Capturing emotion

Blaine Ferrandino’s creativity flows like a river winding through new territory at every mile.

 It moves through the Christmas carol he debuted last season. It runs through the cello symphony he premiered at Ed Landreth Auditorium. At every bend it changes.

 In the last few years, Ferrandino, associate professor of music theory and composition, has not just composed the carol and the three-movement symphony for cello but also a tuba ensemble piece, a work for piano, a duet for double bass and bassoon, several choral works and a piece for trumpet and marimba, the xylophone-like instrument that hails from Central America.

The variety alone is astounding to those who do not know the life and mind of an university composer and music theorist. Yet to Ferrandino, one of six professional composers on the TCU faculty, the completion of one or two compositions of varied styles a year is a natural part of devoting one’s life to music.

 Each semester Ferrandino teaches three classes and gives private classes to four or more honors students, students working on their thesis and students working on compositions.

 In one year alone he premiered “December Carol,” a work for an unaccompanied choir performed by TCU choirs during the 2008 holiday season. Last spring he premiered “Symphony in Three Movements for Violoncelli,” performed by the TCU Cello Ensemble. The work was performed again at the Honors Convocation where he was presented with the 2008 Honors Faculty Recognition Award. Honors students select the recipient.

 In the rush of days, he still finds time to compose for strings and wind instruments, piano, brass and even marimba. It flows like a river.

 On variety

In the symphony of his own life, Ferrandino was born in Queens and grew up in rural upstate New York. His family was not particularly musical but Ferrandino nonetheless developed a natural and varied affinity with music early on. He played guitar. He learned violin. He sang in choirs and at age 16 the family bought a piano. He wrote music.  Along the way he learned and loved the double bass, also known as the contrabass, an instrument popular in jazz ensembles and known for its deep and rich sound.

 In the second movement, he was, like most future academicians, a student who studied at varied schools, first the Manhattan School of Music and then Ithaca College for bachelors’ degrees in music and music education. He earned his master’s in music at Syracuse University and his doctorate at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music. 

 Now, in the third stage and in his 19th year at TCU, Ferrandino says his variety of musical styles and instruments is not an uncommon thing among university-level teachers, particularly in contemporary times.

 "We live in a musically eclectic age. Music is everywhere," he says.

 Our lives have multiple soundtracks. Music is on our telephones, our computers, video games and in the background most everywhere we go.

 “To write just one style of music would be difficult. To do that today you would have to shut yourself off from so much of the world,” Ferrandino says.

 He is not one to shut himself off. Inspiration, like music, is everywhere.

 On inspiration

Ideas emerge throughout the course of days.

 “They can come from a poem, a season, a person,” Ferrandino says. “They can be ideas I talk about with performers, or I may want to explore an approach or a technique or a problem to overcome.”

 In “Symphony in Three Movements for Violoncelli,” the first movement is called “Prayer,” and it is where he was inspired to write something meditative.

 “I wanted to create a mood, to express a feeling, “Ferrandino says.

 The second movement is titled “Scherzo,” the Italian word for jest or riddle. In this section he sought to create a rhetorical musical problem to solve.

 The final movement, “Romance,” is an homage to conductor and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who died in 2007. Rostropovich was exiled from his native Soviet Union from 1974 to 1990 for his public complaints about government treatment of dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and for his support of creative and cultural freedom.

 Ferrandino’s inspiration to write music is different, he says, than his impetus.

 “The impetus to compose comes when I’ve been asked to write for a certain group or I’ve decided to write for a certain instrument,” Ferrandino says.

 The inspiration, he says, comes for a desire to create something beautiful to share.

 Often, he is looking at a book or reading a poem when a particular word or phrase strikes him and he sets off to express it in music. James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, even the simpler language of Robert Louis Stevenson resonates and makes a sound and resonates with Ferrandino. As Robert Frost defined it, “A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words are strung.”

 A composition emerges from that same kind of flow.

 On creativity 

In classroom discussions of music, students ask Ferrandino to define music. Is birdsong music? Is the sound of traffic and car horns music?

 No, he tells them.

 “When you compose, you put things in place. It is the placement of sound in time,” Ferrandino says. “What separates music from all other sounds is the placement, the arrangement of a forward motion that is not random.”

 The creation of music, however, is more than a rigid architecture of well-planned notes. It is a flow, a river of ideas.

 A musical idea is introduced. Then another.

 “When there is an interaction of two forces, a third idea emerges,” Ferrandino says. “It is like a river that runs into a rock in the stream. The pattern and flow change. The river is influenced by anything that gets into the flow.”

He follows those eddies and rapids of ideas.

 “The composer is thinking as the river,” Ferrandino says. He is moving and responding to ideas as the music courses onward.

 “Once a piece gets going, it can be a melody, a color, a harmony or a rhythm that moves it forward,” he says.

The creative process of composing is one that has similarities to the creative process of writing, he says.

 “You place characters in a story. These are characters you cannot just introduce and ignore. They interact,” he says.

Unlike writing, music is a language made up entirely of verbs, of movement, Ferrandino says. 

 “The nouns are provided by the listener,” he says, and listeners can react to the same piece of music in different ways.

When Russian composer, conductor and pianist Igor Stravinsky delivered his “Poetics of Music in Six Lessons” at Harvard University in 1939-40, he explained that a finished composition is like a prism, Ferrandino says.

 “If it is created properly, it is multifaceted so that it means something to whoever hears it,” Ferrandino says. “A composition is like crystal. It refracts light. One person will see that light as blue, another as red.”

It is music and it is released from the interior flow of the composer to a world that will hear what it hears.

 

Contact Ferrandino at b.ferrandino@tcu.edu.

Comment at tcumagazine@tcu.edu.

 

Blaise Ferrandino is an associate professor of music theory and composition, and he is the division chair of theory and composition. He earned his undergraduate degrees in music and music education at Ithaca College, his master’s at Syracuse University and his doctorate at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music where he studied composition and double bass. He has presented lectures internationally and has been published internationally. He is a past president of the Texas Society for Music Theory. He has taught at TCU since 1990.