About my Marginalia

Now that A Heart So White is completed, and (what was, in many ways, far the harder task) we have a rehearsal schedule agreed upon, I have taken thought for some more music for The King's Chapel program. On one hand, I want to leave ample room for my colleague Pamela Marshall to have as much time as she may wish, on the other I don't want her to feel under any strain to compose in short order.

Yesterday I arranged the Marginalia for C flute, alto flute, violin and horn.

There is an anecdote, quite possibly apocryphal about a conductor, (English, I think) who was rehearsing an orchestra which was having difficulty with Schoenberg's tone-poem Pelleas und Melisande. In an effort to help the orchestra get a handle on the piece, he reportedly exhorted them to think of the music as "Brahms with wrong notes."

On roughly those lines, we might possibly regard my Marginalia, which is simply something of a quasi-canonic chorale, as "Ockeghem with wrong notes." It is the middle piece (a light interlude) in the suite It's all in your head, not that that's a bad place for everything to be, a suite which has yet to see a performance.