After the Atlantic Center for the Arts / White House concert of the music of composer David Felder, I hung around to talk to the artists, and later yet, asked Benoit how the previous week's Timucua Jazz Orchestra recorded rehearsal of Kenton big band music turned out. He invited me into the control room to take a listen. During our sharing of the recording, tech, and music, he mentioned that his talented family might do a kind of tour of France the upcoming summer, and that he was interested in a work from me for those concerts.. I accepted, of course. The conditions were that the work had to be finished in a very short time, and would not require too much time to rehearse. Benoit suggested I might rework a previous piece to his family's instruments: trumpet, piano, violin, viola and cello.
I took his advice and decided to reset the first of "5 Stanescu Songs" called "lesson on the circle", the strongest piece in that set which was written in the first half of the '80s. A tightly composed work, it was built upon a juxtaposition of simplicity and complexity. The simplicity is that of a kernal of action - that of rising a perfect 4th, or falling a perfect 5th - the strongest musical interval that weaves its own polyphonic matrix. This kernal is the solitary item played by each string player, but at different rates! The violin often takes the track that moves fastest (half notes). The viola often on the track that plays it slower, and the cello slower yet. Upon this harmonically complex fabric of simple movement, I placed the singer (now trumpet) in a strict 12 tone row, also constructed of groups of 4ths. The piano part is a medium ground that sometimes lives in the row, sometimes in the matrix of 4ths. The work begins ends when the cycle returns to the same pitch. Choosing specific points of harmonic tension and release in the matrix that felt correct to dramatize the original poem became the macro-act of composition.
To create bookends for this complex work, I decided to create two new pieces to become a first and last movement with a very basic concept of non-motion. Stasis. Inspired by Morton Feldman, and staying with the 'lesson' concept, the first movement "Lesson on Time and Space" explores sound and how we perceive repetition. Variations on a single rich chord is played (my favorite piano chord from high school years) throughout by the piano and strings. The trumpet employs a melody of only three notes. The Golden Mean/ Fibonacci series regulates all of the timing aspects - giving the piece a slow moving life.
The last movement "Lesson on the Family" is a text/game based piece for the group. I learned how to compose these pieces from my retreat with Pauline Oliveros (Deep Listening Institute) a few years back and love these approaches. They are pure concept! I limited the musical materials to be the same as the first movement but with several new interactive loops. The family members must negotiate and respond to each other throughout. The piece will expose the functioning (or disfunctioning) of their collaborative relationships and balances choice, limitation and freedom of expression and reparté.
