No matter how young and fun the party crowd is, the newborn baby will get all the attention.
Friday’s (Jan. 12) Lansing Symphony Orchestra concert is a perfect example. In the group photo, two all-time greats are in the pink of youth, flashing million-dollar smiles. Mozart was in his mid-20s when he wrote his joyful Symphony No. 35, and Georges Bizet was only 17 when he wrote his one and only, equally joyful Symphony in C Major.
Nice try, boys, but Friday’s concert also features the world premiere of a brand-new trumpet concerto by Michigan State University associate professor of composition David Biedenbender, with LSO principal trumpet Neil Mueller as soloist.
Mueller is ecstatic to be the first human to play the probing, profound and revelatory concerto that takes the trumpet to its outer limits and beyond.
In his excitement, he stammered the word “I’m” at least five times, groping for an adjective juicy enough to describe his feelings.
“It’s a wonderful piece,” he said, finally giving up. “It covers a lot of aesthetic territory.”
About a month ago, Mueller wrote a heartfelt letter to the composer, confessing that he was getting “almost too attached” to it.
“I’m a little like a doctor who delivers a baby and says, ‘Cute baby, I think I’m going to keep it,’” Mueller said.
The concerto sprang from a backstage discussion more than a year ago between Mueller and LSO music director Timothy Muffitt, who likes to let the orchestra’s principal players step out in solo roles.
Mueller loves a Haydn trumpet concerto as much as the next guy, probably more, but he wanted “a little bigger mountain to scale.”
He was familiar with Biedenbender’s music, especially an absorbing and dramatic trombone concerto written for LSO principal trombonist Ava Ordman in 2018.
Biedenbender, in turn, was deeply impressed by Mueller’s clarion tone, virtuosity and thoughtful approach to music. Mueller’s first concert with the LSO as principal trumpet was in fall 2019, just before the year-and-a-half pandemic hiatus, although he appeared as a guest principal trumpet twice before that, after the retirement of his predecessor, Rich Illman.
Mueller and Biedenbender found they had a lot in common besides music.
“Neil is one of the most thoughtful, reflective, well-read humans I’ve met,” Biedenbender said.
Their friendship quickly progressed from nods in the hallway to long, late-night conversations around their backyard fire pits about music, metaphysics and how to juggle a musical career with a growing family. Mueller has three grown children; Biedenbender has two elementary-age children.
More to the point, they agreed that the trumpet has a huge — and largely unexplored — expressive range.
“It’s not all loud and declamatory or technical and fast,” Biedenbender said. “I tried to think about, ‘What is the soul of the trumpet? How do I come up with music that becomes a vessel for Neil?’”
The composer’s ears perked up when a former colleague at MSU, conductor Kevin Noe, used the phrase “river of time” in a conversation. The phrase brought to mind a passage from the “Meditations” of Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone. Existence flows past us like a river.”
Biedenbender was near the MSU Union when the horrific shooting erupted on Feb. 13, 2023.
“It rocked me,” he said. “I saw the hurt and trauma in the students, and I thought about the fragility of life and how lucky we are just to have a day.”
Around the same time, a mind-bending book by Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, “The Order of Time,” was rolling around in his head.
The concerto coalesced into a three-movement “there and back again” journey.
Along the way, Biedenbender emailed several snippets to Mueller for comment. Mueller loved the music but occasionally reminded the composer of more practical concerns.
“I’d say, ‘Maybe a breath mark here, because I’ve got to breathe,’” Mueller said with a laugh. “Little things like that.”
The first movement, “The Coming,” depicts the awakening of time itself, a moment of creation heralded by the trumpet at its most commanding. Long, lyrical lines drift through the second movement, “Flowing.”
Biedenbender called it a “meditation on becoming a part of time, being in the present moment.”
“I think about being a father, being present in the moment with my children,” he said.
The third movement, “Crossing,” warps into wild concepts Rovelli explores in his book. To mangle it all into a crude approximation, Rovelli teaches that time is a convenient tool, like up and down or north and south, that works well enough when you’re meeting your boss at Kewpee’s but evaporates into 56-dimensional tortellini when you look at the bigger picture.
“I imagine crossing time, bending time, moving backward and forward through it,” Biedenbender said.
Biedenbender is also mindful that the Wharton Center is right next door to MSU’s Facility for Rare Isotope Beams.
“The kinds of experiments Rovelli talks about, probing the universe and time and matter and stars, is happening a few hundred feet away from where the premiere will take place,” he said.
But it’s not a total head trip. Mueller loves the finale’s “joyful physicality.”
“Some trumpet concertos have a very intellectual, academic character to them,” he said. “This is not that.”
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