The Instrumentalist Publishing Company

A Conversation with Frank Ticheli
By Dan Blaufuss

Among highly regarded composers of band music during the past 20 years, Frank Ticheli would be near the top of most directors’ lists. Having just turned 50, Ticheli, who is professor of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, understands and explains the unusual, sometimes agonizing process he goes through while composing. It works, and he explains why.

What is your approach to writing music?
At the start I am completely open to any inspiration that develops. My joy in composing is that with music we can express anything, and for a while I am often frustrated trying to figure out what the work should portray. I never start with the decision that I will write the piece in E flat major in rondo form, ABAC, or that the harmony will be a particular way.
My friend Francis McBeth has told me that he does the opposite and has the whole work planned before he writes one note on the page. I think he does much of the precompositional work in his head and resolves many things before he starts to write. I admire this approach but I just can’t create that way. When I start it’s like starting a trip without a map. I may drive 2,000 miles and still not have a map, but along the way I often find something amazing off the road that I never would have found if I had stuck to the route indicated on a map. I delight in these accidents and discoveries.

What project are you working on today?
It is a piece commissioned by Kingsway International to be premiered at the Sydney Opera House on July 5 by a massed band of hundreds of winds and percussion players. Most performers will be high school students and they will surround the audience inside the Sydney Opera House. I’m pulling out all the stops, but this is a hard work to create.
I wrote a dark, energetic section first and now I’m literally working backwards and composing the section that precedes it, then moving on to the section before that. I want the music to start out quietly but with lots of energy underneath. I almost never start at the beginning. I often write segments out of sequence.

How did the composition unfold in your mind?
At first I had only a general concept of using hymns from various religions including a shaker hymn, a doxology, a Jewish hymn, and perhaps some Hindu music. The premiere will coincide with World Youth Day, for which the Pope will visit Sydney. This got me thinking about faith, spiritual renewal as well as spiritual doubt, angels of darkness, and the tensions between darkness and light. From these abstractions the musical ideas evolved through lots and lots of hard work.

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