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

115 conducting lessons, “Good composers are like bad poker players. They show their hand at the very beginning.” BRYANT: (Laughs) That’s a good one. Yeah, well, thank you. That’s pretty much my whole modus operandi of composing and that comes from all of my teachers, but particularly Francis McBeth. The organic development of a motive, and a single motive. And that’s been a thing I’ve tried to do for years now is just build as much as possible from as little as possible and make it really obvious. JENKINS: What are the challenges with that? This is twenty some minutes worth of music, without the cadenza. When you have so little material, how do you keep it from sounding the same? Obviously you’re a fantastic composer, but how do you make it not do that. BRYANT: (Laughs) Man, if I could codify that and sell it as a book I would….I drink a lot of coffee. JENKINS: (Laughs) BRYANT: So, I’ve been taught to think big picture, architecturally about all of my pieces, especially a large piece like this. I think in character first. Like the first movement, I knew I wanted to make something fast and quiet. Those are my initial ideas, before I even knew the motive. And then I started looking for ways that this motivic material can serve that larger idea. What can I do to it? What all can I teeth out of it that would fit that character or this architecture? Slow it way down. Just play it really quietly. Sequence it. Build harmonies out of it. All the usual sort of composery things. I find actually that it’s freeing. I should look this up because I always try to quote it but I can’t remember Stravinsky’s quote. “There’s a lot of music left to be written in C major.” He’d rather be told to write, “You need to write a tuba quartet” not write whatever you want. It’s much easier to work in a box and set limits. I think that fosters creativity. When you’re a young composer, I think that can be very frustrating. But I’ve done this a lot, and I’m certainly no longer a young composer. Because then I know where the solution is. Like, I’m stuck. Well the solution is already right in front of me. That’s all I’m allowing myself to use. It gives you a direction to search. Now there’s a lot of noodling and a lot of different playing with it a million different ways and going, ‘Well that’s stupid. Well that’s stupid. Well that’s stupid.’ So there’s just a whole lot of inefficiency in writing a ton of music. A lot more music gets cut out than stays in. So for all the pages of music you see, there’s much more that didn’t end up in there, or variations where it went different directions. So it’s really an inefficient process of trying to do everything I can possibly imagine to do with it, and then only picking out the best bits. And saying, ‘That’s what I meant to do.’ I don’t know. I don’t have any processes or systematic ways of approaching it but once I find a hook, like the first movement, or the third movement, which is what I wrote first. Which actually helped, you know, just that (sings first two measures of the third movement) sequencing, what is it, jumping by minor 6ths or something. I don’t remember how, but I chose those kind of intervals and that makes it feel chromatic and not in any particular tonality. And that right there sets the stage.