Seasons (2018)

Written for concert band, premiered by Rio Americano Honors Concert Band in 2018 under the direction of Maxwell Kiesner.

In 2018 I was provided the special and rewarding opportunity to return to my high school, Rio Americano in Sacramento, to compose for their concert band a new work to celebrate their first year in a beautiful new building that would replace the old, dilapidated, though cherished, couple of rooms that they used when I was a student there. It was during my four years there under the tutelage of Josh Murray and Maxwell Kiesner that I decided I wanted to be a serious musician. I loved being able give back to the program which had so greatly contributed to my nascent musical development, and to show the current students what someone who had been through the same program could do 10 years later.

In my senior year of high school, 2010, I wrote a song called Seasons, which me and my friends would play for so many functions and shows that it became sort of a coming of age anthem that we all got extremely sick of. The melody, with its incessant descending pentatonic repetitions became a parody of itself, and my friends would tauntingly sing it at me constantly (and still do), or jokingly shout it out at every musical performance, as if it were my Freebird. In this way it kind of followed me around for years after high school, like an embarrassing adolescent ghost of yourself.

That being said, it felt pretty invigorating to perform the song at the Memorial Auditorium in downtown Sacramento, one of our most historic venues. A video of that performance can be seen here. My friends Nathan Swedlow (bass), Zach Giberson (guitar), Zach Darf (guitar), and Jarrett Tracy (drums), who played Seasons with me, and I would go on to form the band Family Photo, which released three albums and put together several tours in the U.S.

I decided to re-imagine this song for my new work for the concert band, which uses the same melody and harmony, though develops in some totally new musical directions that I never would have thought of ten years ago when I originally wrote it. The orchestration is very specific to the band, which always had an odd collection of musicians depending on whoever is ready for the band that year. This year included a huge amount of percussionists, twelve, each for which I wrote an individual part.

I conducted the premiere of the 2017-2018 Rio Americano Honors Concert Band, which was directed by Maxwell Kiesner.