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| Your blogger with Karen and sons more or less in 2003 |
Of course that isn't how it seems while living it. Whatever ideas arrive do so much as any whim might - some stick and some don't. I work out a piece or a project because it interests me while I'm doing it. As past work piles up, habits of thinking reappear. Procedures that worked well in one piece might be tried again in another, their details shifted around to fit new circumstances. But the fact is that I have never had a grand plan beyond whatever the current projects happen to be. For instance I continued to be intrigued by the possibilities of working with mod-17 arithmetic applied over the mod-12 universe of traditional western pitch collections, but also indulged in regular mod-12 thinking, whether diatonically or with more esoteric reference sets, and in 2003 I composed pieces in each of those modes.
I had become acquainted with the local composer/trumpet player Jim Knodle through the Washington Composers' Forum, and for a while my oldest son was taking trumpet lessons from him. At some point he asked if I would like to write a piece for him (one of the very few instances in which anyone ever asked me to write something for them) and I obliged most gratefully with Sarabande, which is based on a mod-17, 17-tone row. He was participating that year in the Blind Youth Audio Project at Jack Straw Cultural Center, so we spent several hours there being the test piece while the engineers and students tried out various microphone placements to see how they affected the final sound. The recording we made there was quite fine, but we did go back later to make me one for keeps.
For my setting of Psalm 133 (also mod-17, 17-tone) I revisited the essentially two-voice texture of my recent Lamb of God, but expanded the range of the keyboard part and indulged quite freely in large vocal leaps and occasional extra voice sonorities. It's a bit of a bear to work up but kind of fun to play, and I hope also to sing, once you get there. Two other songs that year fall into the diatonic-adjacent mod-12 camp: a setting of Nahum Tate's Christmastide hymn While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night, and another of a few verses from Song of Solomon. Both of these are, I think, quite approachable and attractive.
In a somewhat more esoteric mod-12 vein is a clarinet duet called Eurydice, pitch sets that mirror each other between the parts, riffing on Cocteau's image of Orpheus (from the film "Orpheus") accidentally catching a glimpse of Eurydice in the rear-view mirror of the poet's automobile. The midi version is fine as far as it goes, but I'd love to hear it with real players.
In other news, I gave a recital in June, at University Temple United Methodist Church. On the program was my 17 Prepuntal Contraludes (1981), 5 Duets (2000) {clarinet duets arranged for piano}, and Slow Blues (1999); Preludes 17-24 of Lockrem Johnson (finishing up my first cycle of live performances of his 24 Preludes); and Ben's Soliloquy {also known as ("…what I could hear, trying to crawl out from between the lines of your last ferocious sonata…")}.
Banned Rehearsal and Gradus settled into our new routine of alternating weeks. The biggest news being that late in 2003 we were joined by Steve Kennedy, whom I had met at Seattle Composers' Salon, and who just seemed to get us right off the starting block.
Banned Playout:
Numbered: 645-661 - 08:46:10
Peripheral (1 session with me and Pete
Comley): 1:00:20
Total 2003: 09:46:30
Grand Total: 709:53:48
Scores:
While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night
Recordings
While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night
Eurydice
Psalm 133
Sarabande
Song of Solomon 3:1-4
