Remembering The Orpheus of Lowell

I dreamt of absurdly small cheese crackers marketed as Tweez-Its.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

the thorny hard regret of rocks.
— Jack Kerouac from “Mexico City Blues”

The origin of this piece was a lovely occasion on which flutist/conductor Orlando Cela & I took a cup of coffee together at La Pâtisserie in Winchester (in fact, I don’t think that fine establishment employs the accent circonflexe, but we don’t hold it against them.) I believe it was likely the first time we two had gotten together since my stroke, so the first part of the conversation was mostly my reporting on my experience and condition. In the course of the conversation, as I’d assured Orlando that my recovery is going well, and that I had returned to composing, we spoke of his work. Later, he asked me, “What do you think of Jack Kerouac?” “Love him,” I said. At Wooster, some friends and I had Reading Evenings, and for some of these I read out from The Dharma Bums. Orlando was organizing a concert as part of the celebration of the Kerouac Centenary in Lowell (the poet’s birthplace) and the Lowell Chamber Orchestra was commissioning new pieces for the program, featuring Soprano Rose Hegele. I would be at liberty to select whatever texts I wished, and to score the accompaniment from a Pierrot ensemble. My first inclination was to go ahead and use the full complement, however I was encouraged to prune, if I felt I could, so (reckoning that the flute and clarinet occupied the treble clef sufficiently) I sacrificed the violin, so to speak. The text consists of an opening line of my own modest, febrile invention: “Oh! for an instrument of lemon peel and steel.”

there then follow five complete or partial choruses (I had originally selected seven, but that proved more text than the desired scale of the piece would accommodate) from Mexico City Blues, and the accompaniment scored as follows: 

(1.) XLIII. [tutti]

(2.) CCXXVI [bass cl & vc]

(3.) CCVIII. [alto fl & pf]

(4.) from XXV. [alto fl, cl & vc]

(5.) from XC. [alto fl & cl — then vc & pf]

The piece concludes with the curtain line from the first chapter of The Dharma Bums: “It’s all the same thing,” I heard my voice say in the void that’s highly embraceable during sleep.

The event itself was enormously gratifying. I was one of a number of composers and performers receiving questions prior to the concert proper. I was mildly relieved that my reference to Orpheus in the title did not provoke a question of whether I considered Lowell to be the Underworld. My piece, superbly executed, was well received by the performers and the audience alike. It is the nearest I have come to feeling like a well-respected celebrity. Entirely an experience for which I remain grateful.