Overnight prodigy

PALMER — Last March, the Mat-Su Concert Band performed the piece they had commissioned from National Young Composers Challenge champion and Palmer native Sterling Maffe, but they weren’t able to do that night — record it.

That box will be checked Saturday night at the Glenn Massay Theater when the Concert Band kicks off its season with its show ‘Strike up the Band’, which will include a number of concert band standards, as well as Maffe’s 12-minute ode to his home state ““Alaska: Crest of the Hinterland”, fittingly on the weekend leading up to the state’s sesquicentennial next Wednesday.

https://soundcloud.com/sterling-maffe/alaska

“It’s a great piece. It is very cinematic and that is what his principal type of composing is based at,” said Gleo Huyck, director of the concert band the last 10 years. “It has three different parts and each one has a theme.”

Maffe, now a junior at Biola University in Southern California, was able to find a flight in the nick of time, arriving in the Valley on Thursday, just in time for Saturday’s show.

“The first part is an homage to the Aurora Borealis and the magic texture that the Northern Lights bring to the sky… I wanted to evoke the mystery and overall beauty of that phenomenon,” Maffe said from campus, hours before catching his impromptu flight home. “The second theme is about the pioneer expedition to the Last Frontier — very heroic, almost cowboy-like and it describes the excitement… The third theme is to illustrate the beauty of the state, so there’s large, sweeping melodies and big orchestration that hopefully will move the audience to reflect on their home state and just how beautiful it is and really how lucky the people are to be there.”

If the tone of ‘Hinterland’ comes off very movie-like that’s because Maffe is unabashedly a cinematic composer, having written music for more than a dozen films, advertisements and short videos.

“I write it to be cinematic mainly because that’s what I’m most comfortable with, but also because it’s the most relatable style of classical music — the most accessible, certainly,” Maffe said. “It’s the most effective at communicating emotion.”

Maffe said it’s movie music’s ability to tell a story directly that connected with him most precisely.

“A lot of classical music is more about pickling the intellect than moving the audience. I think the moving the audience in a personal way is more effective than making them think hard about something,” said Maffe, who recently completed an internship with iconic movie music composer Hans Zimmer. “The great part about music is that it tells a story, it transports you someplace and if you can stimulate some high intellectual thought, that’s an added bonus — that’s great, that’s what the classical masters do. They have their music that’s mathematically perfect, very complex, but if a lay person can sit back and be emotionally moved by music and let it tell them a story… that’s why I like the more cinematic story.”

Maffe’s first piece was performed in 2011 by Colony High School music teacher Jamin Burton’s band. Maffe was just 14 when he wrote that first piece, but contrary to what one might assume, he was no child prodigy leading up to that effort.

He’d taken a few years of piano lessons, but never really taken to an instrument despite his father being a jazz trumpeter and his mother, who plays woodwinds in the Mat-Su Concert Band still. Then one day he was staring at his iPod becoming increasingly frustrated by the apparent lack of songs that start with the letter ‘x’. He figured the only way to change that was to write just such a song.

“So I spent two weeks slaving over a 2-minute piece,” he explained of that first piece, orchestral in style, no less. “It was influenced by a lot of music I liked. I always loved film music, the sound colors, the orchestration, the melodic techniques they use.”

Maffe was around 14 years old at the time he was struck by the epiphany.

“I like to think God sort of had a water faucet or tap kind of switched on,” he said. “Ever since then, it’s been pretty constant — it’s strange. I wasn’t like a child prodigy at 4. It was sort of an overnight gifting, if you will.”

Even to this day, as a composition major at Biola, Maffe hasn’t picked up an instrument, really. He suspects his training to be a graphic artist while at Mat-Su Career Tech High School might have something to do with his unusual musical journey.

“I thought I was going to be in the tech world,” Maffe said. “I thought I was going to be stuck behind a computer alone all day. In the end, that was sort of true, it’s just musical design as opposed to visual design.”

So far, the Mat-Su Concert Band is the only to have performed Maffe’s Alaska-inspired piece. But, he’ll head back to school after this weekend with a recording on its way, hopefully ahead of ‘Hinterland’ next day on stage, performed at Biola.

“I’m putting on a symphonic wind concert next year, and that’s where the Alaska piece is going to be performed,” Maffe said. “In addition I’ve got my foot in three or four different films — some short, some feature-length. I’m still working on sharpening my skills in that area. Film music is really where my career aspirations lie.”

Meanwhile, back in the Mat-Su, the concert band, entering its 33rd year, is continuing to blaze trails as probably the best such band in Alaska, and according to Huyck, among the best in all the northwest at its weight.

Saturday night’s playlist includes ‘October’ by Eric Whitacre, "Light Cavalry" by Franz von Suppe, and several Sousa marches. Tickets are $15 general admission and $7 for students. Tickets may be purchased at the Glenn Massay Theater or online atmatsuconcertband.org.

“People are going to be treated to some really great concert band music,” Huyuck said. “This band has come a long ways in the last few years. We’ve got a few professionals who’ve played in military bands, four members of the 9th Army Band play with us… We’ve got people from professionals to people who’ve picked up an instrument out of their closet after not playing for years, so it’s a very high-quality concert.”