Delusions of Grandeur Part One 1975-1977

String Quartet #1 (1976)

Music for Orchestra (1977)

Variations, Fugue, and Dance (1977)

String Quartet #2 (1977)

Chamber Suite (1977)

blogger without hat

I became aware of Scriabin at about the same time I started composing. These are some factoids I found intriguing that might be more or less true:
1. He was about my (then) age when he started writing music,
2. he was 19 when he composed his first Symphony,
3. he was a brilliant pianist (better than Rachmaninoff per the rumors) known for subtle use of the damper pedal, and
4. he invented a completely new harmony "based on 4ths."  Oh, and
5. there was something about sex that was never quite explained.
A heady mix for a young nerd. I figured if I was going to keep up I had best get started.

I started by trying to invent a new harmonic system. 4ths had been used so I decided tritones were my ticket to fame and glory. My first string quartet uses bunches of them in parallel double stops. What I discovered is that I had no understanding of how a harmonic system might be constructed in the first place. Looking back at it now, it is ambitious, showy, energetic, and quite good practice at writing notes in an open score format.

For my next trick I tried a big orchestra piece. Music for Orchestra is scored for piccolo, flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 french horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, xylophone, chimes (tubular bells), snare drum, timpani, and the usual army of strings. It has some ideas pasted onto a set of orchestral builds. It starts and ends with chimes and long held string unisons.

blogger with hat

For Variations, Fugue, and Dance, saving only the timpani, I traded all the spare percussion for a 3rd french horn. This time all those ideas are thrown into a more tightly held set of structures. This is
1. my first set of variations,
2. my first fugue, and
3. my first dance.
Humble beginnings indeed. Many moments are cribbed from Shostakovich. This score actually got a read-through at orchestra camp that summer. My co-campers were brave and I thank them.

Orchestra music has a lot of notes, hand inking big scores was time consuming, and making all those copies was expensive. I think I even copied out all the parts. Oof, back to quartets. If SQ #1 was all marcato aggression and cool impressionism, SQ #2 does a splashy cannonball into expressionistic teen angst. Some of the melodic ideas were derived from names of people - though rather than matching letter names in the name to the letter names of the notes I mapped each letter to its place within a 26 semi-tone pitch span, then spelled the name in pitches. I had heard of Schoenberg's tone rows by that time and probably inflicted some operations on my tunes. I finished this piece while working with Ken Benshoof at the University of Washington, though I think it was pretty much complete by then. It was the first piece of mine performed at the UW, in what was then the Studio Theater, downstairs at Meany Hall.

blogger on the beach

For the Summer of 1977 Dell Wade was putting together a chamber concert - he was always putting something together - and my assignment was to write a piece for it. Chamber Suite is for wind quintet and string quartet plus double bass. I didn't know what Suites were made of so I looked at several. Well, maybe I looked at one. There is a Prelude, an Allemande, a Courante, a Sarabande, an Air, and a Gigue. It must have been one of Bach's that I looked at. I didn't have any experience of what those sorts of dances were, so I stuck close to the model. The Air is the only one that isn't similar at all to what an Air is in Bach. This piece worked pretty well in performance, in the sense that it clearly sounds like music, the orchestration works reasonably well (nothing fancy), it doesn't overstay its welcome (much), and it doesn't get all weepy.