A Conductor’s and Performer’s Guide to Steven Bryant’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone - Chester Jenkins

107 be able to transcribe this part from just listening to the recording and you have to be as accurate as possible, but you can’t make it sound metronomic. JENKINS: Gotcha, yeah. LULLOFF: And so he has a lot of offset rhythms that are very difficult for the performer. And then why does the composer write that? Why does he put that speck of ink there? (Marcato/staccato notes at measure 177 & 178) What articulation does he want? Be very specific with it. Does that speck of ink represent the same kind of speck of ink as there (marcato at 179)? No. This is shorter here because it’s got a staccato. This has to have a little more fatness like a brass, ‘Bop!’ versus ‘dot, dot, dot, dot’ you know. Brass players stopping the note with the tongue, instead of letting the air shape the note. Those types of details I think was really important here. And then, this is kind of that mini-cadenza idea, I think that (sings measure 238), when you have the ability as the performer to stretch out of the time to give a sense of a cadenza like feel, foreshadowing what’s coming into the second movement. But you still have to pay attention to the band time. You can’t be totally devoid of it. So those types of things, I think that are some specific things that he wanted me to do with the first movement. Second was pretty straight forward. I always felt his use of range was very smart. The piece is deceptive because sometimes you have to play a little louder because you’re playing against your brass colleagues. And you just have to do this. The end of the second movement, I cried probably for, I don’t know, the first month that I played it. It’s just haunting. It made me think of the loss of my parents a little bit. It made me think of Janet a lot. It made me think of life a lot. It made me think of a lot of things of who I need to be. It gives us a little bit of cadenza like material with jazz with this diminished lick (m. 88, first movement). To be honest, actually I thought there was too much diminished when I played the piece. But then I started getting into the piece of, ‘how do you make a diminished lick’ how can you shape it so it doesn’t always sound the same all the time? And that helps us grow as a musicians, if you get a certain kind of pattern or lick how to you make it sound not like a pattern? But make it sound interesting. I have certain chromatic tendencies. You know, moving this and that. And then you start to evaluate these, this writing in the first movement at 157 and all these kinds of things he opens the movement with. Are places where he kind of intersperses minor seconds and minor thirds and you can find there is a whole set of language and a set of leanings, if you lean this note this way, it kind of gives more of this harmonic kind of sound. And I’m not talking about this is a diminished 7 th chord that comes out of this kind of interpretation. Or this is a #11 chord. I’m talking just the sound, the actual sound how you kind of shape, you know what I’m saying? I think for me, sound is kind of shapings like this, and the music’s gotta…you take a note and the note