It's Easier Than You May Think

 What do we do your information?
What do we do your information?
What do we do your information
Ear-lye in the morning?
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

No one would believe me in a sheet.
Robt De Niro, turning down the role of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ.

Work on expanding the Fantasia on a Theme of Rahsaan Roland Kirk scoring
(which I succeeded in finishing yesterday) is the second time I have somehow triggered
a bug in Sibelius: I’d been working on a score, everything is comme il faut and then for some mysterious reason after a copy-&-paste operation, the file no longer plays back. I tried closing and re-opening Sibelius. Tried shutting down and re-starting the laptop. Since I work with
an old version which I bought outright and do not subscribe to the newer version, I get no Customer Support (which was always on the spotty side, really.) Anyway, I reached the
point where I believed the work to be done, though I should really have wanted playback of the
state of the score for my ear to confirm that my fingers did the work I intended.

I am fortunate in having a patient friend who has graciously permitted me to outsource the
occasional MIDI export operation and mine ears appear satisfied.

At an early-ish point in the process, I half-wondered if I might be spoiling an excellent, streamlined piece. But I soon set that nagging down to an echo of (rightly) having discarded my first attempt in the opening statement.  Once I realized that my initial notion was wrong, and the real way forward dawned upon me, the work very nearly did itself. The fact is, too, I love the “fatter” sound. I don’t believe I’ve muddied things. In a way, my gravest concern was that the clarinet solo (in m.263) which answers the flutes and which, when I first composed the piece in December, I presumed that Dan would play, well, I felt a pang that Todd was “taking that away” from Dan, which felt like shabby treatment on my part. Since it’s all pretty mad imitation, though, the easily obvious solution was adding an entrance for the bass clarinet. And I almost immediately decided that the bass clarinet and bassoon should play it in unison and thus we enjoy an entirely new color.

Maybe I’m just a father crowing over a newborn, but I’m apt to feel that Dark Side of the Sun and the Fantasia on a Theme of Rahsaan Roland Kirk are my very best work yet.