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The Martirano Memorial Award, an annual honor that celebrates the legacy and music of longtime School of Music faculty member Salvatore (Sal) Martirano (1927-1995), is approaching its 2025 cycle. As part of this year’s festivities, Victor Zheng, Coordinator of the Martirano Award and an alum of the School of Music (DMA ’23), leads a special conversation with the three 2024 winners, offering a unique glimpse into the creative processes behind their compositions.
The first feature focuses on Daniel Fawcett, the Third Prize winner of the 2024 Martirano Memorial Award. His award-winning composition, Echoes of Wild Petals (composed in 2023), is scored for baritone, bass clarinet, trumpet, trombone, and electronics, setting four texts by poet Paul Cameron Brown in a song cycle. Through his thoughtful selection of texts, integration of electronics, and use of extended instrumental techniques, Fawcett’s work reveals a deep engagement with natural imagery, musical textures, and experimental approaches to form and repetition.
Victor: I’ll start off with the title here, Echoes of Wild Petals – I take it that you’re very deeply interested in nature and depicting its features.
Daniel: Yeah – not typical kinds of features. I’m not talking about color; I’m not talking about smell. I’m talking about something that is sort of an unusual idea that I’m deriving from those, so it’s like the way something moves or what sound it makes. Something that’s not very typically described when we describe nature.
Victor: I guess like what I’m getting, then, is that you also kind of try to synthesize many senses like the sight, the movement. Not just what you’re seeing directly, but how you feel it, right?
Daniel: Yes, the experience of it.
Victor: That’s quite beautiful – I really like your approach here. You mentioned in your program notes you chose these four texts by Paul Cameron Brown. Can you talk more about how you chose these texts?
Daniel: I’ve actually had these poems around since I was an undergraduate, and there’s a few different poets I’ve gone to.There’s one, Paul Cameron Brown, and then another one is Robert Fuller Murray.These two poets are not very commonly set – I think I was one of the only people to set Paul Cameron Brown’s work. Robert Fuller Murray is actually a Victorian poet, but the cool thing about both of these guys is that they write an older style, but what they’re depicting is almost new age – something that you can find in like 60s kind of writing.
Victor: Yeah – the way I’m reading this – it doesn’t quite fit the pastoral love, romantic based nature that I would normally associate with Victorian poetry.
Daniel: Well, Paul Cameron Brown is more modern, but still, he’s in the early part of the 20th century, 1948. I forgot who described him as this, but someone said he’s “Hemingway on acid.” It’s really funny –every time you look up Paul Cameron Brown, it’ll just say “Hemingway on acid” – someone described him like that and that’s just stuck. It’s very pretty, but it’s very abstract and it’s very difficult to sometimes set all that, so it was really interesting.
Victor: I glanced over the text earlier and I think it makes so much sense the way you mentioned Victorian influences it’s just like kind it depicts things in a way that’s reminiscent of like a century-ish-old English while also being addressing concepts that are not quite so familiar to the Romantic idiom.
Daniel: And the way I set the poems too – sometimes they’re pretty straightforward set, where the singer has basically line-line-line, where everything is a very straightforward setting that you would expect, but there was – like “Leaf Doctor,” which was the third song [in the cycle], I found it really hard to set, so I set it in a strange, kind of unusual way where I just kind of fixed on [the line] “you said,” because “Leaf Doctor,” at least the way I heard it, it’s a very kind of lonely song in solitude, so I just kind of hooked on to “you said.” At the end the baritone just has “you said” just over and over and over again.
“Leaf Doctor”
You said happiness was a bird – a hand extended
could bend its perch. span the perfect wings.
I spoke of swallows. lived off flies
ebbed when flying. seldom came to rest.
Victor: Actually, that ties into one of the questions I want to ask about the piece. You use repeat signsquite a lot in this,and I guess at first glance I would have wondered like why not just explicitly write things out, but there’s a certain kind of cyclical nature and artistic choice behind specifically using the repeat sign. What you said earlier about “you said” and this other line in the poem, “happiness was a bird,” you have that repeat five times with the baritone while kind of doing something different every time, while everything else is kind of doing their own thing, right?
Daniel: I was in choir during my undergraduate for a year. Being in choir, you find these unusual kinds of settings, orways of setting things, and sometimes some of the stuff was like this, where eventually I was like, yeah, just repeat every time especially if the texture just kind of undulates. Because that’s what I wanted, a sort of undulating texture while the baritone has this one very long line, but I just didn’t want to change the underlying texture.
Victor: It goes matches very well with what you’re talking about, depicting some of the different dimensions of the imagery of petals, right? It’s doesn’t linearly go forward you if you’re watching a petal fly flutter in the wind, you’re not going to expect it to logically lead somewhere, just back and forth without a specific direction.
Daniel: Yeah, and there was the clarinet part that’s in that third movement, it just kind of flutters, it’s this really cooleffect that they have, the multiphonic. They have a high partial and they have a tremolo on the bottom right.
Victor: Yes, it was so striking when I heard it! It was subtle as well. Whenever you try an extended technique or something, it’s so hard to keep it from sticking out like a sore thumb, but this one, it just blends it very well.
Daniel: And the opening too, I decided on that opening for the trombone, it was kind of a cool way of doing things with the glissandos. When I was thinking about it, I was thinking, like a plant kind of growing, its roots spreading because, I did want the trombone solo at the beginning just to sound very un-grass-like.
Victor: You also mention here [in the score], “match clarinet dynamic level.” It really conveys something about what you’re trying to achieve, unification wise between the three instruments here?
Daniel: Yeah, and including the trumpet part. [I use] the Crown Royal mute – it’s a cloth mute, that just takes a little edge off the little brass. Just as a string player this is this is kind of how I approach things. I play brass very minimally and this is just kind of a string player’s way of approaching it. The bass clarinet is just kind of like a cello – I play the cello so that’s what the bass clarinet is doing, something I could do on cello very easily.
Some of this stuff as well as some of the settings like the last movements, I had been working on this at the same time I was running sound and doing the live electronic portions for Sarah Kirkland Snider’s piece. I was running sound and she has some live electronic stuff in her piece. There were two pieces -there’s Penelope and then there’s Unremembered. My friend was running Penelope and I was running Unremembered.
Victor: Did you did you compose the sounds for it?
Daniel: No, she does that, but she wants stuff that’s cued, and she also wants you to EQ stuff and to play with the sound a little bit. This was for Nief-Norf, and at Nief-Norf we talk about performing a lot, so she wanted us to actually perform, to give us the opportunity to perform electronics and not just be hitting play.
Victor: Performing electronics is so underrated yet really fascinating – I do it myself in my collaborations, like putting together the GUI for live performance, letting a performer play with it or letting myself play it, it’s so fun, I love that. I imagine this must have influenced on what you did with the electronics, right? I think you were getting around to that point.
Daniel: Yeah, that was the approach for the fourth movement. The beginning of that has what I call “musical waves.” I wanted the idea of waves. I started with these kind of “chordal” electronic sounds.Each one’s an individual sound; I just stacked them on top of each other to make these “waves”. I could have recorded sounds of [ocean] waves and stuff, but I decided to make waves like chords.
Victor: So, you put together a few sounds that correspond to existing chords and then just stagger them?
Daniel: Yeah. And then I played with the volume to make it sort of go in and out to flow. That was something that’s really prominent in her work and I think that was pretty influential.
Victor: You mentioned the live electronic portion – did your experience performing live electronics play a role in how you constructed this?
Daniel: Yeah, a little bit. At least, the way I was taught with electronic music is that all electronic music,regardless of whether it’s tape or live, it should sound live. So, that’s what I did. For the fourth movement, I have pre-recorded trumpet portions in there. There’s like one segment where the electronic trumpet is in there and then the regular trumpet kind of feeds into that, so it’s sort of a seamless kind of transition.
Victor: You achieved a really remarkable unity between the electronics and the instruments in my opinion. Your electronics – you have them in the first and last movements, if I remember correctly, and when they just come in, my first impression of it was how the electronics blend so well with the mute work you’re doing, with the wah-wah sound, right? And obviously, you can achieve that to an extent by matching the sounds in the electronics, taking the recorded samples and matching them with the what’s done live. But compositionally achieving that level of connection that making the nuances match up is quite a remarkable feat in my opinion and I really enjoyed that part. That’s going around to my wider point – did you think of unity as a really important part of this piece?
Daniel: Yeah, especially for the outer movements. Unity was kind of a big thing in terms of just making it technically more viable, just making it easier to put together. But additionally, it was to add to this kind of wall of sound that I have. Because [in] the first movement, I have very sparse sounds at the beginning,and just at the very, very end for the last 30 seconds or so, it’s just kind of a wall of sound. So, you just have everything together at once, and when I interlocked all these parts together, it just kind of turned out really well.
Lately, I’ve been working on pieces where each movement or each song is in a separate kind of style. So,the second and third movements are kind of that traditional academic art song style, especially that second movement is something that is more that kind of art song, a little bit abstract style. That third movement – I really look to Vaughan Williams, his settingsof “Songs of Travel,” “The Vagabond,” that kind of stuff.The third movement, “Leaf Doctor,” was very Vaughan Williams-inspired, especially the voice. It’s like that – you know, he always likes the baritone, the low voices.
And then that the last movement is pretty pop-y – it’s nice, it’s major. There’s not really too many striking dissonances, and when there are they’re sort of just like big seventh chords that are just stacked on top of each other.
Victor: There’s a common feature between the first and the last movements, where you use some recitation. Could you talk more about your narrative choice in spoken versus sung?
Daniel: I really wanted the recitation – at least the way I saw it and heard it, I didn’t want to sing the words that I didn’t feel were as important, and the lines I didn’t feel were as important. I guess from “melancholy vastness – its pleasure” to “the further I search the sea,” especially “the further I search the sea,” is a pretty important part. So I just wanted to sing the parts that I found were the most important from those two movements.
Victor: So, you reserved the singing part for the significant lines in your opinion.
Daniel: Yeah, and for the movements where I don’t really have the option because there’s no electronics,so there’s nothing to kind of “do” anything, I just set specific phrases to be the main focus so for the second movement. I started with “it was strangely quiet” – for me, that was pretty striking, so I decided to make kind of a focus on those.
Victor: You took, in my opinion, several bold choices in uh setting these and uh they all they came off well. Like you say,the pop-y composition of the final movement and also deliberately playing with the contrast between the spoken and the sung, it’s a very free, modern exploration into text setting which also has clear roots in classical text setting. The wide range of influences that you seem to have is actually one of the most striking parts of the piece in my opinion.
Daniel: For me, I just wanted to try – I just do my way of doing things. When I approach song cycles,it’s especially what I’m interested in: just lately, a lot of the song stuff I’ve been doing is sort of this kind of exploration of different styles. I had a piece for harp, clarinet, viola, electronics, and soprano, and one style was almost Renaissance-based, for the second movement of that piece – it’s part of my Sculpturesseries.
Victor: So, you’re obviously taking influences from many different sources, but ultimately you want to synthesize them into something that’s unified into your style, rather than playing on the diversity of styles– like, this is vignette of this, vignette of that – it all comes together into you.
Daniel: Yeah, it’s my style too. It’s also where it doesn’t have to be a 100% representation of that style.If I were to do a fauxbourdon thing, I wouldn’t do it exactly as that. If I were to do, like, a jazz standard, I would do a lot of things that people in jazz composition would not be very happy with. But I don’t care – it’s my way; it’s more my take on it. Also –one of my loves is the Berio folk songs. It’s where all of this kind of style comes from – it’s like, “let’s see how many styles like can put into this, make it into a synthesized work.”
Victor: I feel like so many composers still struggle define their own style, but you seem like you’re happily incorporating as many things as you can and just whatever results is this mixing pot, is your own personal take on all of this and ultimately that’s what we are, just learning and trying to incorporate whatever we can.
Daniel: And at least for myself, I just record a lot of stuff because I just have ideas. Like, on my computer right now,there there’s just thousands of files of ideas I have. And so, for this piece [Echoes of Wild Petals], I had all the trumpet and especially the clarinet multiphonic samples, and they just looped on top of each other. That’s how I compose.
Victor: So, you recorded/found these samples and then you stacked them top? It’s like almost like a chemistry experiment.
Daniel: It’s like composing on Pro Tools. I have all the files all the files have a notation attached to it: so,this is what this sound is – this sound is this this notated pitch.
Victor: So, you’ve actually gone through the trouble of notating every single one of them?
Daniel: Yeah, and I can just drop it into Pro Tools. For the second movement, that’s what I did, just drop it into Pro Tools, “I like this sound.” Same with the third movement, too. I just have that tremolo happening the entire time – I have a sample of that one tremolo happen over and over and over again, and it’s like, “okay, what can I play over this,” and just have a little electronic keyboard on my computer with corresponding keys on my computer.
Victor: That’s a really fascinating insight into your approach here, and that makes so much sense, the way you come up with these sound combinations.
Daniel: Textures. It’s really an important thing.
Victor: Textures, yes. Something that you can’t really replicate just in your head.
One more question, if that’s okay. What did you think about work working the IME?
Daniel: Oh, it’s a lot of fun, really great. It’s really nice to see a student level organization perform at that level. Especially for this piece. This year, I’ve had this piece played twice: one of them was by IME and then the other group who performed it was part of a festival that I really like, New Music on the Bayou. I hadn’t talked to them for a few years,and they asked me to submit something, so I was like,“okay, I’m gonna see what they do with it.” It was very interesting. It’s basically very different – I’m always very interested to see kind of what their approach is to this in terms of the technical aspect and what they bring to it, especially what the singer brings to it.
Victor: Can you talk about like what the differences were?
Daniel: Yeah – for New Music on the Bayou, the baritone was kind of a much more established deeper baritone, so it was a little bit different at times. It was more, again, that Vaughan Williams style, almost a Bryn Terfel: very heavy, heavy, heavy baritone voice. And it really worked in some moments. It was very interesting, the contrast: some of those floating aspects where it’s more in the tenor range to where some portions were very low, and he really did some interesting things with how it worked. And some of the brass players did kind of a different approach to the mutes, a different approach to how they performed it,different approach to setup as well. There’s just a lot of different kind of approaches, but they have unique results that I was happy with.
Echoes of Wild Petals can be found at Daniel’s Soundcloud profile.
Daniel’s other work and biography can be found at his personal website.