When imagining a job in the food industry, certain scenarios always come to our mind: stories of horrendous, angry customers; miscommunications gone terribly wrong; confusing language barriers; and bizarre, questionable requests. In my year of working in the food industry, between my bachelor's and master's degrees, I experienced all of these, some leaving lasting impressions and others creating endless hours of laughter. Through it all, I saw the good, the bad, and the ugly of a business. Nothing will ever terrify me more than being in a restaurant exploding with a mob of new sorority girls twenty minutes before closing time. January 6, 2018 will not be forgotten. 

        Despite the worst of moments, I found that I enjoyed my job and loved the people I got to work with. It was my first time having coworkers; the closest'd thing I'd experience was fellow musicians in music ensembles. Connecting on a social level at work with people outside of music and academia was rewarding and refreshing. More than ever, I felt encouraged to just be myself and talk to all the different kinds of people around me. (A little sentimental mushyness, but true.) If anything, the job actually made me more social. Even simply communicating with customers, "daily strangers," helped get me outside of my social comfort zone. Most satisfying though was that when I shared something about my music, whether it was with an employee or customer, it was a personal specialty, and not just some part of my music-career-job-kinda-thing. I got to share a part of my world with others who  don't engage with classical music as frequently as I do. 

My time in the food industry came with a surprising amount of lessons applicable to life:

1.) Be proactive - Before the lunch or dinner rush, you better have the restaurant stocked, locked, and loaded for action. Be prepared.
2.) Keep a positive attitude - You can't escape having a bad day now and then. Center yourself, stay calm, keep going, and see the long-term silver lining.
3.) Practice your best courteousness - Just because the previous customer was rude, doesn't mean the next customer deserves attitude. Every "daily stranger" needs respect. (Well, most... Do your best.)  
4.) See a need fill a need - If you see someone needing help, you can be the help! Sometimes it's only holding the door open for an elderly customer.
5.) Speak slowly and clearly - Everyone has different hearing and speech abilities. Effective, respectful communication makes a lasting connection
6.) Develop a sense of compassion and empathy - expand your ability to care about others. It will make you more responsive and more likely to go the extra inch for someone. Your tone best communicates a genuine, caring response. Kindness is a power anyone can possess.

       When combined, all of these lessons contribute to our personal growth in an increasingly difficult world. As a musician, composer, human in the 21st century, I need these skills to foster a career dependent upon networking as my authentic, musical self.

​Happy future purchases foodies.

​        Ever since I was a child, my greatest impulse has been to create. First, it was designing elaborate toy train layouts complete with tunnels, stations, and bridges. This lasted until the age of seven when I developed a healthy obsession with Legos, building increasingly more complex layouts and sculptures.  Briefly, there was a stint of stop motion animation, but I settled on composing by age 13.
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When I’m not composing, this impulse to create has appeared as cream and sugar sculptures at Perkins Restaurant and Bakery. This catalog of works captures the creations of 2015 and 2016. 

        My intention in writing Loneliness and Imaginations was to create a piece unlike anything I had written to date. From the outset, I knew it needed to be for guitar and chamber orchestra, in several movements, and more than twenty minutes in duration: new instruments, new genre, and new form. Naturally, treading through unfamiliar territory presented many challenges to be addressed. How would I balance the soloist and ensemble? How would I keep the music engaging for so long? How would I create a cohesive piece with so many movements?

        The most pressing dilemma for me was to create strikingly dissimilar movements that belonged together. Part of the solution was to find what I felt was the right emotional trajectory for the work, the balance of emotive ups and downs that could act like a narrative. The order and character of the movements was always up in the air, constantly being remapped as I composed. It was first in 15 movements, then 6, 13, 5, 10, and only finalized in 8 at the last minute. For months I planned on an exciting, bombastic ending, but it ultimately didn’t fit the piece and was dropped. 

        Contrast between the movements was designed by using the guitar and chamber orchestra in a variety of ways. For the guitar, each movement focuses on a different technique of playing. (e.g. scales, glissandi, chords, and polyphony). Similarly the chamber orchestra shifts between various roles: an ambient environment of sound around the soloist (II. Filigree and VII. Constellation), a rhythmic accompaniment sharing musical material (IV. Dance and VIII. Loss), a shifting reverberation of the guitar’s sound (V. Proclamation and VI. Interlude), or as a smaller ensemble with soloists (III. Song). The chamber orchestra is absent in the first movement, Meditation.

        What ultimately binds the movements together is not shared motifs or melodies, but a trilingual harmonic scheme. Movements rotate through three harmonic languages: noise, atonality, and free tonality. The noise based harmony relies on extreme registers where pitch becomes unrecognizable, and instrumental techniques like blowing unpitched air or bowing various parts of an instrument. In the atonal and tonal languages, pitch cells weave together to connect vertical harmony shared by the movements. The two languages simply differ in how they progress horizontally.
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        My most sincere thanks and gratitude goes to guitarist Eli Schille-Hudson who premiered this piece and collaborated with me over several months and hundreds of sketches.

Listen to Loneliness and Imaginations​ here.

One of my favorite underrated symphonies from the romantic era.

      ​One of the most rewarding experiences I had at the Jacobs School of Music was performing in the New Music Ensemble (aka NME) my senior year. NME could be described as a micro-orchestra, a sinfonietta, where there is only one of each instrument, except for two violins and sometimes two percussionists. (You could say I was the first, last, best, and worst horn player.) Many new pieces are composed especially for this type of ensemble, so NME specializes in performing the music of living composers including acclaimed, international artists and Jacobs faculty, alumni, and students. A very special highlight of NME this year was performing with soloist, flute goddess, and real-life wonder woman Clair Chase.

       NME performed a wide variety of exciting music by many of today’s leading composers including Nina C. Young, Dai Fujikura, Sean Shepherd, and Tansey Davies. Their compositions were full of musical challenges to be faced: Super-fast runs, saturations of high notes, quick leaps, tricky rhythms, and ensemble balancing. I had no chance of survival if I didn’t learn to beef up my high range playing. (Which, luckily, did happen.) NME definitely made me a better, more confident hornist.

      When composers visited NME for dress rehearsals and concerts, it meant so much to hear their satisfaction and complements for us. We were rising up to the challenges in their pieces and bringing their work to life. Performing for composers, friends, and colleagues in NME made me feel like a legitimate musician. I was honored to be a part of the amazing ensemble I had already been listening to for three years at Jacobs.

      As a composer, NME was an invaluable source of inspiration and knowledge. Instead of learning pieces through a score with a recording, I learned scores from the inside out, from sound to notation. I learned music by being part of it, not by studying it at a distance.  Going in, every rehearsal felt like a new lesson in orchestration and timbre: how to combine instruments in new ways, how to uses extended techniques, how to score rapid, flickering passages, how to write good, engaging percussion parts, and how to weave intricate patterns among an ensemble.
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      What made NME most meaningful for me was the way it blended my passions, horn playing and composing. Playing contemporary repertoire brought my thoughts on composition into my horn playing and vice versa. Playing in a new music ensemble is an indispensable tool for any growing composer.

Dear Jason Lewis,

        My name is Chris Neiner, and I am a constituent of the second congressional district of Minnesota. My permanent residence is in central Burnsville, but I am temporally living in Bloomington, Indiana to obtain a Bachelor of Music (BM) in composition from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. I am writing to you because of a concern regarding our federal government’s interest in eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts. I strongly believe this action would disrupt the artistic legacy of our state.

        Growing up, I was very fortunate to live a state blessed with many artistic organizations, several of which receive funding through grants from the National Endowment for Arts. I had compositions of mine performed by the Minnesota Sinfonia and the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra, performed in chamber music groups coached by musicians of the St. Paul Orchestra, studied composition for free with Minnesota-composer Edie Hill through the Schubert Club composition mentorship program, heard the Minnesota Orchestra perform in their Inside the Classics series and Future Classics concert where they performed new music by up-and-coming young composers. Even with music aside, many students and I had school field trips to the Guthrie Theater for literature classes in high school. I could not be where I am today without the art opportunities and education available in our state. Today, these organizations and their programs continue to contribute to the educations of young Minnesota citizens and enrich the greater Minnesota community.

        Since 1998, over one thousand grants from the National Endowment for the Arts have been provided for art organizations in Minnesota. Twenty of these grants were for our congressional district. Beyond the organizations I have mentioned, grant recipients include, but are not limited to, Bloomington Theatre and Art Center, Carleton College, Northfield Arts Guild, Rural America Arts Partnership, Anderson Center and Sheldon Theater in Red Wing, Rochester Symphony Orchestra and Chorale, Rochester Art Center, St. Cloud Civic Orchestra, Chamber Music Society of St. Cloud, Mankato Symphony Orchestra, Bemidji Symphony, Children's Theater Company and School, Riverland Community College, St. Catherine University, Regents of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, Minneapolis Pops Orchestra Association, Minnesota Chorale, Minnesota Opera, Minnesota Orchestra, Minnesota Public Radio, and the American Composers Forum.

        These grants provided by the National Endowment for the Arts have supported a variety of programs: a concert series featuring international performers, workshops brining elementary students to artistic professionals, productions of new plays by local artists, an educational music series of new compositions by significant American composers for middle school and high school bands, visiting guest lectures series, music festivals brining talented faculty to students, outreach activities for senior citizens and people with disabilities, the creation and distribution of historical, educational DVD materials, and financial support to preserve jobs endangered by declines in philanthropic funding in economic crisis, and more. You can find more information about grant recipients at the National Endowment for the arts website: https://www.arts.gov/grants/recent-grants

Minnesota has an artistic legacy, one of the best in the nation.
Please tell Washington to keep it that way.

        Arts programs and organizations in society have shown to increase civic participation and community engagement (https://www.pps.org/reference/artsprojects/), and cutting funding for the arts goes against the goal of uniting America in this heated time. The National Endowment for the Arts poses almost no financial burden for the United States government. The total appropriation for the endowment was $147,949,000 in 2016. Comparatively, 0.0002% of the USA military budget (approximately $600,000,000,000).
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Very respectfully,
Chris Neiner

I hear of composers being criticized for not being “new” enough, but what does that actually mean?
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      A piece of new music, as I am concerned, is a composition composed no more than fifty years ago that has not developed a documented history/tradition or performance practice analogous to pieces of the Western Musical Canon (Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Bartok, etc.)  By that standard, any piece composed since 1966 is, to me, automatically new music.

       So what is this “new” enough critique?

       I don’t think it pertains so closely to music, but to sound. There is an expectation that newly composed pieces should incorporate new sounds, or sounds that are not exactly new, but have been neglected over time and gradually gained prominence into contemporary composers’ sonic vocabularies (i.e. sul ponticello, flutter tongue, inside-piano techniques, extreme instrumental registers, minor ninths, tone cluster, etc.) It seems dangerous to make new sound a mandatory requirement for music composed today. Making music pass a checklist for new sound would cause damage to artistic freedom, make new music less diverse, and encourage style favoritism.  It might even make listening to new music boring; if each new piece must have prerequisite sounds for validity, we might have pieces that sound more and more alike.
       Now are these sounds alone a problem? No! I love these sounds! They’re just as unique as any other sound that Brahms or Bach could have used. Each sound has its own identity. If past composers were required to feature enough new sounds (new for their time) in compositions, much of Mozart and Brahms could have been discarded (save their taste for dissonances.) An entire tradition of sound would be lost.
       I think a composer should be more at fault than their sounds. With the unlimited possibilities of music, an original voice can be developed without requiring persistent new sound. I’d suggest criticizing a composer’s handling of material and not the material itself. Still, don’t think it’s wrong to encourage young composers to experiment with new sound. It is s a part of being well rounded in this century, to be knowledgeable of the diversity of sounds ready for you.  

       Above all, sound has no motivation but to express vibrations.
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Leave sound alone!
 - Chris Crocker/Morton Feldman

It’s inevitable that a composer’s music is going to be judged by many people. But when composers discusses whose opinion really matters, the conversation gets messy quickly. Should we care about the opinions of our colleagues? Should we care what are audiences think? What about the performers? Does any opinion beyond the composer’s deserve attention?

Ultimately, the answer is murky as the question: it depends. It’s up to composers to prioritize whose ears they care about, and much of that comes from one’s own values and personal experiences.

As someone who has studied both horn performance and composition, I find that I rank the importance of judgement, from highest to lowest:

Myself
Performers
Composers
Audience members

If I’m not satisfied by my music, how do I expect anyone else to be? 
If performers have to practice, rehearse, and present my music, shouldn't I consider their input meaningful?
When my composer colleagues face similar challenges in writing high-quality, shouldn't I trust them?
If an audience member takes the time to come to a performance of one of my pieces, shouldn't I inspire to make a piece worth his or her time?
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​By Sister Corita Kent and John Cage

Rule 1: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.
Rule 2: General duties as a student - pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
Rule 3: General duties as a teacher - pull everything out of your students.
Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.
Rule 5: Be Self Disciplined - this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Rule 6: Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch onto things.
Rule 8: Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.
Rule 10: “We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X qualities.” (John Cage)

Helpful Hints:
Always Be Around.
Come or go to everything.
Always go to classes.
Read everything you can get your hands on.
Look at movies carefully and often.
Save everything - it may come in handy later.