Minerva Road Ain’t What It Used to Be—It’s More

 Wagner longa, Ars brevis

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Anybody can play weird, that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple - awesomely simple - that’s creativity.

— Charles Mingus

Bringing Down Along the Canal to Minerva Road home to the saxophones required a measure of tedious work. Going from the source pitch level to the transposing instruments made for some bad orthography—unnecessarily eye-crossing accidentals (especially for the E-flat instruments—alto and baritone saxophones.) Hence the need to go measure by measure, solving for eye-friendlier enharmonic equivalents. In comparison, the comparable task for the Rahsaan Roland Kirk Fantasia went exceptionally smoothly. For both pieces an octave displacement was helpful here or there. Now, I have sent the scores of the Four Quartets, Op. 126 (an elder opus number re-purposed) to Matthew. We shall see what he thinks.