Composer Profile: Kenneth Froelich

When Kenneth Froelich entered USC as a freshman, he believed that he wanted to be a film composer. He had been involved with music most of his life by then, beginning with piano at age five, taking up sax a few years later, and then starting to compose in his junior year of high school. And as a student at the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts, he was blessed with such opportunities as getting to hear the school’s wind ensemble perform one of his works when he was a senior.

Still, as he told me, “I really didn’t know much about contemporary music and thought that new music was film music.” And so he entered USC’s music major with an emphasis in film composition.

Soon, he became more aware of all of the things going on in new music, and of all of the possibilities that held for him as a composer. “It didn’t take me long to realize how much I enjoyed the process of composing but that I wasn’t going to be a good fit with Hollywood. I’m not smooth enough for Hollywood,” he said, not doing justice to his affable personality. “I realize that I would have a difficult time taking direction from a director.” And so he eventually changed his major to the standard composition track.

Following that, he spent a few years in Bloomington at Indiana University, where he earned both his Master of Music and Doctor of Music degrees in composition. “I had a very good time at Indiana. Being in a college town was very positive—the smaller environment worked well for me. I had outstanding teaching in composition, and on top of that, when you have 1700 musicians, all at such a high level that they can automatically play your music as you envision it—how lucky I was! Just how good these musicians are—sometimes I forget that this is not normal.”

For the past eight years, he has been a professor of music theory and composition at Cal State Fresno, my own alma mater. Since I found the musical environment of Fresno to be surprisingly rich, I was curious to know how Ken and his wife have found it, 30 plus years after I graduated.

“For the most part, I enjoy living in Fresno. It’s different for me, having grown up and lived in San Diego and in Bloomington—pretty towns. It took a while to find the things we love. But it has a rich food culture, partly because of the interesting phenomenon of gifted restaurateurs who can’t afford to open restaurants in San Francisco, so they do it in Fresno. There is an interesting art scene, and the downtown has undergone a big revitalization. I enjoy getting to know how the city developed. And we have found good friends here.

“The musical life is a double-edged sword. It’s a relatively small community, and I do get to work with really good people. All of the ensembles at school are good, and Fresno has a really good youth orchestra. But given where it is, Fresno is a little bit insulated, and that makes it harder to make connections with musicians from the outside. We’re removed from the major centers of art. And though I like it here, I want to make sure people know I’m here.”

It’s a place that requires you create your own opportunities. One of those that Ken has done is his creation of the annual Fresno New Music Festival, which he began in 2006, and which annually brings in composers and performers from the outside, as well as featuring the ensembles of the University. It has been very successful, both shining a light on Fresno and exposing the people of the community—which for a long time was thought to be too small to embrace new music—to the wide variety of musical styles happening in the world now.

The piece that Pacific Serenades commissioned him to write, and which we will be premiering on our upcoming concerts, is Piano Quartet No. 1: Mirror. He had written a great deal of wind music in the preceding year, including Portraits of Mt. Rushmore for the US Air Force Brass in Blue, a subset of the US Heartland Band in Omaha, which commissioned the work. The USAF Brass in Blue premiered the work at Mt. Rushmore last year. After that, he said to himself, “I need to write something that isn’t brass and winds. I need a change.” And so he welcomed the opportunity to write a piece for strings and piano.

He described the piece to me as “primarily tonal, but also modal, octatonic, and bitonal—shifting rapidly from one key to another. It has less jazz in it than some of my other works, as I wanted the piano quartet to be more classically oriented. There are hints of chant in the piece, and the introduction is chant-like, even hymn-like. Originally I had a concept for the piece as rooted in political relationships, but I abandoned that. That didn’t feel authentic to me, and I always want what I am saying as a composer to be authentic, to be in my own voice.”

I am excited about hearing Ken’s new piece, and so is he. “It’s a really good time for me, with lots of composing and lots of performances of my music. I am really excited about this particular piece. I’ve written so much for collegiate ensembles, and it’s great to be able to write for a professional group. I look forward to being able to write more for ensembles like yours, and I am very appreciative of the opportunity to work with Pacific Serenades.”