As of October 25, 2011, I am in the final stages of work on the new piece funded by Kickstarter. The program notes I’ve written for the score will give a little insight into the piece:
Blue Bang was composed in summer 2011 for the Firebird Ensemble of Boston, Kate Vincent, artistic director, with David Maxwell on piano. The idea of composing for this mix of instruments occurred to me after I learned that David, in addition to being a widely acclaimed blues pianist, was a devoted listener to new music. Since much of my music has been influenced by the blues, and that as a native Southerner I consider myself an heir to the tradition, it seemed a most natural path to take.
The structure of the piece unfolds as a series of explosions, a series of "Big Bangs" such as physicists theorize began our universe. String theory posits that our three spatial dimensions are but a portion of the eleven spatial dimensions that exist, and that sometime after the Big Bang, our spatial dimensions unfurled in a period of rapid expansion. Current thought seems to be that our universe continues to rapidly expand, and will never reach a point of maximum expansion and then collapse into another singularity and Big Bang. Blue Bang takes an opposing view, and allows each explosion to be followed by a collapse, to be followed by a slightly more significant expansion. Thus the subtitles which serve as rehearsal markers progress from small world 1 through small world 4, through expanding worlds 1, 2, and 3, eventually landing in improvising world 1 and improvising world 2.
Musically, the aim of Blue Bang is to provide a new-music context for a blues pianist to be fully him- or herself, and to create a piece which lays out a continuous musical spectrum in which the kinship of blues and new music is made evident in sound.