Finishing up Fuchsia

“Embalmer’s Almanac.”

– Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

Let’s have everybody claiming college football is the most important thing for America sign up for a shift changing bedpans on a COVID ward.

— Dan Rather

As I have been working on For You, Fuchsia, I am finding it personally an interesting and unusual endeavor. The piece is essentially glosses upon a monody, so part of me feels, “just stay out of the way of the original, and maybe you can’t go wrong” (content with the Ur-text, August Haze, as I am.) Part of my experience, though is a kind of second-guessing, I’ll stop working after a while and think, but is it garbage? Maybe the g-word is a shade harsh, but that’s near the gist. But then, I listen to the extracted sound-file and I’m pleasantly surprised. Once this tone-poem is finished, I shall find it easy to prep the quartet version for the k a rl h e nn i ng Ensemble, and which I shall dub Fuchsia Minor.