A few weeks ago in my composition class at PSU, my professor introduced us to a piece called OK FEEL GOOD by a composer named Jonathan Newman. I was instantly taken back by it. The piece was written, as Newman states in the notes of the score, during “a year of somewhat intense personal distress, and I was extremely tired of feeling bad, so I decided to write a very happy piece.”
To me it’s an amazing work, full of lush melodic color and pulsating with rhythmic motion. I specifically state this because the motivic material is written in a somewhat odd meter. It starts with a bar of 7/16, goes into a bar of 3/8, back into another bar of 7/16, and then finishes with two bars of a more common 3/4. But it manages to flow very well. It has many moods, no doubt due to the fact of his intentional transition from dark to light, and it’s easy to her his love of jazz rhythms, percussion, and Gershwin. It’s warm and very tender at times, extremely sexy at others, and it reminds me a lot of a Don Ellis composition. It’s rad.
The seven and a half minute long composition was written for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and debuted on July 12, 1996 at the Harris Hall as part of the world renowned Aspen Music Festival. The orchestration is for a small six person chamber group: Flute (doubling Piccolo), B-flat Clarinet (doubling Bass Clarinet), Violin, Cello, Piano, and Percussion (Crotales, Xylophone, Vibraphone, Marimba, Triangle, Suspended Cymbal, Conga).
Finally I would also like to mention that Mr. Newman is part-founder and member of the BCM International, a consortium of four composers: Newman, Jim Bonney, Steven Bryant, and Eric Whitacre, who was the artist in residence at the APU School of Music two years ago. He adapted ideas and themes from Milton’s epic poem to a multimedia opera/dance/stage performance with live and prerecorded music and entitled it Paradise Lost. Interesting idea, sort of trendy output. Anyway I thought it was cool that they all work together and promote each other. Something of a no brainer but refreshing to see for two composers that I had no idea were connected.
THE HOP ARCHIVE 
