ITEA Journal Volume 49 Number 2 (Winter 2022)

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Composer's Corner
Michael Waddell

Anthony O'Toole

Editor's Note: In this issue, we introduce a recurring column entitled Composer's Corner. This column will feature interviews with composers and a brief analysis of a well-known composition.

Composer Anthony O'Toole

Anthony O'Toole (b. 1988) has quickly become a prolific composer in the tuba-euphonium world and beyond. In the past decade he has written dozens of works for tuba and euphonium including Concerto for Euphonium, Chronicle, Sonata for Euphonium, Scarborough Variations, Technodrone, and many more. In addition to his work in this community, he has quickly become a popular composer of wind band music with pieces such as Electrons Dancing and Fanfare to the Hammer being performed by High School and University bands across the country, such as Kansas State, University of North Texas, and many others.

Arguably his most notable work is War Machine. Written in 2012 for euphonium quartet, War Machine is a three-minute exhilarating journey showcasing the capabilities of the euphonium.

War Machine was born of unique circumstances, and its composition did not follow a traditional trajectory. In 2012, about a week before that summer's International Euphonium and Tuba Festival (IET) in Atlanta GA, I was tasked with helping choose a variety of music for euphonium quartets to play during the camp. I knew O'Toole from our days as students at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, so I sent him a message asking if he had anything we could use, specifically for a faculty/staff quartet who had named themselves "War Machine." There was no immediate response, and we moved on.

About 4 or 5 hours later, I did get a message. O'Toole had not had a composition which fit our needs when I reached out, but within those few hours he had composed War Machine. We were shocked and thrilled to find that he had composed this exciting euphonium quartet showpiece in less than half a day. We were thankful for the opportunity to play such a fun new piece, and it was premiered the next week by myself, Adam Frey, Paul Dickinson, and Jason Casanova. War Machine was published shortly thereafter and has enjoyed meteoric success in the tuba-euphonium community since, even having been performed by the joint armed-forces euphonium ensemble.

The story behind the composition of this piece demonstrates a peek into how O'Toole works as a composer, and how he views his life as a musician. When presented with a project that interests him, he is always keen to jump on the opportunity.

In our interview on starting the piece, and specifically on starting War Machine, O'Toole said:

When they asked me if I had a piece and I go, I had not written one, but I could. All I need is really one little nudge and that is all I'll need, and I'll just go [Write] because I do like the utility faceted part of music. It's like - there's a need and how do I fill that? How do I make something possible? Otherwise, you would've just had to play something else, but nothing's more exciting than premiering a half decent work and having your name on it.

O'Toole often thinks of writing music in the context of solving a problem. Regarding the "ask" to write War Machine, he said:

They [The Low Brass Community] are constantly asking me to write new pieces and people are like "aren't you tired or writing low brass pieces?" and I go "No!" because every piece has a new problem to solve, right? Like, I'm not writing the same piece for everybody. There's some overlap. Like there's a, a voice in my music, or at least I like to think that I have a recognizable voice in my music and way how I put things together. So that voice is recognizable, but it's also like there was a new problem in that, we need a piece, it was a dire problem, and it wasn't even really a problem. Like you never really, I don't think you really formally asked me to do it.

He was right, we never formally asked him to do it. We asked about music he had already written, and he took that as a nudge and as an opportunity to create something new, and to solve a new problem. He also puts a lot of thought into how to write a piece of music based on the aforementioned "problem" to solve. On War Machine, he described the specific problem he was tasked with trying to solve, and how he approached the composition itself.

I said, okay, "War Machine: euphonium quartet, nineties. … I was just like, let's make some macho masculine music and just make it flashy. Because I knew the four of you guys who were going to play it. And I was just like, yeah, I can, I can go to the wall here with this. I put high C's and put it in 5/4, and all triplets and stuff like that.

Today, O'Toole finds himself living life as a full-time composer in the Los Angeles area. He spends his days working on a variety of projects and commissions ranging from full wind band music, flex band arrangements, chamber works, solo works, and even some ghost writing. It is rare to find a composer of his generation that is finding enough success to be able to achieve this without any formal "day job" or college teaching position. Simply put, he is a composer, and he can dedicate himself entirely to his craft.

With all this success, one might think that he comes from a family ripe with musical knowledge and excitement. You might be surprised to find out that this is not the case. From South Philadelphia born and raised, at the piano is where he spent most of his young days. The third of seven children, Anthony comes from a family that by his own description had little to no musical background.

As a child he sang in boys' choir at church. Outside of church, the O'Toole family had no significant relationship with music, certainly no more than any other average family in Philly. As a young boy, he had a "little brush with music" at the age of four or five. When his older brother and sister were attending piano lessons, and 4-year-old Anthony was dragged along by his mom and sat in the waiting room of the piano teacher's house. In that waiting room were magazines, books, and pamphlets on how to read music and about basic music knowledge. He browsed these magazines and started teaching himself how to read music while waiting on his siblings. The piano teacher noticed his interest and gave him a pad of manuscript paper with some basic things written out, a pad that he still has to this day.

After a year and a half of begging his mom to also get lessons from this teacher, she buckled and gave into little Anthony's requests. His siblings did not share his passion for piano lessons, and they soon quit. O'Toole's mother removed him from lessons at the same time, but by then the seed had been planted. At the young age of 5, he was just learning how to read English, and began to learn to read music at the exact same time. Being so young, and at such a prime stage in the development of the brain, music was engrained as a key piece to his young developing mind.

O'Toole's piano lessons may have ended, but his musical growth and learning did not. In a closet, his family had an electric keyboard that also happened to have an 'instruction manual' full of different chords and how to play them on the keys. O'Toole found himself spending hours tinkering with the keyboard and finding ways to make sounds that he liked. He states about the impact that piano had on his young life:

We didn't have any actual piano, but that, that little keyboard that my dad got at radio shack was sitting there in the closet. And I would take it out all the time and start playing with it. I would take it down to the basement where nobody would, like, get mad that I was playing it. And I would just start tinkering around and playing along to songs that I knew and just developing my ear so early on, which, I mean, most musicians don't start aural training or ear training until college …

Though O'Toole would later pursue formal music education, it was in these early years that he taught himself music fundamentals, to read music, and trained and developed his ear. He considers himself a primarily "self-taught" composer as a result of the years of learning he did out of his own interest. Sitting in his basement, he started to notice patterns, ways to put notes together, and to play chords. He began to write them down, but not in the academically "right" way. He credits the "wrong" methods of his childhood with forming part of his compositional voice today.

There I was, magically playing chords. … and that sort of affects my music to this day. Like I think every, every unique composer comes from a place of doing something a little bit wrong. And then you notice that, that little imperfection or that thing they do wrong. And then that becomes more of their voice. You know, like you, you listen to Poulenc or something and Debussy or whatever, and even like early Schoenberg, when he is imitating like late romantic music, like Strauss and stuff like that. And he has got his own take on it. That is a little bit wrong.

Once Anthony was in school, he of course had general music classes. One day he was plunking around on a keyboard when his music teacher, shocked, realized he was playing things by ear. She suggested he join band, and then he did. He started out on percussion, and throughout the rest of his school age years, became much more serious with music.

His family moved to the suburbs, and he was lucky to be a part of a great high school program, with a director who encouraged his compositional skills. While he studied percussion seriously, and later learned to play many other instruments, none of these were what really interested him. It was the function of the music, how it worked, and the problems that he could solve with it that he really wanted to pursue. O'Toole talks about what it is that really interests him musically:

And I was like, okay, I'll do band. And I just started with percussion. Because that's the instrument that's still the most interesting to me. But I got bored of it after a while. There's plenty to get into, if you're like a real percussionist, like a real gear head, like you love talking about drumheads and shells and sticks and stuff like that. But that doesn't really get my brain going. So, it's fun to know that stuff. And I know too much about drums and even the bass trombone and tuba and all the other instruments. I played clarinet and Viola and whatever saxophone, but the technical logistical stuff of music is not the most interesting thing to me. It's more about like, what are we actually saying with the music?

It's what he wants to say with his music, those problems he wants to solve, that really drove him out of high school and into a formal path of studying music and starting his vast output of scores. In a day and age so driven by money, competition, and "getting the big job," it is refreshing to see an artist driven primarily by his work and the desire to produce new and meaningful material.

Anthony O'Toole is a musician with incredible drive, passion, and integrity for the music he writes. He is also a bit of an outlier in the sense that he began studying music and composition, even if he did not know he was at the time, at a very young age. Despite his young age, his dedication to music has been life-long and his output is vast and impactful. I expect we will see many more great compositions, including works for the tuba and euphonium, for years to come.

You can find more about Anthony O'Toole's music on his website at anthonyotoolemusic.weebly.com.

1. O'Toole, Anthony. Interview with Michael Waddell. Personal Interview. Remote, October 10^th, 2020.

Analysis of Anthony O'Toole's War Machine for Euphonium Quartet

Anthony O'Toole's War Machine, written in 2012, has quickly become a staple of the growing euphonium ensemble repertoire. Scored for 4 euphoniums, it is a short tour-de-force showcasing technical prowess and lyricism, while being extremely accessible and enjoyable for many audiences to experience. From a form standpoint the work is constructed with relative simplicity, with a focus on a few repeated ostinatos and heroic melodic material. Harmonically the work explores a variety of different modes that take the listener on a hero's journey in this War Machine. This combined with constantly shifting meter, effective use of articulation variety, and intense dynamics make the work quite effective.

From a form standpoint this piece can be viewed as being constructed almost in modules that are linked together through rhythmic and melodic material. Labeling each section gives us a form of "A-B-C-D-E-AB." These sections or modules are finally all brought together in a compelling synthesis of ideas toward the end of the work. See Figure 1.

Figure 1

The "A" section, or introduction, spans from measure 1 through beat four of measure 4. The piece begins with a rhythmic motif almost designed to give the listener an unclear sense of meter. This pattern is stated with emphatic force in all parts and is referenced at several moments throughout the piece. Harmonically, the introduction lines up with its unclear sense of meter by giving the listener an unclear sense of tonality. All the notes presented in the introduction represent an octatonic scale. See figure 2.

Figure 2

Following this introduction, a 2-beat transition occurs at the end of measure 4, which leads to the "B" section. Here O'Toole introduces a rhythmic ostinato that will remain prominent for much of the piece. See Figure 3.

Figure 3

O'Toole initially presents this idea in all 4 parts, but breaks it up throughout the piece, interjecting it often in 2 or 3 parts. At measure 9, the listener is introduced to the first real theme of the piece in euphonium 3, marked "heroically." This theme leads all the way into the next transition at bar 17, and it gives the piece a very triumphant character, as if to signify this "War Machine" entering battle. For the duration of the theme, it is surrounded by the galloping ostinato in all other parts. See figure 4.

Figure 4

Harmonically, this passage is effectively a long variation on a tonic chord in c minor. The ostinato presented in measure 5 is an exploration through c aeolian. This ties into the first theme of the piece that enters in measure 9 which is based on a c hypo-aeolian mode, exploring the higher tessitura of the passage.

After some transitional material that oscillates between Eb Mixolydian and Ionian modes from measures 17-21, the listener is presented new material at the "C" section of the piece from measures 21-26. In this section, the sense of meter is lost as the music employs 7/8, 2/4, and 5/4 time signatures all in the span of 6 measures, with meter alterations in every bar. Perhaps the uncertainty and intensity of the war machine is being evoked here. O'Toole uses harmonic planning throughout this section, as all parts generally move in parallel motion. Euphonium 4 serves as an outlier, joining and breaking apart from the rest of the voices every other bar. This adds to the disjointed nature of this section that helps lead into the next section and the presentation of the second theme beginning in measure 27. See Figure 5.

Figure 5

By measure 27, the beginning of section "D", the key area returns to c aeolian and the bottom three parts have a new ostinato that carries into measure 33. This patten is similar to the material presented in the "B" section of the piece, as it returns to the tonic and continues to experiment with c aeolian. The theme here is similar to the one from measure 27 in c hypo-aeolian, featuring c minor triads, and a closely related register. The theme is extended through a transitional section from measures 33 to 44 where O'Toole uses eighth note triplets against lyrical thematic ideas to drive into Section "E," the most distinct section of the work.

For the duration of the "E" Section in measures 45 to 65, euphoniums 3 and 4 work together in quintal harmony. The euphonium 1 part reintroduces the idea of rhythmic ostinato from the pattern first presented at the introduction of the piece, evoking a bit of foreshadowing before a truer return in the work's final moments. After a 4-bar statement of these ideas, on beat three of measure 49 euphonium 2 enters with a new melody in C mixolydian. See Figure 6.

Figure 6

This new melody stands out in several ways from the previous material. All the previous thematic material clearly started on beat one and could clearly be seen in four phrases, while this new melody has no clear internal phrase endings and is really one 16 measure melodic arc. The more lyrical quality of this melody also makes it stand out as the emotional core of the work, as previous themes have been more heroic and aggressive in nature. Here the theme is composed predominantly of half notes or longer, and it includes the highest note in the piece so far in measure 58. See figure 7.

Figure 7

The quintal harmony present here in the piece creates an ethereal atmosphere that one could conceptualize as the "calm before the storm" moment of a war, which is precisely what comes next in the final section of the piece.

The rest of the work, from measures 65 to the end, is a synthesis of all of the ideas previously presented, and it could be considered a pseudo-AB' section with a 4-bar coda at the very end. This is not mere repetition, as O'Toole instead chooses to synthesize many of the previous ideas throughout the four parts, including snippets of previous motifs, ostinatos, and slight variations on previous themes. In the final section, the music returns to the idea of uncertainty of meter as the composer again shifts between 4/4 and 5/4 through to the end of the piece. The original ostinato returns to accentuate this uncertainty of meter, as if the "war machine" is in the heat of battle. The piece ends with a 3-bar rhythmic unison statement reminiscent of the introduction, however this time much more harmonically simple, written in open fifths until the last motif, where O'Toole inserts a 9^th in the euphonium 3 part, to bring just a bit of extra harmonic integrity to the last note. See figure 8.

Figure 8

War Machine has quickly solidified itself as an important part of the euphonium repertoire, due in large part to how the music is structured, resulting in satisfying music for both performers and audiences alike. Its repetition of ideas is thoughtfully composed in intelligently scored ways. All of this is jam-packed into a work that is less than 3 minutes in length, creating something compelling and easy for an audience to enjoy.

1. O'Toole, Anthony. "War Machine." Euphonium.com Publications, 2012

Analysis of Anthony O'Toole's War Machine for Euphonium Quartet

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