Tag: classical

Back in May, I luxuriated in the time I had left in 2025 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my journeyman work on my opus 1 orchestral set. Now, though, it lacks but two days till the new year! Little did I know I’d be spending most of my energies this month of December in moving from one part of Norfolk to another (smaller quarters, but closer to the beach). Also, meanwhile my mafioso muses (he typed affectionately, in an inadvertent alliteration…) insist on pushing through a set of ‘cello solos (almost three, so far…) that no-one on this plane of existence ever asked for! There it is.

My original opus 1, from December of 1975, was a rag for piano called Holiday. This referred not to the seasonal festivities then obtaining, but rather to the bittersweet 30s comedy directed by George Cukor, my favorite movie of all. By the end of 1977 I would orchestrate it and three other piano originals to form my Divertimento I for orchestra. I changed the title to Holiday Rag whilst preserving its unorthodox form. It closed out the set, and is now referred to as op. 1, no. 4. I have dropped all other work, and am spiffing its NotePerformer file up for anyone curious to sample it. (For the record, the first composition for which I have a recording, studio or live, that’s sufficient in quality to be sharing is my opus 3 Bagatelles for strings, my earliest published work.)

In E1 and E2 I promise to invoke, here in E3, further excerpts from the retrospective career essay I have embarked upon. But that was under the assumption that the survey of op. 1 could be completed by this point. I’ll just kick that can down the road again, since the most I can hope to do by tomorrow (New Year’s Eve) is have an adequate audio sample of the Rag ready to share. The jabberwocky verbiage can wait until I’m addressing the opening number, next year. Thus will I have presented the numbers in this seminal suite in the quizzical order 2, 3, 4, 1! Life with Victor.

I was intent on getting E1 in during 2024, which is to say 50 years since I composed my earliest circulating work. Inasmuch as I was up to op. 84, though, before finally releasing it, it was assigned the misleading opus number 85! Back in 1975 I began work on what would be my op. 1, and now, 50 years removed from then, I’m about to plunge into those waters.

But two observations before I do; one looks back to text from 2024 I already used in E1, and the other expands on even earlier texts I plan to paste into E3. (Rather than revise what was in one, and will be in the other, I choose to reflect on the topics in greater depth here.) First, let me discuss the stamping I call for in op. 85. Back in my 20s, I tried playing the soprano, alto and tenor parts whilst stamping and had no trouble coordinating the two activities. But I am an organist, and thus used to independent rhythmic activity in my feet. Moreover, I have never owned a bass, but years later, when just holding one, I found it unwieldy indeed! This alone calls the whole concept of asking wind players to stamp as they played into question. And the idea of asking transverse players, with their delicate embouchure, to do so has now come to seem preposterous. My smarmy comment about the struggling flute players at the premiere embarrasses me now, when I am more inclined to say, “Bless them for trying”! At all events, I have now appended the following performance note to all op. 85 scores:

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

Now I am in the odd position of commenting on text which I wrote before (1996 program notes), but have not yet incorporated into this blog. (It will figure in E3, below. And in case that is not already clear, “below” for me represents text I have yet to write. Some of you approach the texts latest to earliest, others vice versa, which makes the matter relative!) It again involves belying a superficial comment. The middle numbers (of four) in op. 1 are joined at the hip and cannot be performed separately. I attributed this blandly to the “simple coincidence” that each begins with the same two notes. (Spelled as D-D# in the first number; D-Eb in the other.) But the dovetail only works because the two notes occur respectively right before the next barline, making the transitional iteration an utter surprise when it suddenly lands us in an “unrelated” key! What is more, the tactus remains the same between numbers, such that the two notes are identical in both pitch and tempo. I also noticed later that the two numbers are identical in structure. In their shared binary (AABB) form, each A is twice the length of the corresponding B. The rustic Ländler (op. 1, no. 2) moves from loud to soft; the dreamy Lullaby (op. 1, no. 3) continues the diminuendo, from soft to softest. I promise to address the bookending numbers that remain in E3, but for now you can listen to the concatenated middle pair I discussed here first.

“Lack of early training,” I write, or “juvenilia”? Perhaps, but in op. 1 I was clearly making up for lost time!