As I’m basically taking the week off, and as this recent post set me to thinking of the time of my stroke, I have recalled a touching incident whose memory is dear to me. To begin at the beginning, though, in what I feel certain must have been April of 2016, while riding the Red Line with Becky and Peter Bloom back from a recital at King’s Chapel, Peter invited me to write a piece for Ensemble Aubade, so a piece for flute, viola & harp, and since they often toured the harp part should also be suited to piano, since Mary Jane Rupert could not travel far with her concert harp. If I do not misremember, It was Peter, as we were rolling along the track somewhere between Harvard and Porter Squares, who originated the thought that such a piece might be the first of a set of three. It appears that I first posted of this project in August of that year. The Ensemble have been big fans of the resulting piece, Oxygen Footprint, Op. 138 from the start, and when possible, they take the piece on tour with them. The first extra-Massachusetts performance of the Footprint appears to have been in Jacksonville, Illinois in April of 2017.
A few days after the November 2018 Triad concerts (on which Sudie Marcuse and I performed my Mystic Trumpeter ... one of a number of Triad performances for which I wish recordings had been furnished to me) I suffered my severe stroke. When Becky & Peter came to visit me in rehab, they reported that Aubade had included the Footprint on their November tour and that the piece was well received by audiences. My musical brain was by then beginning to re-awaken, and my friends were a great encouragement. Peter lent me a portable CD player and also brought me some manuscript paper. I greatly appreciated the moral and emotional support. The first use I made of the MS. paper was actually to write a toy piano piece for my friend, David Bohn, Penny Candy. Before long, though, I also made the first sketches for a new piece for Aubade, which I would continue in earnest when I was discharged from rehab, the piece which became Swiss Skis, Op. 161. Before long, Bicycling Into the Sun (Feel the Burn), Op. 163 followed. The latter trios have not as yet burrowed their way into the Ensemble's affections, but I hope their fortunes may improve. One reason I am especially fond of the Burn is, for the coda, I salvaged a lovely bit of music I had originally nominated sand dance. I had composed sand dance for a Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame call from a flute/harp duo. I see this pertinent post. My incorporation of that unloved submission into the Op. 163 may thus be a flagship salvage operation, lest some music of which I thought highly had lapsed forever into obscurity.
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