Features

Hearing the music

ANDY LALOS '00, band director at Cawley Middle School in Hooksett, N.H., wanted an original piece of music three minutes long for a school concert, "starting strangely and coming together at the end." He commissioned Tim Miles '01 to compose it.

"I started brainstorming what I could do with three minutes," says Miles. He decided to base it on a haiku, and wrote the haiku himself. Meanwhile, he was also composing a major work to be premiered in April by the UNH Wind Symphony and another piece for Nashua's Bishop Guertin High School, where he was band director for three years.

Andrew Boysen Jr. and Tim Miles '01

"I really liked teaching high school. It was fun," says Miles. "But I wanted to work with college-level music and musicians." So last year he returned to UNH to earn a master's degree in conducting, a first step toward a doctorate and, he hopes, a job with a college music department.

Miles, who started on clarinet in the fifth grade, switching to a trumpet in high school, was a music education major as an undergraduate at UNH when he took classes in orchestration, conducting and composition with Andrew Boysen Jr. and realized how much he enjoyed systematically analyzing a piece of music.

Boysen, an assistant professor who is Miles' graduate mentor, has a national reputation as a composer and conductor, with more than 30 published and recorded works, including many for elementary through high school bands, choirs and small ensembles. "Composing is not a requirement for good conducting," says Boysen, "but it certainly helps. If you've put a piece together, you understand better how others have done it."

Conducting, he says, demands "knowing what you want to be hearing at the same time that you are hearing what is being played, and instantly knowing how to reconcile the two." It also includes being able to inspire musicians to do it.

In their sessions together, Boysen and Miles review every aspect of a particular score, parsing the most subtle nuances of melody, harmony, pacing, phrasing and balance. Then Miles conducts the piece as if there were an orchestra in front of him. He and Boysen sometimes sing the score as he conducts. There are the hand gestures: the left hand signaling phrasing, loudness, transition, emotion, and the right keeping the time.

"Your face must be showing things as well," says Miles. "It all must be clear, convincing and inspiring if you want them to follow you." And when they do, he says, when everything comes together the way it should and the entire ensemble is feeling connected to the music and to each other, "it's an indescribable feeling."

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