Roots

I recently wrote about meta-composing, a path combining many threads of my experience as a musical thinker, composer, and teacher. Funny how things settle into our minds. That seemed, and is, a major realization, a turning point in my compositional career and life. After I posted that, a college classmate and fellow Governor’s School of North Carolina alum wrote a comment on the blog, excited about what I’d written and suggesting that I bring it to our college class reunion next year (45!) What a great idea, I replied, since I’m already working on a version of the piece for accordion (which my spouse plays), trumpet (I’m taking up the trumpet again: I used to play trumpet in college, and it’s what took me to the Governor’s School, exposing me to modern music against a background of not knowing anything about it… the experience that turned me into a composer), and voice (our child Eva is a quite good singer). We could easily travel to NC in early summer next year and do the piece there!

Well, more has now occurred to me – as is so often the case, during meditation – making it even more chilling to me how things come together. My old friend Andy, a very good guitarist, bassist, drum builder and songwriter, lives in the mountains of NC now, not more than 3 or 4 miles from where the commenting friend lives. I have to this day a visual memory of the instant that my desire to have a life of “making crazy music”. (I still describe it that way, though my music edged more and more toward the refinement of classical influences for a long while.) And the crazy music I had in mind was either to be Andy and me doing the kind of wild stuff we did in music practice rooms in the middle of the night, akin to drum/space in a Grateful Dead show, or modern classical music of the sort I’d been exposed to at the Governor’s School. Things like Stockhausen, Ives, Ligeti: really experimental stuff that lit my fuse. 

Now I realize that Andy could be the singer for this if Eva can’t make the trip. It might take a little cajoling, for Andy is more of a singer-songwriter who has not been doing the crazy stuff we used to do. But I know he could easily do it well, for I’ve heard him come pretty close already.

This spring, I put on a concert of my music where I teach, at the Longy School of Music of Bard College, and I called it Roots: From the Ground Up. But the roots I referred to there are not the same roots as those I’ve described so far. Those roots are blues, bluegrass, rock and roll: I gradually “became myself” over the years, incorporating more and more of those influences until finally composing a piece called Blue Bang that starts with experimental-style modern music and evolves to close with a modified 16-bar blues using a real, live blues pianist. As I mentioned in my remarks at the concert, I knew then that I wasn’t really representing all my roots, but Blue Bang did in fact merge two. 

Roots merge to form the trunk of a tree.

So now I’m off, really back to my roots, almost all of them.  Playing trumpet, writing music that seriously experiments in order to bring an invigorating experience to everyone involved.