Players’ premiere performance recording of my quartet in six movements, “Notes from Inside,” which I wrote for them in 2020-21, expanded into its final form as a part of the Rapido! competition.
The complete episode is archived at this link, which includes the detailed playlist. “Notes from Inside” begins at about 39 minutes into the broadcast.
Some updates….
I’m delighted to be returning as Composer-in-Residence at the Lutheran Summer Music Institute hosted at Valparaiso in June-July 2023.
Not a Thing But a Movement, for solo piano, will be premiered in its seven-movement version on March 26 at the Hidden Valley Zen Center in San Marcos, CA, by the incredible Peter Gach. The eighth and final movement is still in progress, and will eventually be a standalone piece that can be played as sort of an optional conclusion to the NATBAM set.
A set of pieces for Paul Cannon (of Ensemble Modern) is still forthcoming, somehow always on the backburner but still very much alive
I can’t believe it but I’m currently teaching my tenth semester at Hope College - a mix of private composition, theory (diatonic harmony, post-tonal styles), and aural skills (with a focus on improvisation in various styles). I still love teaching as much as I did when I first started - what’s not to love about listening to, writing, and talking about music all day?
The Atlanta Chamber Players premiered “Notes from Inside” on Sunday afternoon. This six-movement suite for clarinet and string trio was written over the course of the past year, its movements responding in various ways to pandemic life.
I’m so grateful to the ACP for their intensely committed performance of my piece and I look forward to future collaborations.
Here is an excerpt from EarRelevant’s review of the concert:
“The last piece before intermission was Notes From Inside by Benjamin Krause. This composition, a winner of the Atlanta Chamber Players’ most recent Rapido! composition contest, was expanded from its original five minutes to nearly 15. As Mr. Krause explains in a short video, the idea of adding further movements to form a suite with very loose interplay between the individual movements was attractive.
This music is immediately appealing. Its freshness, inventive rhythmic treatment of single instruments, and constant pulsating flow made it the highlight of the evening.”
“Notes From Inside,” for clarinet, violin, viola, and cello, was named the winner in the Atlanta Chamber Players’ Rapido! Competition. I’m so grateful for this opportunity to further collaborate with the ACP in the creation of new music. I would especially like to thank the wonderful performers who premiered the music of the five finalists, as well as the judges: Robert Spano, Michael Gandolfi, and Brian Nabors.
The full press release:
https://www.earrelevant.net/2021/01/benjamin-krause-wins-sixth-rapido-composition-contest/
A review of the finalists’ concert:
https://www.artsatl.org/review-rapido-showcases-finalists-in-pandemic-inspired-composition-contest/
Taxonomies of Pulse was named a Runner-up in the 2021 RED NOTE New Music Festival Composition Competition at Illinois State University. It was selected from among 318 anonymous entries from 33 countries.
To watch/listen to the score and recording of the piece, click here: Taxonomies of Pulse
From the full announcement:
The judging for the RED NOTE New Music Festival Composition Competition - Category A (Chamber Ensemble) has now concluded. There were 318 anonymous submissions from 33 nations around the world. Initial rounds were judged by the Music Composition faculty at Illinois State University. The final round was judged by the esteemed composers:
Anthony Cheung (Brown University)
Arlene Sierra (Cardiff University)
Anna Weesner (University of Pennsylvania)
The results of the competition (Category A) are as follows:
Winner: and more and more and more and this, by Thomas Kotcheff (Los Angeles, CA)
Runners-up:
Duhkha, by Dan Langa (Brooklyn, NY)
Taxonomies of Pulse, by Benjamin Krause (Holland, MI)
Honorable Mentions:
Aeropittura, by Daniel Godsil (Sacramento, CA)
Children's Games, by Vera Ivanova (Orange, CA)
Compressor, by Nick Bentz (Charleston, SC)
I’m very thankful to have some musical things to look forward to during this unusually difficult time:
I am honored to be a finalist in the 2020 Rapido! Competition, sponsored by the Atlanta Symphony and Atlanta Chamber Players. My piece “Notes from Inside” will be performed live in January by the ACP with a limited in-person audience and with live streaming. More information here.
Pathways will be performed by the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra as a part of the ISU Contemporary Music Festival in 2021 (postponed due to COVID). It was selected as the winner of the ISU CMF Orchestral Composition Competition.
Taxonomies of Pulse was selected as a winner of the Music Now Contest, also a part of the ISU CMF, and will be streamed as a part of a virtual festival on October 30th. The complete announcement of pieces can be found here.
In the spirit of anticipation, I’m also thrilled to be presently working on two commissions: a large-scale solo piano work written for pianist Peter Gach, and a new work for choir and chamber ensemble, commissioned by Lutheran Summer Music to celebrate its 40th season.
I’m a bit overdue with this update:
I’m very pleased that a piece of mine, Night Tides, was selected as an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Flute New Music Consortium Composition Competition.
I wrote the piece as a graduate student in 2010-11. It was premiered by the amazing flutist, Henry Williford (https://www.henrywilliford.com/) , with myself at the piano.
I hope that this leads to further performances of the work, which I plan to make available on an online store in the near future.
BK
I carry the words of composers and musicians - some long passed away, others still breathing, some whom I’ve met and others only read about - with me in my head. Over the years, their morsels of advice and perspective have become lodged into my brain. At times they are helpful — other times I wish they’d become unstuck for good but can only sort of try to bat them away when they appear and circulate like hungry horse-flies. I probably used to take much of this stuff too seriously; if any larger objective truth has emerged it’s almost certainly that there are infinitely diverging pathways towards artistry and that, when taking anyone’s advice, your mileage may vary. Like presumably most people, I tend to best remember those tidbits that confirm my own biases and feelings, although there’s a special (cursed?) place in my heart for those that seemed to speak directly to my most sensitive insecurities and self-doubts. “I feel attacked,” as they say on Twitter.
So, I thought I’d use this space to create a sort of informal, annotated list. Maybe it’s a form of self-surgery or artistic detox. As a mentor would say, “bless and release.”
(Side note: I have realized that there are a lot of these, so they will more than likely be spread out over subsequent posts, especially as I remember more of them. Like I said before, these are informal. I’m not digging around for citations. I will probably paraphrase more than quote. Some of them are the result of a long game of telephone, where I heard it from a teacher who heard it from their teacher who read it in a book written by someone who maybe heard it from someone who knew the source. Etc.)
Joan Tower - When you are stuck, don’t try to wrestle with the music or force it in a particular direction. Listen to what the piece wants to do.
I don’t remember where I read this, but I think it was sometime around 2010 or 2011 when I was studying a few of her pieces for a theory class. This is good, sound advice, if a bit abstract, i.e. how does one even know what a piece “wants” to do? It’s an argument for intuition over rationality, but also an interesting call to self-immolation before the alter of music. Try to detach from the ego, Tower is saying; the music has a will of its own.
George Rochberg - Every time I start a new piece, it feels like I’m completely starting from scratch.
Yes, we’ve all been here. In a strange way Rochberg is speaking to imposter’s syndrome. Of course he’s not just referring to the obvious - that we are literally starting from the beginning of a new project - but that starting a new piece can make us feel incompetent, like we’ve forgotten everything we’ve learned, that there’s no immediately secure footing or sure path forward, and that rules that seemed to apply very naturally to the previous work have no bearing on the new one.
Louis Andriessen - What we call a composer’s “voice” or personal style is really the result of his or her particular limitations.
This idea makes sense to me but is difficult to articulate clearly. Artistic limitations create habits, patterns, and certain traits that recur. These habits and patterns recur over the course of several projects and become part of that artist’s DNA. Perhaps another way to say this is that, through the repeated process of creation, certain grooves are formed that ultimately contribute to the contour and outline of the artist’s work.
Aaron Copland - When I compose, I use the piano in the same way an author uses the typewriter. It doesn’t tell me what to write, but I write through it.
This doesn’t seem that profound, though it does make the important distinction between “composing at the piano” and “letting your fingers go wild across the piano and write whatever you come up with.” Being clear about this distinction for myself has been a huge help when writing for instruments and ensembles that are NOT the piano, but when I still want to explore harmonies and other materials using the keyboard. It was also important for me to read that people like Copland (and also Stravinsky) used the piano when composing, given what the next composer had to say about that…
Dmitri Shostakovich - Real composers don’t use the piano (If you use the piano, you’re a hack).
It’s great that Shostakovich could carry around an entire symphony with him in his head as he worked on it, wait until it was finished, and then write down the piece in one final draft. It’s also possible that this is largely exaggerated or apocryphal, something I read in Testimony, the possibly specious “memoirs” of the composer as dictated to Solomon Volkov. In any case, learning about how various composers and artists have worked on their craft has variously filled me with awe, interest, and the ultimate realization that we must do whatever works for us, in whatever situation we may find ourselves.
I’m pleased to share the news that the Six Lowell Songs received an “Honorable Mention” in the 2020 NATS Art Song Competition.
Many thanks to the performers, soprano Angela De Venuto and pianist Christina Giuca Krause, who brought the piece to life. Also a big congratulations to the 1st and 2nd place awardees, Kurt Erickson and Ellen Harrison:
The full article and press release from the NATS website.
2020 NATS Art Song Competition Winners
The Six Lowell Songs were recently recorded in two sessions at DePaul University, with soprano Angela De Venuto and pianists Christina Giuca and Ben Krause.
Christina Giuca and Angela De Venuto
I’m happy to have completed a new song cycle, Defined by Words, for Lynx Project’s Autism Advocacy Series (more info here).
The five songs are settings of poems — “Silence Defined Me,” “My Best Friend,” “Rap About Girls,” “The Yellow Zoo,” and “Lake Eerie,” — written by youth ages 8-20 who have autism and who are primarily nonverbal. It has been a real joy for me to experience this beautiful poetry and to celebrate these voices, and I’m grateful to Lynx Project for inviting me to participate.
Performances of the songs will be scheduled for Winter/Spring 2020, and one will be included in a collection published by NewMusicShelf.
My Six Lowell Songs, for soprano and piano, have been completed and will be recorded in September with the wonderful soprano Angela DeVenuto. The songs are settings of six poems by Amy Lowell, an important voice in early-20th century American poetry, especially through her innovations in poetic meter, language, and content associated with the Imagist movement.
The songs are interconnected through musical material (songs 1, 3, and 5, 2 and 4, 5 and 6, for example, share important motives and musical allusions); through poetic themes (1, 2, and 3; 4 and 5; 1 and 6) and, on the whole, create a dramatic narrative arc dealing with themes of solitude, despair, love, resignation and in general, the inherent loneliness that results from our estrangement, from the tension between the desire for connection and the necessity of solitude. I hope the songs capture Lowell’s creative voice and personality as much as they do my own.
The piece was begun while in residence at the Brush Creek Arts Foundation, and completed while at Copland House, as a winner of the Copland House Residency Award.
The cycle includes:
Solitaire
Vintage
Grotesque
A Sprig of Rosemary
A Rainy Night
Hoar-Frost
I’m very much enjoying my time as Composer in Residence at Lutheran Summer Music, hosted this year on the campus of Valparaiso University. LSM is a fantastic program for high-school-age musicians interested in performance (band, jazz band, orchestra, chamber music, choir, musical theater, conducting, etc.), composition, church music, and more. It’s a four-week program that, in the composition program, culminates in a recital of student works. This year there are approximately thirty(!) student composers who have elected to either study composition privately or as part of a group class. I’m also teaching musicianship/theory, which has been a true joy, as these students are simply absorbing and devouring so much information and are eager to learn more. Yesterday I covered (or tried to) what is normally about three weeks of an undergrad theory course in a fifty minute class session — none of the students seemed to mind.
I’ve also enjoyed the opportunity to perform several times, including excerpts of my Suite for Bari Sax and Piano with faculty saxophonist Stacy Maugans, a couple jazz standards with vocalist Daniel Greco, some more jazz with trumpet and cello, and on Monday, another performance of Taxonomies of Pulse with Christina Giuca Krause, who is also here on the piano faculty.
I’m thrilled to have received this honor for my work, Taxonomies of Pulse, which was premiered in October at the Indiana Music Teachers Association State Conference in Fort Wayne.
From the MTNA:
“This award is conferred upon the composer of the most significant composition from among all works commissioned by the MTNA state affiliates. This year there were 28 submissions.
The recipient of the MTNA Distinguished Composer of the Year Award receives a $5,000 cash prize, made possible by the MTNA FOUNDATION FUND. The award also includes a performance of the composition at the 2019 MTNA National Conference, which will be held from March 16-20, 2019 in Spokane, Washington. The actual performance is scheduled on Sunday, March 17 from 11:00 a.m. -12:00 noon in the Conference Theater in the Spokane Convention Center.
The judges for the 2018 MTNA Distinguished Composer of the Year Award were:
Dr. Philip Schuessler, 2017 MTNA Distinguished Composer of the Year, Instructor of Music Theory & Composition at Southeastern Louisiana University
Dr. M. Shawn Hundley, Lecturer in Composition and Music Theory at University of Hawaii, Manoa
Dr. Michael-Thomas Foumai, Associate Professor of Composition & Music Theory Bethune-Cookman University.”
for two pianos performed by 4x5 Ensemble: Christina Giuca Krause and Benjamin Krause recording engineer: Drew Elliot www.benkrause.com
I’m happy to share our recording and this score-video of my piano duo Taxonomies of Pulse, commissioned jointly by the Indiana Music Teachers Association and Music Teachers National Association. The piece was premiered in October at Sweetwater Sound in Fort Wayne.
Performers: Christina Giuca Krause and Benjamin Krause
Recording Engineer: Drew Elliot (Hope College)
While impressions are still fairly fresh, here are some thoughts and photos, in no particular order, from my recent 3-week residency at Brush Creek, near Saratoga, WY.
I spent most of every day in my log cabin studio with a beautiful Bösendorfer, writing desk, reading chair, leather sofa, Western decor, etc.
Deer (they were all over the place) would meander through the camp, occasionally poking their heads against the windows
Most early afternoons were the perfect time to go on an hour-or-two-long hike; my favorite was a meandering trail up and down along a ridge on the eastern bank of the creek, called Smalls Trail. In mid-afternoon, towards the end of the trail, you could look back over the creek, with the light hitting it just right, and see part of the artist camp, surrounding hills, the ranch, and the endless sky.
I wrote most of a song cycle - so far, five poems of Amy Lowell, with possibly more to come
I began a set of pieces for flute and bass for bassist Paul Cannon
I played a lot of Brahms piano music, particularly Op. 116-118. I memorized the first piece of Op. 118
I practiced and played a lot of jazz: Giant Steps, All of You, A Sleepin’ Bee, and Our Delight especially
I met and bonded with seven other wonderful artists and people
Taxonomies of Pulse for two pianos, which was premiered at Sweetwater Sound in Fort Wayne, IN, on October 6, was featured on the Dorico Showcase this past week.
Dorico is a new professional notation software platform developed by Steinberg, and was used for the score design for Taxonomies.
Taxonomies of Pulse excerpt.
I’m thrilled to be in two residencies this coming season: first, at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in late October to mid November, then, at the Copland House for four weeks in February. The residencies will provide inspiring environs, as well as the time and space to devote to upcoming projects, including a new work for flute and bass, song cycle, piano trio, and extended work for solo piano.
I've been hunkered down in St. Louis while Christina works as a pianist with the Opera Theatre for eight weeks. Fortunately this has meant a lot of time for me to compose, and even my own "studio" (an extra room in our apartment) with a desk and piano to use while she's off at rehearsals and performances.
Because of this allotment of time and space, I've managed to finish two pieces in the past few weeks - the first, a duo for two alto saxophones titled Luminous Blue Variables, written for saxophonists Stacy Maugans and Carolyn Bryan for a premiere at the World Saxophone Congress in Zagreb, Croatia, next month. And just yesterday I finished and sent off a commission from the Bennington Chamber Music Conference, Meno Mosso (after Ockeghem) for two oboes, English horn, and solo strings.
Luminous Blue Variables, opening measures
Luminous Blue Variables explores the two saxophones' relationship to a single monophonic theme; how the two voices split apart and depart from the theme; how they occasionally re-converge; how one may echo and distort the material played by the other; how this may happen in incredibly tight time intervals (like a rapid delay), left up to chance (variable delay), or at very long time intervals; and how multiphonics may play a part in this dialogue by providing a harmonic framework in which another voice may interpolate scalar material. I had a lot of fun writing this one, and, I feel, also broke new ground in my own language and process - particularly by using timbral parameters to modulate and effect the areas of melody, harmony, rhythm and gesture (and vice versa).
LBV "theme" with alto sax echoes/delay.
In the excerpt below, the musicians play the same cadenza-like passage as fast as possible, one beginning immediately after the other, creating a type of canon at very close, somewhat random and variable time intervals.
LBV excerpt (canon at the unison at micro/variable time intervals).
With Meno Mosso I went in a completely different direction, taking inspiration from the instrumentation of oboes and strings and embracing the modal sound world of early Western music. I even borrowed a few melodic fragments from Ockeghem's Missa Mi-Mi.
Meno Mosso, oboes' entrance.
The piece extends, transforms, and distorts this raw material in various ways. The oboes' opening music, seen above, experiences the intensification of dissonance from diatonic clusters to more jarring cross-relations. The piece also takes the falling-fourth plagal relationship prevalent in Renaissance music to an extreme, and enriches the music's harmonic palette by extending this pattern upward and downward, creating a sort of "hyper" modality:
Meno Mosso, ending.
This has been my pattern lately: as I move from one piece to the next, each becomes a reaction against the previous one, creating a large-scale zigzag between parallel tracks moving towards some unseen point of convergence (or maybe it's more like an asymptote). On the one hand, I'm attracted to complexity and abstraction; I want to create music with pulsing vitality but without an obvious pulse, music that is harmonically expressive and nuanced but without discernible common-practice underpinnings, music that speaks through color and gesture, and melodies that sing but without affectation or rhetorical precedent. On the other hand, I keep feeling the impulse to simplify, go back to basics, speak plainly and without obfuscation, build from the ground up, and communicate a primal impulse rooted in the musical traditions that I was born and grew up in. I know I'm not the only one working to try to resolve these contradictions.
My next piece, due in September, is a work for two pianos, commissioned by the Indiana Music Teachers Association/Music Teachers National Association. We'll see where the next impulse leads me.
