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| My neighbor across the street |
Six IntermezziI stayed in the Red Hook barn into the middle of December. Campus was a mile or so off. I kept myself busy by providing music for dance classes (ugh), auditing classes, teaching a few piano students, observing life in the cow pasture across the road, and generally setting myself up to stay for an unspecified duration. The barn's only source of heat was a wood stove down the hall, and when the owner left us tenants over Thanksgiving weekend with no wood for the fire I'd had enough of that nonsense. Ben came to the rescue and offered to rent me the apartment in the basement of his house, which had its own bathroom and central heating. I moved in at the end of January, having spent Christmas and the bulk of that month as a guest of Alison and her family in Malabar, Florida. I lived in Ben's basement until moving back to Washington in 1984.
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| Your blogger, long ago in a galaxy far away |
The first two Intermezzi were written that Fall, the third in Malabar, and the last three over the course of the next few months. The first is an exploration of the interval between A-natural and E-natural, in its guises as Perfect Fourths and Fifths, both filling in the gaps between them and extending the registers in play step by step, all in a one-note-at-a-time texture, save for a few instances of two-notes-at-a-time, in a slow tempo with only two durations in play - short and long, indicated by quarter and whole notes.
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| Alison Watkins |
Intermezzo 2 is similar, but instead of starting with one interval it begins with a sequence of three pitches, G-natural, E-flat, and C-natural, in ascending order, so that I was working with the two flavors of sixths and also the larger span of an octave plus a fourth (17 semitones). It was not the first time that "17" had come up in my compositions, but is the first time it did so as a generative element, internal to the music as it goes along. Each of these were presented in small recitals at Bard, sharing the stage, if memory serves, with Dan Sedia and Jill Borner.
The third was written while visiting Alison in Florida, and is based on a similar idea but with a two-notes-at-a-time texture, in sevenths and ninths, and the fourth like that but with sixths. Intermezzo 5 is a text drawn mostly from my correspondence with Alison and a dream journal I kept at the time, edited down and re-arranged so that it flowed to my ear. To the extent it has an explicit subject matter it is the same as that of the other Intermezzi: the beginnings of an exploration of thinking about thinking about music. Intermezzo 6 is one of my few 12-tone works, with nothing particularly esoteric about my use of the procedure, other than making it sound like an extended riff on 4-3 suspensions. It mixed one-note and two-note textures freely.
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| Your blogger, Jill Borner, and Dan Sedia |
I made performance scores for each of them, but also large-format scores with giant notes on hand-drawn staves, a few notes per page. That for Intermezzo 1 was scribed carefully with ruler and stencils, but for the rest I used a big black magic marker. I'm pretty sure these are all now in the big pine box coffin that lives under my piano. All six were presented at Bard with Intermezzo 5 consisting of Jill Borner's taped reading, overlaid with a recording of some crickets to mask the tape hiss, divided into four segments interspersed between the piano solos - inter-intermezzic, as it were.
