Composer Mark Buller creates a musical repast.
Music feeds the soul, much like a comforting home-cooked meal, and as social distancing continues, one local artist has built quite the menu for friends and colleagues, developing delectable new compositions almost daily.
Shortly before the stay-at-home order was implemented, composer/pianist Mark Buller announced his commitment to writing a set of works titled “Quarantine Miniatures” and distributing them free of charge in celebration of the music community’s solidarity and resilience. His guidelines, which he outlined on Facebook, were simple: comment to request a piece, and once the score is received, post a recording of it being performed, tagging his page and #QuarantineMiniatures.
Houston boasts a thriving arts scene full of passionate creatives, and with most of them furloughed due to the coronavirus, this innovative venture — inspired by a similar project titled “Miniatures for One” by Florida-based composer Matthew Kennedy — ticked all the right boxes to keep musicians connected and engaged.
So, he joined the quarantine-friendly endeavor and made it his own. As of this interview, he had prepared and delivered 43 pieces of music, ranging from 20 seconds to approximately four minutes. While a few of the works are scored for a small ensemble, one being a Mother’s Day song written for the children’s choir at Morrison Academy Kaohsiung in Taiwan, the majority of the collection consists of solos or duets such as “Koan” for clarinetist Alexandra Doyle, “Allemande” for guitarist Marc Rosenberg and “Psalm of Refuge” for soprano Grace Roman and her husband, organist Jim Roman.
Despite the ways in which these miniatures differ from his typical pre-pandemic commissions, which include hourlong operas, extended choral pieces and orchestral works for organizations like the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Grand Opera and ROCO, Buller’s narrative approach remains the same. As it turns out, a barren pantry doesn’t have to deprive one from enjoying a quality meal, he explained.
“When you are writing a piece for orchestra, you have the full kitchen, which can be great in that you can come up with complicated nuanced colors, but you also run the risk of trying too many ingredients, so in a sense, paring it down for single instruments like this can be really rewarding as a composer,” said Buller, who also serves as director of education and community engagement at AFA, a nonprofit provider of music education programs.
Not all of his compositions involve instrumental accompaniment, however. He has created a cappella arrangements as well, such as a piece for Boston-based soprano Rebecca Worthington featuring the German text of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, a setting of original text by local soprano Anna Diemer, and a work for speaking percussionist Paul Kasperitis with text by Suzie Summers, who wrote the beautiful, heartrending poem amid her battle with stage 4 cancer. Titled “Not the End Yet,” the latter, Buller explained, is particularly meaningful to him and his wife, Esther Wagner Buller, a two-time cancer survivor.
“That’s kind of a microcosm of this whole experience for me in that the reason behind this hasn’t been any sort of career furtherance or networking,” he said. “The reason I started doing this has been to celebrate community, to celebrate the incredible people who are all stuck at home with little or nothing to do but who still have that strong creative impulse.”
There are still blank pages in his recipe book, but they will be filled soon enough, as he completes the remaining 37 requests on his list, day by day.
“Good music can live virtually,” Buller said. “We might not have the big stages, and we might not have contracts right now, but we can still make something that’s beautiful, something that moves people and something that brings people together. We can do a lot of really great things from our own homes.”