Deafening thug-rap from a passing car drowns out Rob Constable in mid-sentence. He's sitting on the balcony of his home on a busy street just north of Ybor City, discussing his orchestral composition soon to be performed by the Florida Orchestra. We grin at the thundering beatmobile's aural tableau and resume our chat about sonic shapes, the rich tonal color of eight French horns and how his piece, titled Target Audience, might be slightly Debussy-esque.
Ah, a little high culture in the 'hood — ain't it grand?
Constable, who's been a fixture on the Bay area's avant-garde music scene since the early '90s, is thrilled to have the orchestra play his two-minute Target Audience, which will be presented as a sort of appetizer just before their performance of Stravinsky's savage masterpiece The Rite of Spring. Part of Constable's mandate was to pen the piece using the same instrumentation as Rite, which augments the standard orchestra with a bevy of horns. "I'm getting a little more nervous as the time approaches," he says. "At first, I thought, 'Cool, I get to use all those colors,' and later I realized, 'Wait, Rite of Spring comes immediately after. This is not good.'"
Constable joins several other local composers this season in contributing short works to the orchestra as brief concert-openers. The initiative evolved from two seasons ago, when music director Stefan Sanderling was looking for short pieces to spice up the program that the ensemble would perform unannounced. When such works proved difficult to find, the Orchestra reached out to Bay area composers. "The idea was the [new] piece should be based in a way on the [masterwork] piece it's preceding," says David Rogers, the orchestra's artistic administrator — "whatever that meant to any given composer. It could be stylistically, or in a completely different style with the understanding that it is in some way a stepping stone to the rest of the concert."
Which is to say, essentially, that the parameters were quite wide.
Target Audience falls generally within the realm of contemporary serious-music, neo-classical, New Music, whatever you care to call it. It features herky-jerky melodic lines countered by long, massive chords involving dozens of instruments. It becomes more dense and discordant as it progresses, reaching a rousing crescendo. The work manages to express a lot in just over two minutes.
"It didn't take long for me to feel constrained by the length," Constable says," although I want it to be clear that I'm not complaining. I understand why the orchestra wants to keep it short. But I felt like the piece wanted to be larger — I sketched a lot of stuff that I didn't use — and I plan on rewriting it into a longer form."
When Constable landed the assignment in July, he "stewed on it for a couple months. I spent the summer studying Rite of Spring and getting the instruments in my head. I'm always driven by the instruments I'm writing for. I've worked in computer-generated music, and it was a great opportunity to write for an orchestra."
Once he established the shape and concept of the piece in his mind, Constable started "writing like crazy, and it became a lot of fun." He composed directly from his mind to score paper, occasionally checking his work on a piano in his garage. He also eschewed the old-school method of composing a piano score and filling in orchestral parts later, opting instead to write the entire dense script of music — often times with each instrument assigned a different part — in one process.
The project was both arduous and exhilarating. Admittedly a slow worker, Constable says he wrote three to six hours a day for several weeks, finishing in November.
Because of budget constraints, the Florida Orchestra did not commission Constable to write the piece; rather, they rented Target Audience as they would a previously published work. "If it were a commission, it would be pretty puny," Rogers says, declining to reveal the fee. "As a rental, it's about on par."
"I'm not complaining at all," Constable says about the paltry compensation. "I know this may sound a little kooky, but for me the deal is being able to compose the piece. I've written a lot of pieces that have never been performed, and I don't care that much. It's great to have a premiere, but the reason I studied music was so that I could write music. That's when I'm a really happy guy, though I might not show it."
His passion arrived early. He begged for piano lessons at age 4. The first LP he bought, in his early teens, was Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, as performed by Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra. The Constable family relocated from Long Island to Seminole when Rob was 14, at which time he started concentrating on classical guitar. Because most of the existing classical guitar repertoire was in the Spanish Romantic vein, Constable began writing pieces for himself. He changed his focus to composing.
Constable earned his bachelor's in music from USF, then shipped off to the Eastman School in Rochester, N.Y., where he earned a master's in composition and did some work on a doctorate.
Returning to Tampa in '93, he fell in with an Eastman/USF cartel that included Paul Reller, David Rogers and Corey Holt. The cluster of friends and artistic cohorts was largely responsible for establishing the Bonk Festival of New Music, the Bay area's preeminent outlet for avant-garde sounds. (The event is currently on an indeterminate hiatus.)
The musicians didn't restrict themselves to classical music, but formed a series of rock bands, the most prominent of which was Reller's much-beloved and now-defunct Clang. Constable and Rogers have co-helmed Handshake Squad for nearly a decade. The band makes quirky, sophisticated music that borrows liberally from the classical milieu but never resorts to art-rock ponderousness.
"We try to write four-chord pop songs for Handshake Squad, but it never quite comes out right," Constable says with a chuckle. "I had hoped that after so many years of trying to write the perfect two-and-a-half minute pop song that it might help me with the problem of writing a two-minute composition for classical orchestra. I'm not sure that it did."
As for the Florida Orchestra's outreach to area composers, Constable concludes, "It's amazing, given the state of things. Performing any new music is a daring feat. 'What about the box office?' It's been done in a smart way, though. The pieces are short enough so that I don't think anyone could object. There are a lot of talented composers in this town that are basically working undercover. I'm still amazed that it's happening."
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2007.