"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose.", Ms. Found in a Bottle - 2001

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Lingering in my piano bench since 1982 was the original reel-to-reel master tape of my synclavier piece AKU. Some artifacts had crept in to the cassette copy the listening library folks made for me at the UW, and I was certain that if I could, someday, find a working reel-to-reel tape deck and the equipment to transfer the track to digital I would finally have a record of the piece in all its pristine glory. And so, when I learned that my friend and occasional Banned Rehearsal collaborator Pete Comley had all those parts I asked if he would be willing to help me out, which of course, being as interested in hearing an old synclavier piece as I was, he did. He was living just a few hundred yards away at the time, so one day in May I walked my tape over to his apartment. He threaded the tape and prepared the DAT for recording, and set it all going. It is difficult to describe the combination of dismay and delight that followed as it became clear what time's ravages had worked upon my master tape, transforming what remained into a magnificently tortured parody of what it had been 20 years prior - a sound unattainable by any other means. A few months later I took that file (on DAT) to Jack Straw Cultural Center and dubbed into it a recording of my more recent text piece Confessions of a Polyphonist, calling the result Ms. Found in a Bottle after the tale by Poe. 

I also completed several new compositions that year: Lauda Anima and How Firm a Foundation, for organ; The Farthest Shore, for flute trio; a setting of Jeremiah 17:5-8, for voice and piano; and "Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose." for solo piano. Marcus Oldham performed Lauda Anime magnificently on the big organ at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral. Much to my regret the event was not recorded (at least to my knowledge) so it lives only in my memory. Both of these short organ works live perfectly well on piano as well. I don't recall the exact incitement for my flute trio, but I have a vague recollection that it was involved with some sort of call for scores sponsored by the Washington Composers' Forum. I have never heard it played on real flutes, but Sarah Bassingthwaighte had a group of her students (nine of them, if I remember correctly what she told me) perform it while they were touring in Russia. Somewhere I have a copy of the program, complete with my name transliterated into Cyrillic. Fortunately the robot flutes of midi get the idea of it across pretty well. The Jeremiah setting was intended for Karen to sing at church. At the time Karen's dad was an associate pastor at a church in Olympia, so for a few years, most summers, I would write something we could play for them.

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And in December I completed the first large-scale piano piece I had done since Slow Blues: "Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose." The first ideas I sketched were for violin and piano, but it took on a life of its own and the violin thoughts were left behind. It follows a similar tonal scheme to Slow Blues - the notes used in each figuration-segment are derived from successive (mod-17 multiplicative) transformations of a set of pitch classes. I allowed myself considerably more freedom in composing the relative hefts of each segment, so that the piece as a whole moves along much like a set of preludes, or variations on a theme, performed without any breaks between them. I played it at a Seattle Composers' Salon (probably early in 2002), the video of which performance may have played a role in securing grant funding for that long-running project of Tom Baker's. 

All in all it was quite a productive year for me, and though I didn't give any recitals I was trying to be an active participant in the Salon, then being held at a Mennonite church a few miles north of my house, in a space that used to be a movie theater. And of course Banned Rehearsal carried on as best we could, adding 30 or so sessions, and adding just over 20 hours of recorded sound to the corpus.

Banned Playout

Numbered:(596-626) 20:05:30
Assembly Rechoired: (one session) 00:06:37
Peripheral: (three sessions) 00:08:48

Total 2001:  20:20:55

Grand Total: 698:01:54

Scores:

Lauda Anima
The Farthest Shore
Jeremiah 17:5-8
How Firm a Foundation
"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose."

Recordings:

Lauda Anima

The Farthest Shore

Ms. Found in a Bottle

Jeremiah 17:5-8

How Firm a Foundation

"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose."