From the archive: 11 years ago today

From Cathedral days.

[ 13 Sept 2007 ]

Choir rehearsal again last night. We had a no-frills read-through of Bless the Lord, O My Soul (which I think we may be singing on 7 October).  We also had a good twenty minutes of solid rehearsal on Nuhro, culminating in a complete read-through, with no train-wrecks of note; the piece is slated for 4 November.  I was really pleased with how good it sounded, even last night . . . it sounds more like a piece we worked on a lot last year, and not so much like a piece we haven’t sung together for several months.

Composition has taken a smaller slice of the time-pie lately; but I am still making progress on The Mousetrap . . . got a good jump on a passage described in my notes simply as “unison dance”; and I have been crunching pre-compositional notions for an abstract arabesque section of some three minutes.  Formally (in abstract terms) it is not at any great remove from the Studies in Impermanence, a fanciful composition-qua-stage-improv.  I suppose that what these pieces are for me, is something like this:  with a number of other pieces I’ve written, I have often had a very clear ‘global’ design of the piece, and in a number of these cases, one of the first sections (or at any not, not the last section) of the piece that I’ve composed, was the end, so that I knew ‘where to go’.  So in The Mousetrap, as in the Studies in Impermanence, instead I am engaging in a ‘working from inside the narrative’ perspective, playing with the relation of the parts, keeping a not-entirely-drooping eye on the whole, but largely trusting the ‘formative’ powers of the parts and of the narration.

And, of course, the English horn version of the Studies in Impermanence is on John’s [John Rasmussen] program this Saturday evening.

This past Sunday’s performance of the Alleluia in D, although Ed [Broms] approves and will use it for the radio, will not go on this week!  Stand By . . .