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The 30-minute piano solo piece
Welcome to my planet. I come in peace. began life as an attempt to
compose a setting of the Beatitudes as they are found in The Gospel According
to St. Luke. The musical material quickly got out of hand for that purpose,
but came together smoothly as a piano solo once I gave up on the words and let
the musical idea loose. Probably the best way to conceptualize the composed-in
structure is to imagine two trains, running parallel to each other but at
different speeds. Each train has a differently measured cyclic pattern of
windows, and we are watching from the side observing the rhythm of all those
windows' intersections as they go by. The number of pitches in play, and
consequently the complexity of the interval content accumulates methodically,
so that the tonal feel increases in density and, I hope, referential depth, as
the various trains of windows move past each other. As best I recall the pitch
material was conceived in good old fashioned mod-12. The title arose out of a
conversation Karen and I had at a restaurant one snowy Sunday after we had
walked to church and decided to stop for lunch on our way back. I note that it
could be read as a Gospel message, so it's not entirely off of its origin.
The only other piece I completed in 2012 was the brief
Flourish for Jim, scored for 2 horns, written on the occasion of his
passing. Jim was one of Karen's dad's brothers, and was an enthusiastic
amateur horn player, as well as being a blast to hang out with.
In 2013 I revisited the Luke text, eventually ending up with a setting for
vocal duet and piano, Luke 6: 20-26, that is considerably shorter than
it would have been had I been stubborn enough to stick to the original pitch
material. Instead I went with a loosely diatonic pallette that goes down well
for use in church (I quipped that I had out-Ruttered John Rutter) - not overly
flashy and not particularly edgy, but devious enough tonally and metrically to
make it interesting to put together.
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| Karen at Tipsoo Lake |
I also wrote a setting of a text from the Chinook Psalter that had had been
used as a call to worship at a service at my parent's church in Langley,
Washington:
Sing a New Song of the Universe. I ended up not finding a
way to set the text that was both easy enough for congregational singing and
true to the text's irregular rhythms and stanza sizes. You can't win them
all.
I was also beginning to work on a massive project, that I will begin to
discuss in the next chapter, but finding myself at an inflection point therein
I started doing pretty regular solo improvisations, which activity continued
for several years in various guises, and which I have taken to calling
Sabbatical Improvisations. That project began as a method of becoming
more comfortable operating guitars and such other fretboard instruments
through unstructured improvisation, but then took on a life of its own,
sometimes cutting improvisations in half and dubbing the two halves together,
and sometimes playing with digital effects - your basic puttering around with
sound files sorts of things.
I gave two recitals in 2012. "Greek Nickel and Change",
given on June 23, consisted of Emily Doolittle's
Minute Etudes (book one); Aaron Keyt's
Bagatelles, J. K.
Randall's
Greek Nickel #1; and my
7 Cues Without Film and
Sonata in 2 Movements. "Preludes in Seattle Part 4", given on October
10, consisted of
Preludes 13-16 of Lockrem Johnson, Ken Benshoof, and
Greg Short; Ken's
Patti's Parlour Pieces 13-16; and my set of
24 Preludes. In 2013 Neal and I shared a recital on May 4. Neal played from John Cage's
Solo for Piano, and I played
Welcome to my planet. I come in peace.
And of course Banned Rehearsal and Gradus carried on steadily.
Banned Playout:
2012:
Numbered 805-826 12:06:29
Assembly Rechoired (one session) 00:32:25
Total 2012: 12:38:54
2013:
Numbered 827-849 13:16:03
Assembly Rechoired (one session) 00:31:01
Total 2013: 13:47:04
Grand Total: 808:21:55
Scores:
Welcome to my planet. I come in peace.
Luke 6:20-26
Recordings:
Welcome to my planet. I come in peace.
Luke 6:20-26
