September 11, 2019
Music & Artists: Brian Balmages
The renowned composer — who helms new scores and initiatives for Alfred and MakeMusic Publications — talks about what goes into crafting great music for students and reflects on the most poignant moments of his career.
In early 2019, when the composer Brian Balmages was asked by 1st Lt. Elizabeth Elliott to write a new piece of music, he hesitated.
Elliott, a conductor in the U.S. Army, suffered the stillbirth of her daughter in November 2018, and music played an essential role in her journey toward healing. Balmages doubted he could fully comprehend or express grief of such overwhelming intensity.
After all, as a man he couldn’t physically experience the profundity of childbirth, and he’d never lost a child. “When [Elizabeth] contacted me, every bone in my body wanted to run away,” says Balmages, who is the Director of MakeMusic Publications and Digital Education for Alfred Music and MakeMusic. “I wanted to say, ‘There’s no way I can take this on.’”
But then Balmages began to reflect. Though he hadn’t faced the great tragedy that Elliott braved, his young son had recently struggled with a serious illness. “I knew that feeling of being helpless, even though you’re doing everything you can,” he says.
More importantly, through numerous conversations he came to understand that Elliott’s goals with this new music were in many ways universal: She wanted the work to offer a sense of peace to everyone who’d endured the heartbreak of outliving their child. The two musicians spoke about this “really difficult experience that so many people have, but it always seems to live in the shadows, and we don’t talk about it,” explains Balmages, 50. “So the music took that experience and put it centerstage.”
The resulting piece, Love and Light, is dedicated to “Madison Elliott, and all the little angels and their parents,” and it traverses a striking range of feeling — the warmth and grace of love; the chaotic inner-tumult associated with loss; and the triumphant serenity that comes with spiritual healing. It premiered in February 2020 in Alexandria, Virginia, conducted by Elliott and performed by the esteemed U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own.”
The performance had gotten some strong advance press, Balmages recalls, and the venue was packed. Later that evening, he discovered that a good many of those in attendance had in fact lost a child. From a seemingly endless line of concertgoers, Elliott and Balmages heard story after story of gnawing heartache. “There were people who had lost a child a decade or two earlier,” he remembers, “who were coming to hear this piece to get closure.”
A Change of Heart
Love and Light would go on to win the 2020 William D. Revelli Memorial Composition Contest, presented by the National Band Association. The composition also proved to be a pivotal moment in a career full of remarkable achievements. Born and raised in Baltimore, Balmages grew up in a deeply musical family. Both of his parents graduated from the Peabody conservatory, and his father enjoyed a long and fruitful career as an elementary-school band director. He studied at James Madison University, where he received a Distinguished Alumni Award, and at the University of Miami, where he received a Centennial Medalist Award as a distinguished alumni at the university’s centennial celebration.
He was an endlessly fascinated overachiever in college, earning far more credits than he needed to graduate before going on to an early career as a performing musician. Over the past two decades he’s earned acclaim as a composer and conductor whose mastery runs from student bands to acclaimed professional ensembles, and comprises band, orchestral and chamber music.
His music has resonated in symphony halls like the Sydney Opera House, the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall and the Meyerhoff, where the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra premiered his suite-length interpretation of the Little Red Riding Hood story as part of a 2002 children’s concert series. In 2013, at the Washington National Cathedral, Balmages’ piece Ite Missa Est was performed in a National Prayer Service attended by President Obama and Vice President Biden.
But as Balmages would argue, even the most imposing resume pales in comparison to the transformative power of music itself. Love and Light, he explains, was “a moment in my career where I suddenly started to view the music I write in a different way, and the purpose of being an artist in a different way.”
He realized then that composers, conductors and performers “have a tremendous responsibility to bring beauty back into a world that so desperately needs it,” he says. “We also have a responsibility to highlight the things that are not so beautiful in the world, and to bring attention to that as well.”
Since 2022, Balmages has brought this perspective to his position with Alfred Music, a powerhouse publisher of sheet music and music-education materials, and to MakeMusic, a world leader in music technology and home to MakeMusic Cloud (formerly SmartMusic). Although his job entails writing and supervising a constant stream of new music, content and initiatives for the music-education marketplace, his approach is, admirably and refreshingly, rooted in creativity.
Educational Music Should Be … Musical!
To start, Balmages reminds his interviewer that music for the educational market needs to deliver the spirit and soul of authentic orchestral composing. “For me, everything about music needs to relate to connection,” he says. “I always tell people, If you’re out to teach a rhythm, go into a method book or a technique book and teach it there. We don’t play music to teach a rhythm; we don’t play music to teach a technique. The technique exists to serve the music.”
Balmages’ job, then, “is to look at the vocabulary available to any group and to maximize what they can do expressively with that vocabulary,” he says. Of course it’s great when a student can expand their skill set by immersing themselves in a piece, “but if that’s the sole purpose, then you’re really just writing educational, not music,” he says.
Don’t Hold Back, But Remember to Connect
So a genuine piece of music needs to connect. But if the performers are schoolchildren, then topically the piece probably shouldn’t explore the travails of career stagnation or a bad marriage. Too many times, composers have submitted pieces to Balmages that “younger students simply cannot relate to,” he says. “So it’s our job as composers to create music that kids can not only play well, but can emotionally and personally connect with.”
Balmages has demonstrated this understanding both in his original compositions, which often reflect beauty and excitement in straightforward ways, and in projects like MakeMusic’s groundbreaking Foundations Series, which uses music from hit films as the backdrop for technique exercises, stoking kids’ enthusiasm for practice.
The impact has been enormous. Foundations users have averaged nearly twice the classroom and at-home engagement compared to other active MakeMusic platform users, and teachers are reporting a substantial increase in self-motivated practice. “Foundations completely changed the way kids interact with practicing,” says Balmages. “I was getting emails from people who said, ‘My 7-year-old was waiting for me at the door when I got home from school, saying, Can we go practice now?’”
In Search of the X Factor
Surprisingly, when Balmages is on the lookout for composers to join his roster at Alfred, his decisions aren’t predicated on resumes that overflow with school-band bona fides. Rather, he’s in search of what he calls the X factor. “I’m looking for someone who has a lot to say,” he explains. “What I’m looking for in a piece of music is Am I really transported to a different place? Am I caught off guard because they took me in a different direction harmonically?”
He still needs to hear integrity in terms of pedagogy and technical command — Alfred is, after all, an institution in school-music publishing, with the highest standards — but for Balmages the artistry comes first. “I can work with composers to get their music to be more playable by a middle-school band — orchestration that will be more appropriate, where to cue and not to cue,” he says. “But I cannot teach artistry.”
As someone who makes his living guiding and fine-tuning music for a publishing house, Balmages certainly fulfills the functional roles of an “editor.” But that’s not a term he prefers. “I view myself more as a curator and a mentor,” he says. “It’s my job to curate a catalog, and I use the word ‘curate’ because I think of it like art.”
The list of composers who’ve excelled with his support is astounding, and includes thoughtfully adventurous artists like JaRod Hall, Adrian B. Sims, Katie O’Hara LaBrie, Randall Standridge, Soon Hee Newbold and Tyler S. Grant — who recently contributed a piece to Music & Arts’ Project Imagine initiative. That string orchestra work, In Your Wildest Dreams, is now available from MakeMusic Publications.
At the core of Balmages’ style of mentorship is his desire to let the composers be themselves. To push a composer into writing for school ensembles, he says, would only be a disservice — to both the composer and student musicians. His evolving team of composers is defined by a genuine love of writing for the educational market. In the end, it’s a balancing act. “I need to be able to walk that line between a composer staying true to who they want to be, and then finding something that will be accepted in band rooms or orchestra rooms,” he says.
What Makes a Great Score for Young Musicians?
After so many years of experience, Balmages can quickly sense the ingenuity (or lack thereof) in a band or orchestra piece for young musicians. Here, he describes some of what he’s looking for:
I feel like very often I see a melody that’s done once and then it works its way throughout the ensemble. But where is that melody going? I’ll also find a lack of harmonic development, and that can relate to harmonic rhythm, or to the pacing of the harmonic structure.
In addition to that sense of development, I’m looking at texture, I’m looking at orchestration. Let’s talk about a band piece: Is everything doubled all the time? To me, there’s a lack of textural interest there. A lot of times directors put their ambitious kids on oboe or bassoon. Why don’t we give them a chance to be heard? Instead of doubling the oboe all the time, why not cue the oboe?
Shifting to the string world, the viola is not violin 3; they are different instruments. And yet we see so many of these viola parts that are really conceived as violin 3 parts. One of the most beautiful things about a viola is the C string. Young musicians are perfectly capable of playing it, yet we almost never hear it. Should the part be doubled as a violin 3? Of course. But write the viola part first, then figure out the doubling later.
Writing for developing performers is no excuse for a lack of creativity. “To say, ‘I only have six notes, I can’t do anything with that’ — I don’t agree with that at all,” Balmages says. “The challenge becomes how you’re blending those sounds together.”
“It’s a lot harder, right?” he adds. “You have less crayons you’re coloring with. But if you gave Leonardo da Vinci two crayons, he’s going to do something amazing.” It’d certainly help, Balmages argues, if more college-level composition programs offered tutelage in writing for young musicians.
The Triumph of Music for Music’s Sake
Along with Love and Light, another of the most meaningful episodes in Balmages’ career was the premiere of Stages, a composition for wind ensemble. He wrote the work at the request of Kelsey Burch, a music educator and fellow James Madison University alum who died of cancer in 2021, just 35 years old. She’d heard Love and Light and, inspired by its message of hope, commissioned the work through the support of numerous donations in 2020, when her cancer was in remission.
Burch was able to see and hear her piece performed, and the circumstances that allowed that are stirring. “It was a series of events that are inexplicable,” Balmages says, “unless you think about some kind of higher power, regardless of your beliefs.”
To begin, Balmages had a commission suddenly drop off his docket, which almost never happens and created a hole in his schedule. And although he had other composition deadlines looming, he felt a strong sense of urgency and got right to work on Stages. At that point, Burch’s stage-IV colon cancer was officially still in remission. But by the time she was able to hear a mock-up of Stages in its entirety, her illness had returned in full force. As Balmages remembers it, she called him and said, “I want to thank you for getting this done. I’m just sad I won’t get to hear it live, because I just found out that I have three weeks left.”
“I just sat there in silence,” the composer recalls. “I mean, what do you say?”
Balmages decided he had an imperative new mission: Kelsey Burch would hear the world premiere of Stages, which was originally planned for the prestigious Midwest Clinic months down the road. Coincidentally, Balmages was set to conduct Love and Light at James Madison in three weeks. He called Dr. Stephen P. Bolstad, who was then the Director of Bands and Professor of Wind Conducting at James Madison, explained the situation and asked if he might switch gears to Stages. Bolstad quickly agreed, but soon they realized that three weeks might not be enough time for Burch to hang on. Would it be possible to premiere Stages in only two weeks?
Miraculously, the university’s concert hall, whose schedule is nonstop, was available, as were all the crucial personnel. Another unexpected boon: Post-pandemic, the university was equipped to livestream its performances. Burch, who was by then unable to travel, was able to witness the rehearsal and premiere in a hospital bed at home. “She texted me afterwards saying how much she loved it, and we were joking back and forth,” Balmages recalls. “It was the most beautiful thing. The next day she was unresponsive.” Five days later, she passed.
When asked what he thought it meant that she was able to hear her piece, Balmages’ answer arrives quickly. “It meant everything,” he says. “It was a reminder that this music thing is so much bigger than we sometimes realize. I think sometimes [in music education] we focus so much on, Oh, kids in music get better test scores; they’re better language learners; they’re less likely to drop out of school. Those are all great.
“But we lose sight of the fact that music literally changes people’s lives. It gives them closure. It makes it possible for them to get to the next day and survive. It gives them hope, makes them laugh and dares them to dream. It does all these things, and I try to hold on to all of that whether I’m composing, conducting, or working with other composers and a publishing company.”
