ideas for next piece



I'm probably taking a bit of a hiatus from writing new music, since I don't have any major musical ideas at hand, and I also really want to finally finish inputting some older works of mine into Finale. I'm almost halfway done with my first postminimalist piece from 1981, which was a long piano piece. Until I get it all digitized, I don't even know how long it would take in performance, since I've never played it through start to finish. I suspect it's on the order of 2 hours, but it remains a mystery. I also have an old set of songs I wrote around the age of 17 to poems by Joyce. You can hear the first and only performance here. It is from an old cassette tape that's seen better days, was not professionally recorded, and the pianist is pretty horrendous (it was me but then, I've never every claimed to be a decent pianist, since I'm not). Some other old works I'd like to get into Finale format: a piece for violin and piano (12-tone; what do you want, I was a kid!) and a postminimalist work for chamber ensemble called canonical ensembles.

Funny stories about both of these: I dedicated the violin and piano work to the scientist George Beadle, with whom I was doing a research project on the origin of corn (and just so there's no misunderstanding, modern corn is indeed related closely to teosinte [zea mexicanus], regardless of what those misguided folks at Harvard thought at the time). Beadle showed it to a neighbor of his (he lived just across the street from the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, which is one of the best science museums on the planet) who was a professional violinist with an orchestra. It apparently provoked a bit of a reaction. Beadle was, of course, a midwestern gentleman from Nebraska; apart from those sadly mistaken Harvard folks, he never said anything negative about anyone or anything. So I suspect my score, which admittedly is excruciatingly difficult to perform from a violinist's perspective, went over even worse than Beadle was going to relate back to me, being a gentleman and all that. So it's sat for almost 30 years in a box and I'd love for it to at least be seen if not heard. The other work is a pun; there are no canons whatsoever in the entire piece. Not a one. The term “canonical ensemble” is a statistical mechanics term from a physical chemistry class I took in college. At the molecular level, things are determined more by probability than anything else, but it isn't an indeterminate piece, although that would have been a nice idea I suppose.

I have some old works that I doubt I'll ever get around to digitizing. And that's probably all for the best. I have the only completed work for orchestra I ever wrote, which is pretty long and has some great parts. But it would be a bear to dump into notation software and even worse to try to use to generate an audio file that's worth anything. Maybe when/if I retire...

So while I want to get 1-2 of these things digitized already, having planned to do so at least two years ago, I also want to do some new things. I've been interested for some time in setting some Palestinian poetry to music, more as a political statement and as a means to try to build bridges than anything else, but have yet to find texts that I would want to set. So I started thinking: what about setting some blog posts from around the Web? Not that I care about or need precedent, but there is ample precedent for taking everyday texts and using them in music (Partch's Barstow, the third movement of Berio's Sinfonia, some of the 70's music of Rzewski, etc). So perhaps that's what I'll end up doing; hopefully it will be the first new music composition using blogs as texts. Just a thought...

Posted: Mon - February 11, 2008 at 01:07 PM          

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