Nick Morandi

University of Utah Clarinet Quartet Bio

I’ve been doing more writing lately, even if it’s for academic reasons, so I figured, why not post it somewhere at least a few people will see it. This is a bio I wrote for the University of Utah Clarinet Quartet for our live broadcast this July at KBYU radio in Provo, UT, and for our performance at the International Clarinet Association’s ClarinetFest this August in Lincoln, Nebraska.

(P.S., tonight is the night of the premiere of my piece for wind ensemble, MountainCity!!!! I’m very excited.)

The University of Utah Clarinet Quartet is a premier chamber group comprised of the best undergraduate and graduate clarinetists from the University. The quartet placed third in the First Annual Utah Chamber Music Competition in 2011, and performed on its winners’ concert. The quartet recently played in a masterclass for Donald Oehler at Utah’s Clarinet Festival at Utah State University to an enthusiastic response, and was invited to perform for a live broadcast at Utah’s leading classical music station, Classical 89 on July 17, 2012. The quartet’s members pride themselves on their high level of musicianship and camaraderie. Founded by Henry Cáceres and Kattiusca Marín, both Chilean-born, with Salt Lake City native bass clarinetist Nick Morandi, the quartet performs music in various genres and styles, including orchestral transcriptions, standard repertoire, new music, and music from Latin-American composers.

Mountain City - Program Notes

I recently finished (in March 2012) a 10-minute work for wind ensemble entitled Mountain City. It is being premiered April 12, 2012, at 7:30 PM at Libby Gardner Concert Hall in David Gardner Hall at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT.

(all that’s for posterity or whatever)

What follows are the program notes I’ve written. What will be printed in the program is a shorter version of this that takes out some of the less interesting details (and the allusions to my life and struggle growing up surrounded by the dominant faith in Utah). These notes, however, are the “official” notes or what-have-you, and will be printed in the final version of the score.

I will post a recording of the piece once I have a polished sound file to upload, probably to SoundCloud. Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy these notes, and then that the audience on Thursday enjoys the piece and the notes, and then that you enjoy the piece here. Or something like that.

Mountain City was a labor of love, written from March 2011 to March 2012. The long gestation was due both to my lack of experience in writing for this many instruments (the piece requires, at minimum, around 40 performers) and my struggle to work with a formal structure that is larger in scale than anything I’ve produced to this point. As I wrote, the piece seemed to take on a life of its own that strongly resembled that of the city in which I was born and raised, Salt Lake City.

The music grows from two contrasting ideas presented in the introductory section: the dissonant chord presented by the clarinets at the outset; and the more consonant “dominant seventh” figure played by the trombones shortly after, coupled with the rising melody played by solo woodwinds. To me, these dualities perfectly represent Salt Lake City—the “Mountain City”—a city that is rural and dominated by faith (the consonant, folk-like melody); yet also urban, with a thriving nightlife and liberal arts scene (the dissonant, jazzy music). The rest of the piece (and, one might say, my life) consists of a struggle between these two ideas, culminating (and perhaps here the similarities to my life stop) in a perhaps reluctant joining of the two harmonies.

The work is dedicated to Scott Hagen and the University of Utah Wind Ensemble, who all have my undying gratitude for their support and musicianship during my four years at the University of Utah; as well as to Miguel Chuaqui and Morris Rosenzweig, my composition teachers at the U, for their guidance, support, talent, and frankness in the face of naivete; and finally, to my parents Roger and Kari Morandi, for being all that a son could wish for and more.

Occupy Musicians

Indistinguishable From Magic: Rebooting the Justice League!

“Never Forget” (edited)

Never forget the three thousand men, women and children who died ten years ago; those in the World Trade Center towers and on AA Flight 11 and UA Flight 175; those in the Pentagon and on board AA Flight 77; the brave passengers of UA Flight 93 who diverted the attack intended for Washington, D.C., giving their own lives for others; and the sacrifices the first responders and our troops have made and continue to make, so that we don’t have to.

Never forget that those attacks were carried out not by Muslims, but by violent radicals with closed minds who thought the only way they could change the world was through violence, and who were misled and misguided by those they trusted to lead them to a better world.

Never forget that Iraq and Afghanistan had nothing to do with the attacks, but were chosen as political targets, ignoring the human and economic costs of prolonged war.

Never forget that we should not live in an America where hatred of others supersedes basic human kindness and goodwill; in an America that allows torture and indefinite detainment without charge in places like Guantanamo Bay and overseas secret prisons, which remain open to this day; in an America in which monolithic corporations are considered people and have unprecedented sway over politics and the fate of the world’s economy.

Never forget that supporting your country’s troops does not have to mean supporting what they fight for.

Never forget to keep living.

Never forget what America stands for: liberty for all, justice for all, happiness for all, and, above everything, freedom.

And never forget that we should not have to say “never forget” about any of these things.

Family

We (my parents and I) just returned (well, on Sunday) from a family reunion in Laramie, Wyoming.  Both my parents were born and raised there, and a fair amount of both of their families still live there or in Cheyenne, which is about 40 minutes away and the capital.

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Plans (Not the Death Cab Album, Hipsters)

I don’t like to treat Tumblr like Twitter, even though I have a funny thought every now and then that takes longer to explain than the room I am given on Twitter.

So you won’t see a lot of one-shot jokes here or whatever.

However, I do want to post here more often.  I’ve been really busy with summer semester, but that all ends tomorrow so you can expect a little bit more activity here.

I will be going back to practicing clarinet (after too long of a break) and composing (same), and I hope to write some music-related posts and maybe even offer some sneak-peaks of my “big” project that I’m working on.

It’s a piece for wind ensemble.  I’m writing it for the University of Utah Wind Ensemble, of which I am a member (have been for 3 years), and I’m hoping I’ll at least get a read-through of it come this fall, and maybe even a chance to revise and get a performance.  If I do, that could be a pretty big break, we’ve only done a student piece once since I’ve been there, and read through another.

Negotiating performances or commissions is rough for any composer, let alone one who has few finished pieces and little credibility outside the U.  So I’m looking forward to that opportunity.

After that I’m planning on writing a piece for the clarinet quartet I play in, I think that would be really fun, and a welcomed change of pace after thinking in a much larger soundworld for such a long time.

I’m hoping to get more followers here, but of course, I’m not really “out there” as a composer.  … Guess I’ll have to change that!  The next few years are going to be a lot of hard work of composing, practicing clarinet, and shameless self-promotion, but I think I have something to say, so I’m going to get out there.

(And those of you who are reading this first can say you were fans from the beginning.)

(Indie cred, yo)

Summer Semester

I have this weird way of doing take-home tests.  It goes like this:

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Musical Terrorism: A Musician’s Mind

I go through periods of my life when I kind of get away from music, but this is the first time it’s been this long.

For the last few weeks, I haven’t really had the desire to listen to much music.  It’s only come back to me in the past couple of days, and then only in fits and starts; a Sufjan record here, a couple songs by Radiohead there.

When I’m doing homework, I’ll listen to a John Adams piece like Christian Zeal and Activity, or Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, something without words, because words tend to activate my brain and distract it from what I should be doing, which is the homework.

Speaking of distractions, my brain is obsessive compulsive.  Not about anything normal, like words or cleanliness or organization, but about music.  My brain will pick up a phrase of music, usually something short like 4 or 8 bars, and repeat it over, and over, and over, and over again.  Now, I’m not singing this out loud, or playing it over and over, my head is creating it from memory, repeating again and again, infinitely, until something else comes in and knocks it out.

Sometimes it can be an entire song, though this is rarer.  Sometimes it’s from a piece of music that I don’t even remember the name of, and this will drive me insane until I figure it out.  Sometimes it’s something entirely original that I’ve based on some fragment I heard on a commercial or something I listened to recently.  More often, it is just a fragment, and these fragments spin and whirl around me until I feel like I am drowning in music.

I love music and its emotive power, its ability to express things that no other art form can.  But I really wish it would leave me the hell alone sometimes.

——

I wrote the first part of this post, all of what you just read, about a week ago.  Now I’m slowly getting back into music, via the Utah Wind Symphony concert I attended last night, with a pretty spectacular performance of David Maslanka’s Symphony No. 4.  Today I’ve been listening to more music, including one of my favorite albums of all time, Sufjan Stevens’ The Age of Adz (it’s probably number 2, after DeVotchKa’s How It Ends, and followed by Owen Pallett’s Heartland).

I tend to digest music in albums; I like to think that most musicians conceive records to be consumed in an entire sitting, and while they don’t always have to be, that’s the way I prefer to listen to them.

I still have music constantly playing in the mp3 player that is my head.  One advantage of having the kind of mind and as good of ears as I do is that practically every piece of music I’ve listened to (the more I’ve listened, the better I know it, obviously, but it works for pieces I’ve only heard a few times as well) is catalogued, filed, and queued for retrieval by some sick, twisted DJ living in my head.

Sometimes I’ll hear a song in my head, and wonder why that particular song started, as it had nothing to do with what I was thinking about at the time, and then the song will get to a lyric that was exactly what I was thinking, or, occasionally, contained some insight into my current situation that I couldn’t have provided on my own.

You might think that sounds great, but you’d be wrong.

It isn’t always.