Completing the cycle of creation

MOSES LAKE — Composer Darryl Johnson II wanted to actually hear his music played.

“You can write music, but if no one plays it, there’s no point,” he said.

So, Johnson tours middle schools and high schools across the country, teaching students how to play his compositions and, in the process, showing them what a composer goes through, and how music is created.

He also gets to hear his music played.

“So actually seeing the end product is the fulfillment of all that time done in a room, just me and my music,” Johnson said. “It completes the cycle of creation.”

Johnson was in Moses Lake recently to help direct the Moses Lake High School’s Cadet Band, Concert Band and Wind Ensemble in several of his compositions — as well as put on the bands’ regular winter show.

“It was really cool working with a composer,” said Alexa Bond, a senior in the Wind Ensemble who plays French horn. “You always think about what composers are going through in their heads when they’re making a piece.”

It was an interesting experience, Bond said, to talk to the composer of one of the pieces they were playing, to find out what motived him, and why he made some of the choices he did.

“I really enjoyed it,” she said. “You can’t lose anything working with a composer.”

The Cadet Band played a Johnson piece entitled “Aluminum Sharks,” a name the composer said was taken from two totally unrelated words for a piece that “was a little bit jazzy, but then it’s something else.” The Concert Band played “Windsor Castle,” a piece Johnson said attempted to describe in sound the magisterial things that happen in a castle. And the Wind Ensemble played “Waltz and Chaconne,” which Johnson said was the first piece he ever composed, and a difficult one at that.

Johnson, who spent much of Dec. 7 rehearsing the band students, said he was impressed by the MLHS music program and the commitment of a community this size to support it.

“I get to visit schools all across the country, and what stuck out to me about this school, this is a smaller population area, and they are able to have a massive program, a very skilled program,” he said.

“The students here have such great hearts,” Johnson added. “There were there mind, body and soul. I really enjoyed working with them.”

While his fall semester tour is now over, Johnson said after the first of the year he will return to the Pacific Northwest with visits to schools in Alaska, British Columbia, Alberta and elsewhere in Washington. He’s also working on taking his music to schools in Australia and New Zealand.

“There’s nothing like seeing the kids engage with music like that, and hearing it. It’s the synergy of it all,” he said. “It’s great.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.