I’ve embarked on writing an essay I’m calling Retrospective on a Composer’s Career. I wanted to mark my 50th anniversary as a composer, which until recently I thought would be falling next year. But in the kind of wrinkle that characterizes my life generally, the timetable has moved itself up! I will be adapting the essay for use here, where I can organically interpolate musical examples or the occasional graphic with the least fuss. So, here goes.
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April 2024
This comprehensive survey actually started life with the August 2020 entry that has now been pushed below, where I was naturally expecting to begin things with my opus 1 Divertimento. This incorporates music I worked on between 1975 and 1977. But in my archives lay the hoary manuscript of a rag I had written for recorder quartet toward the end of 1974. When I reviewed it, later that year 2020, I determined that it was worthy of release if I could just touch it up a bit! Having done so, I gave the reupholstered rag my next available opus number (85), and also arranged it for flute quartet. (The analogies are strong between the two ensembles. They both have the family’s main instrument, viz., alto recorder and the standard flute, in second position, with the highest member an octave higher, and two more members extending the group’s composite range that much more below.)
I mention below that this sexagenarian (and now septuagenarian) retrospective will largely expound upon the program notes I already have for each composition. Here are the ones I finally wrote for the rag I so long suppressed.
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100% Rag for SATB recorders, op. 85
My development as a composer was slow, and followed a late start owing to lack of early training. It is thus that a piece like this from my college days counts as so much juvenilia. In December of 1975, I began sketching the earliest music from my op. 1 orchestral set, ultimately to be its finale. The present work had directly preceded it, the previous year. Thematic material from that time has meanwhile been available for tapping into later works, including one motive in a work as recent as my op. 70 cantata. But this rag was of such coherent structure (however unorthodox) that it resisted any disassembly. A few days ago, that is to say, more than 45 years since it was first written, I realized that I could release the work after a bit of polishing, which I have now done. But despite the new opus number, I emphasize that 100% Rag is 99.99% a product of 1974!
The title was more than a pun on the term used by stationers for certain high-end papers with maximal cotton fiber content. It was a protest of authenticity against some who averred that the first theme (after the four-bar intro) begins with a long upbeat rather than bona fide syncopation, while the leisurely final theme has but one syncopated measure before the rag unexpectedly concludes back in stop-time mode. Let me refer them now to the final strain of Joplin’s Chrysanthemum, which is completely unsyncopated, or to the second strain of my favorite rag of all, the master’s Wall Street Rag, which uses syncopation only just before its final cadence. Although rags conventionally have but one tempo marking stipulated at the outset, no-one ever plays them that way. I went formally with two contrasting tempi, slow for the intro and first strain, fast for the second strain. The first strain comes back again in accordance with tradition, but then its intro is presented in a fast variant to usher in a “stop-time” section. Players (or a newly employed percussionist) are free to stamp the main beat. But when the final strain slows down it is in precisely the tempo of the rag’s slower opening. (A nicety I just became aware of all these decades later!) A final cadence in stop time rounds off the work, restoring as I said the (literally) foot-tapping syncopation, whose prevalence proves the piece, for all its irregularities, to be indeed 100% rag.
I dedicate the work now to the instrumental polymath Peter Lim, cherishing the idea of inscribing 100% Rag to someone the same age that I was when I first sketched it. (He could, it goes without saying, take any of the parts in a proverbial Augenblick!)
Victor Frost
9 X 20
Baltimore
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I do not yet at this writing have a recording of the recorder version, but here is a scrolling video of the one for flutes. (There also exists a videotaping of the 46-year-delayed premiere, in a stunning Italian palazzo no less. It features, however, a lady distractingly fanning herself in an impressive 5 against the quartet’s 4! Seriously, the group’s flutes sounded gorgeous at this venue, but when it came to the novel foot stamping in the rag’s closing stop-time section, the players were, shall we say, inconsistent.) In the present video, during repeats, I interpolate pics from both the world premiere and the recording session that followed.
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August 2020
I feel as though the best way to afford an overview on my life’s output would be to use the individual sets of program notes I already have as a point of departure, … (to be continued)
Victor Frost's Online Chronicles 