Brief Interlude

Sometimes you take the hiatus, sometimes the hiatus takes you.

– Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

We are our own slaves, not of the British. This should be engraved on our minds. The whites cannot remain if we do not want them. If the idea is to drive them out with firearms, let every Indian consider what precious little profit Europe has found in these.

— Mahatma Gandhi

Work on The Heart was briefly interrupted by the mechanical work of re-building the score for my Op. 42, a two-part choral setting of Ps. 34 which I wrote for use at First Congo in Woburn 22 years ago. That was back when I was still using Finale ... so that by now, I had no soft copy of it. But, I needed a Sibelius file to send to Lux Nova Press, as my old friend Houston Dunleavy plans to have his choir sing it. It is a great feeling, to revisit a piece you wrote 22 years before, and to find that you still own it entirely. Houston and I were graduate composers together at the University at Buffalo (that dark, dark place) and we were participants in the generally neglected new music ensemble, The Fires of Tonawanda. In the unlikely and sonically hostile venue of The Calumet Club, Houston sang what was then a setting of Oscar Wilde’s “The Dole of the King’s Daughter” — a piece which has since morphed into the vn/cl/pf trio, Night of the Weeping Crocodiles. The impossibility of presenting that piece to a club full of people jealously reserving their attentions for their cocktails, nachos and Molson Golden ale is actually one of the more pleasant stories I could tell you about our Buffalo experience