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| your blogger |
The year 2000 found me toe-dipping into a more public arena. Not only did I
become active in the Washington Composers' Forum, but also began attending and
presenting at Tom Baker's Seattle Composers' Salon, which quickly became my
favorite place to share what I was up to and to hob nob with my fellow
wizards. By way of introducing myself I gave two house recitals in February,
at which I played
Slow Blues (1999) in its trio formation with Karen (drums)
and Neal (cornet), as well as
7 Cues Without Film (1984), (then called
Leideslieder),
Create Desolation and Call It Peace (1984), and Ben's
("...my
chart shines high where the blue milks upset...").
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| Karen with tam tam |
The greater part of the music I completed that year was intended for two or
more musicians.
Two Rose is a prelude (
Spring Rose) and fugue (
Fall Rose) for
flute, clarinet, and bassoon that I wrote as part of a call for scores
sponsored by the Washington Composers' Forum. It was performed quite
wonderfully by Sarah Bassingthwaighte, Deborah Colyn, and Ryan Hare, at the
little recital hall at the Seattle Art Museum. Like several other works of
that time it reuses material from
The Abyss (1998). Although pitch material
was conceived within a mod-17 syntax, I was interested mostly in what thinking
that way did to what is otherwise recognizable concert music, in the
Stravinsky-adjacent neo-classical vein.
Five Duets for two clarinets is like
unto it in both particulars. Since no clarinetists stepped forward I arranged
and performed them later for solo piano. They're kind of fun and clever and
present some interesting fingering challenges. I would still be interested to
hear them with clarinets.
The WCF also sponsored an orchestral score reading session with Roger Nelson's
Seattle Creative Orchestra, for which I orchestrated my 1994 viola/piano piece
Doomsome Otherings. This was to be the last time I promulgated any music for
orchestra. Too much work for too little pay-off.
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| Aaron drumming |
Psalm 22:9-10, for voice and piano, was composed without recourse to mod-17
thinking. The idea was to set the verses as though the words were being
squeezed though narrow passages - the poem's imagery is of child-birth. I
believe the writing is strong for most part, though when Karen and I were
performing it at church a few years ago I came to the sudden realization that
one particularly troublesome spot, a few measures hence, could use some
serious compositional attention, which my brain then began to do, which, alas,
pretty much derailed my fingers for a bit. Karen sang on valiantly. When I
eventually sat down to work out the problem I ended up recomposing
it from the ground up, which is why there are two different settings of the
same verses in my oeuvre.
My mom was playing violin then in a string quintet (2 violins, 2 violas,
cello) so I wrote them a fun little Humoresque. At some point they decided to
play it as part of a Maundy Thursday evening service at a large church in Oak
Harbor, on Whidbey Island. It was programmed as a musical meditation on the
Crucifixion, so they renamed it "Quintet". In the service this was preceded by
the celebration of the Eucharist, by the entire congregation of several
hundred people, in what seemed to me the least efficient method imaginable. It
took ages. Never before or since have so many suffered so long to hear my
music.
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| Neal operating a guitar |
On a lighter note I wrote down a little 12-bar rock&rollish ditty that I
had made up to amuse the kids while in the car:
Do the Weedy Weedy at the Bop.
Those are pretty much the whole of the lyrics, each line being punctuated at
its end with whatever word you felt like adding in that rhymed with bop (or
not, I suppose).
The only finished piece of the year that didn't explicitly involve more than
one performer was the text-sound piece Confessions of a Polyphonist, a
structured matrix of homo- and hetero-phones that found its way into several
activities over the next few years. Tom Baker invited me to present it to one
of the classes he was teaching at the UW, much, I'm sure, to their bafflement.
And of course Banned Rehearsal carried on more or less weekly, producing more
than 30 hours of recorded improvisation.
Banned Playout:
Numbered: (556-595): 31:01:28
Assembly Rechoired: (two sessions)
01:02:11
Peripherals: (eight sessions) 03:07:54
Total 2000: 35:11:33
Grand Total: 677:40:59
Scores:
Two Rose
Five Duets
Psalm 22:9-10
Recordings:
Psalm 22:9-10
5 Duets
