On September 28, I will have the pleasure of conducting Daniel Godsil's "Cathedral Grove" with the Camellia Symphony Orchestra in Sacramento. Also on the program are Brahms' Violin Concerto with Catherine Lin as our soloist and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1. Below is an interview with composer Daniel Godsil. (click here for info about this program)
Christian Baldini: Daniel, welcome, and let's start by talking about your music. What was the genesis for Cathedral Grove? Is it different from your other music? What should people listen for in this piece?
Daniel Godsil: One of the things that really inspired this piece was a comment by composer Sam Nichols, my former teacher at UC Davis: he said that orchestral music—with its relatively bigger scale, large performing forces, and sheer number of people working behind the scenes—is really a public art. That really resonated with me, and got me thinking about other public spaces like our country's national and state parks. I often visited California's beautiful parks while I was studying at UC Davis, and decided to do an orchestral "sound-painting" of one of my favorites, Muir Woods (of which Cathedral Grove is a part). Around the time I was writing this piece, I was writing a lot of electronic music that used what I called "sound-shapes"...honestly kind of silly, but trying to render in sound very simple shapes like triangles, X-shapes or chiasms, circles, etc., as jumping-off points to start a composition. People can perhaps listen in this piece for big triangles and X-shapes—roughly the giant shapes created by trees in the Muir Woods—rendered in sound. This piece was also a little different from my other work at the time in that I consciously tried to use more consonant combinations of notes. I often write using a spectrum of dissonant and consonant sound combinations, but for this work I experimented with trending more towards the consonant side of things.
CB: Let's talk about your beginnings with music. How did it all start for you? Was there a particular "eureka" moment when you decided to become a professional musician?
DG: I started playing guitar at age 11. Throughout junior and high school I played mostly rock music, and (after learning just three or four chords) started forming bands with friends. I was writing tons of new songs and riffs all the time, which really the culture of rock music...everyone was writing their own stuff! I didn't think about it much at the time, but that environment was really teaching me the art of composition. My eureka moment was around the age of 17 when I really fell in love with film music. I realized that the orchestral timbres I was drawn to were difficult to achieve with the more limited pallet of tone-colors in rock, and found a piano teacher, learned how to read music, and more importantly, how to write it down and communicate with lots of other more classically-trained players.
CB: Who are some of your favorite composers? Why? What do you look for in "new music"?
DG: This is a tricky question! It's often said that the music you learned to love in your adolescence is the music you love for your whole life, and that's definitely true for me. So that's a lot of heavy metal like Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Sepultura...and also film scoring in the classic Golden Age style like Erich Korngold, Max Steiner, John Williams, and James Horner. Because of my metal background I love "classical" music with lots of raw energy...Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Beethoven, and more recent composers like Georg Haas, Thomas Ades. And because of my love of film music I love composers who built a lot of drama into their forms...I love Sibelius! I also found myself very drawn to the American Symphonists of the 1930s and 40s who helped form the language that film composers use. Composers like David Diamond, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, and of course Copland. What I look for in new music, I think, really tends toward those two silly adolescent drives...energy and drama!
CB: What's a day like for you? When is the best time to compose? Do you have hobbies? Do you exercise? How do you balance your life as a Professor with your time to compose and perform?
DG: I'm in my fourth year teaching music at Columbia College, in the foothills of the Sierra close to Yosemite. This job keeps me very busy—it's a small school and I'm a department of one! I teach music theory, ear training, music history, private lessons, and I conduct the college orchestra. So I haven't found a lot of time to write much in the last few years while I figured out the job! I'm happy to report that I've (more or less) figured it out and am finding more time now to compose...mostly, for me, in the very early morning before my kids wake up. I'm a diehard hockey fan, and have recently gotten very much into astronomy/telescopes. I am an avid cyclist and exercise often...it's essential for me! It's the best medicine one can get. My job mostly (right now) calls on my performing abilities...I play a lot of piano and guitar (and have been studying jazz very in-depth recently) and have been conducting a lot. I find it very musically satisfying.
CB: What is your advice for your musicians who are starting out? How does one deal with frustrations? How does one stay positive?
DG: I always recommend that musicians should develop a very diverse and marketable skill-set...learn to compose! Play several instruments. Get good at video editing. Know how to record with a DAW and know what microphones work for what things. Maybe this doesn't work for everyone, but it does for me: if you get frustrated learning a Beethoven sonata or get composer's block, go learn a jazz standard for fun or go for a walk. 99% of the time that will help you forget your frustration and come back to whatever it was with a positive attitude.
CB: Lastly, what is the meaning of music to you? I know this is a very big and general question. Feel free to answer it in any way that represents you!
DG: This changes for me a lot, but right now I'm just so grateful to be in a big community of great music makers, be it my students, the talented amateur players in my orchestra, or just friends who play bluegrass for fun. Especially now in this election cycle, there's a big push to look at life through a political lens...how much more fun and positive it is to apply a musical lens instead, and let that focus and inform everything else!
CB: Thank you for your time Daniel, I look forward to making music with you!
DG: Thanks Christian! Can't wait to work with the wonderful Camellia Symphony!
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| Daniel Godsil (Courtesy Photo) |
Daniel Godsil's music, which has been described by the San Francisco Classical Voice as having an “intense dramatic narrative,” draws from such eclectic influences as science fiction, thrash metal, and Brutalist architecture. His more recent work draws inspiration from the natural beauty of Northern California, his current home.
Winner of the 2019 League of Composers/ISCM Steven R. Gerber prize (for Cosmographia) and the 2017 Earplay Donald Aird Composition Competition (for his quartet Aeropittura), Godsil's music has been played by Spektral Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Talujon Percussion, Daedalus Quartet, Lydian String Quartet, Empyrean Ensemble, Metropolitan Orchestra of Saint Louis, UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, University Symphony Orchestra at California State University Fullerton, Knox-Galesburg Symphony, Secret String Quartet, and the Nova Singers, among many others. Recent film scores include the PBS documentary Boxcar People, Man Ray’s 1926 silent film Emak-Bakia and the feature film H.G. Wells’ The First Men In The Moon. Godsil was a finalist in the 2018 Lake George Music Festival chamber composition competition, as well as the 2014 and 2019 Red Note New Music Festival Composition Competitions. His choral works are published by Alliance Music Publishing and NoteNova Publishing, and his chamber and orchestral music is published by BabelScores in Paris.
Born and raised in central Illinois, Godsil (b.1982) holds his PhD. in Composition and Theory from the University of California, Davis, where he studied with Pablo Ortiz, Mika Pelo, Laurie San Martin, and Sam Nichols. He holds an MFA in Music Composition from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he studied with John Fitz Rogers, John Mallia, and Jonathan Bailey Holland. He also holds a BM in Music Composition from Webster University.
Godsil was selected to participate in the 2017 Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) in Boston, where he had master classes with composers Nicholas Vines and Georg Friedrich Haas.
Godsil has also been active as an educator, conductor, and performer in the central Illinois area, Knox College, Monmouth College, and Carl Sandburg College. At Knox College, he directed the New Music Ensemble, Wind Ensemble, Chamber Ensemble, and Men’s Chorus. He has also held posts as choral accompanist and collaborative pianist, and served as Music Director and Organist at Grace Episcopal Church in Galesburg, IL.
Godsil is a professor of music at Columbia College in Sonora, California. He has also served as artistic committee president for Ninth Planet New Music, a trailblazing new music ensemble based in California's SF Bay Area.
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