A Landmark of the Before Time

 Saying that something is a thing has become a thing.

(Thing. Thing a thong.)

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Lemme tell ya, them guys ain’t dumb:

Maybe get a blister on your little finger, maybe get a blister on your thumb.

— Mark Knopfler, “Money for Nothing”

Even though neither of the pieces I submitted was selected, I very much enjoyed twice participating in the Rapido! competition, because (especially prior to my stroke, when my stamina was perforce greater) I exulted in the exercise of composing to a short deadline. In both cases I wrote music I could take pride in having created. For the first of the two contests in which I contested, I wrote the Dances of Exhilaration and Nonchalance, which are the subject of this post. I see in another post that at first I dubbed them Dances Defiant. As the point of the contest is not knowing the instrumentation until the starting gun goes off, there is no direct preparation for the contest, per se, but to prepare generally, I decided I would compose a piece for myself in rapid order, and the result, dedicated to my artist wife, was Deep Breath, a piece for clarinet solo accompanied by strings. My hope was to perform it myself, collaborating with a local group. While my stroke has dramatically interfered with that intention, I do hope both to play it myself someday, and that the première of the piece may not wait upon my own rapprochement with the clarinet. I certainly wrote it to be just the sort of piece I should enjoy playing particularly as it is a sort of musical love letter. I promised Maria long ago that I would write her a piece. My first thought was a piece for piano trio, but I have never yet made the acquaintance of a trio with whom I might collaborate, and I didn’t want the piece written for my wife to sit on the shelf. Well, to be sure, Deep Breath has rested a good while on the shelf itself, but as I composed the piece, my hope was better. It is worth pointing out that the inherent musical inadequacies of the MIDI export are in a couple of cases aggravated in this piece (not only the actual sound of a passage of string tremolo but passages of rhythmic freedom in the solo part which the machine is incapable of handling artfully.)

Before wrapping this post up, the only major loose end would be, the second piece I wrote for the Rapido! contest, The Mask I Wore Before.