In Finest Company

After my recent post "Searching for Friends," after reconnecting with a precious few friends from the end of my college days at Truman, of course the next logical step is to do the same with grad school friends. If any still remain, that is. It seems that the last two or three times I devoted a few consecutive days to immersive nostalgia to attempt to rekindle something glorious like that, I was more than let down by the result. Cold shoulders, tepid responses, and little else. The last time I tried, I felt like I was stoking the hopelessly dying embers. 

But I'll be damned if I'm going to be left with only the bad memories of BGSU. No. I won't let the good parts fade and have only the darkness endure. If I did that, it would be nothing short of a tragedy. Loyal to the end, I will try once more. Soon. 

The dark side of my undying loyalty to my friends is my unyielding resentment of my foes. I will give my attention to the latter soon enough, too. 

For further preamble, in the interest of laziness--oops, I mean expedience--I am just going to copy and past what I posted to Facebook yesterday: 

I was scouring a folder full of old pencil-sketched music from way back when I used pencil and not ink, and in looking for one thing, I stumbled across something else, something entirely unexpected. An abandoned composition I’d completely forgotten about.

I’d thought for some time now, after the past few years of archiving, that I’d found everything there was to find. Hoping to one day remaster everything for presenting online, I created two archives: “Truman Retrospective,” for my undergraduate compositions, and “BGSU Works,” for my compositions as a grad student. I’d put a lot of thought into writing new program notes for everything, and I included unfinished compositions and abandoned ideas. Someday I will get around to finishing or revamping them, even the pieces that are too stupid to deserve my attention. I have to wait a couple more years to have the right hardware and software setup; I need a whole new rig, and it’s going to take some time.

I’d thought those two archives were set in stone. But today I found a piece from BGSU that I didn’t pursue. What a find! I had forgotten all about it, but now I remember. I was inspired by a performance of some random piece for vibraphone that used extended techniques, and I was messing around in those days with string harmonics. This piece is for vibraphone and string orchestra, or smaller string ensemble as available.

I wrote the core material to use, along with an outline, but the rest was mostly verbal descriptions of how to compose the piece. It was a good starting point, but alas, it was one of maybe thirty casualties of Dr. Lillios deliberately keeping me in stasis the entire second year of my two-year program there, admittedly making me do months of interminable rewrites on my already finished thesis just to keep me busy, suffocating me and making sure I couldn’t flourish and be as prolific as I damn well could have been, considering this portfolio full of abandoned works. I had no shortage of ideas or inspiration, I lacked only a decent mentor who wasn’t antagonistic.

Yeah, there’s so much music I could have churned out. But no one ever knew it.

So, once upon a time, I had a solid start to a composition that I’d forgotten about entirely. Today, I repurposed that outline into a brief, tentative blurb describing the piece, titled “Dissociative Experience”:

“The strings paint a surreal landscape, relying heavily on long drones on soft harmonics, as the vibraphone explores strange harmonies with them. Much of the material derives from variations of a single, eight-note motif, exchanged throughout the voices and sometimes using imitation and counterpoint. The eerie, dissonant harmonies shift and pivot without resolution, occasionally landing only momentarily on a major triad before quickly moving out again, unable to coalesce. The vibraphone alternates between using mallets and a cello bow.”

Spring is in the air. End-of-school season is in the air. This is totally not the kind of grad student bullshit I need to be wasting my time with right now, but what a find! I feel like I found the fossilized bone of a new species of dinosaur in my folder.

Well, it bothers me that my computer situation won't let me work on making recordings of those archived works to share online. I envision a website with tabs for "Truman Retrospective" and "BGSU Works" among a few other categories that I have already planned to a T, in which you can see a list of compositions with drop-down information and streaming audio for each piece. I really want to share those lists, but I feel it would be pointless without the audio. Someday. I have a clear vision for what it will be. 

Sometime in the next year, I'll probably reveal a lot more, but for right now, I just want to share one particular gem filed under "BGSU Works" which has haunted me. 

I feel like I should compose the piece, hire a team of performers and record it, and send the recording to those for whom the piece was intended. But that is not going to happen anytime soon. Pandemic in the way, the cost of recording, and whatnot. But I couldn't wait indefinitely to share this feeling. Years later? How many years? No, I very much wanted to post about this a year ago, actually, but I hesitated. I held off, because it seemed in vain. But time not only marches on, it does so while mercilessly trampling over our beaten bodies, as we desperately gasp and reach out for aid that won't come. 

Excuse the morbid existentialism. It's indelibly a part of me now. It drives me. Every day is a bid for victory over time. You might recoil from how intensely "real" I have become, but I might shake my head at how your ignoring your own mortality would be doing so at your own peril. Rise up and live. As in, now. Later is not guaranteed. 

And here we come to it. The point. 

For now, this is the working draft of the "program notes" for the piece as I hope to share on my music website: 

In Finest Company

 

For double string quartet, three clarinets, and marimba.

 

After all the experimental music, all my forays into different styles, I wanted to compose this, an elegant, mellow, postminimalist piece, to treat the ears of my fellow musicians. Something complex enough to be approved by hardline academics, yet smooth, refined, and tonal enough to sooth and mesmerize everyone in my target audience. 

 

This composition, to me, is perhaps the most tragic casualty of the egregious saga of my thesis committee consuming my life. If things had gone according to plan, having started so unnecessarily early on my thesis process, I would have been free by January 2006, my final semester, to do anything I wanted. By the end of February, this piece would have been finished and I would have shared it with my friends, for whom it was written. 

 

As a bit of revisionist history, let’s say this piece was finished in February 2006, performed in Bryan Recital Hall at the end of that month. Later, perhaps in late March or early April, the recording was shared with good friends one evening at someone’s apartment, after a grad student get-together to show-and-tell musical scores we’d been working on, and looking bittersweetly forward to the end of our final semester together, when we would be moving on. Let’s say this music was enjoyed in dim lighting and good Scotch. This is how it should have been. 

 

Someday, I will finish this piece. Partly as a means of catharsis for myself, for the sake of completion, to make up for the crushing disappointment of my grad school experience. But mostly as a love letter to those old friends and erstwhile colleagues. To what should have been.