Hard at Work

Ed reminded me yesterday that I had not added any new material to this web-log for some time. Many of you might feel yourselves owed an apology. Please take a moment and consider how remarkably selfish that attitude is. My time is my own to spend as I please, and any writings of mine that appear on this web site ought to be considered a rare privilege. While I feel as hearty as a seventy-five year-old, there is no firm evidence but that I am mortal. So soak up the wisdom while you can.

All that aside, these past few weeks have been particularly busy for me. Now and then I enjoy setting for myself a difficult compositional challenge, and the most recent turned out to be one of the greatest of my career. In late January, I received an unexpected phone call from one Horace Bertelmann, director of the Greater New York Area Euphonium Ensemble, a 12-member group whose name is self-explanatory.

Their concerts are surprisingly well-attended

Lo and behold, this newly formed group has found itself with very little in the way of repertoire, and for the last year or so has contented itself with mediocre arrangements of Leonard Bernstein pieces and an oddly riveting version of Clair de Lune.

Initially, there was some confusion regarding my identity -- Mr. Bertelmann seemed to have me confused with a "Roskoe Willitz," and was under the impression that I specialize in arranging pop tunes for unusual instrumentations. He was particularly complimentary of my purported take on "Teenage Dream," a piece with which I must confess I am not familiar. However, my name is the one he found in the phone book, and thus it is that I accepted his commission without asking too many questions.

For any alert musician, the most significant fact about this euphonium ensemble is that it is a duodecad, something of a rarity in the music world. With twelve performers, this groups is capable of playing all the pitch classes in the aggregate simultaneously with a wonderful consistency of timbre found nowhere else outside of keyboard music.  This is quite a boon for me, because some years ago I swore I would never write another note for the piano as long as the Hamburg Model D third from the left on the second row in the Steinway showroom is off-limits to me for reasons too complicated to explain in this space.

Your move, messieurs...

The extreme challenge that I referred to earlier stems from my decision in 1982 to make a decisive return to what lesser minds term "tonality," although my understanding of the concept is such that I no longer see music in terms of such tidy categories; the decision had more to do with deeper spiritual and socio-economic concerns the tonality of which was a mere byproduct.

Not THOSE socio-economic concerns, you philistine!

Nevertheless, an integral part of that move involved the whole-hearted embrace of tonal counterpoint. Previously, I had mastered the technique in other media -- first in a serial context, and then during my brief stint as a Downtown experimentalist, in a cereal context, as exemplified in my 1973 piece Krab Kanon in Kellog. But tonal counterpoint requires a special sort of craft -- one at which I was likely more capable than any other living composer, but which still did not serve me quite as well as some of my more highly-developed talents.

Now, after twenty-eight years and three-hundred seventy-five fugues of various quality and complexity (all consigned to the flames as of 2pm this afternoon), I feel that I have created my own personal final statement on the subject, my opus euphonicembalisticum, if you will, which unites in perfect measure my previous serial efforts with my current sensibilities: a 12-voice fugue in which at every moment throughout the piece, each voice plays a different note from the aggregate.  I cannot begin to tell you to what extent this effort taxed even my own superbly developed compositional talents. At times, difficulties with the voice leading drove me nearly to distraction.

While the piece in its entirety cannot be revealed until after its premiere, I cannot help but share with you an excerpt* of the momentous climax, when the twelve euphonii, all in triple forte, merge into one impassioned stretto:

*Parts have been compressed to two staves to save space

It took me many a sleepless night to figure out how I could play the theme in its original form, augmented, diminished, inverted, retrograded, autotuned, reverbed, and cantilevered all at the same time and in such a convincing way, but I can now say it without any question: I have done it. And I have done it very, very well.

I have not sent the score to Mr. Bertelmann yet, but I highly anticipate the look on his face when he sees what his (frankly) rather humble commission yielded.