Composing for Others - 2000

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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..."). 

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.

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.

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