I'm not a professional composer, nor do I play one on TV, but I did major in music with an emphasis in composition, literature, and theory. Over the years I've composed popular songs and classical pieces in several forms.
The Fractious Mind is—or rather will be—a kind of symphony. I'm planning five movements. The first two are complete, and I've posted them on Dilettante. The part titles are:
- The Persistence of Grief
- A Spell of Irrepressible Exuberance
- The Resolution of Cognitive Dissonance
- A Peripatetic Imagination
- A Habit of Magical Thinking
TFM began as a string quartet. I'd also planned to give that five movements, but I've rearranged them considerably. “The Persistence of Grief” was originally called “Elegy” and placed third. On September 11, 2001, I began orchestrating it. That was more or less all I could manage to do that day.
The quartet's scherzo made the leap next and became “A Spell of Irrepressible Exuberance” The third movement is all new, and will be a rough kind of semi-fugal thing with lots of modal passages. The remaining two movements will make use of old material from the quartet, but in vastly altered form.
The New World, also incomplete, is a chamber work for piano, viola, and English horn. It will have four movements. Only the first is complete, and it, too, is on my Dilettante profile. The part titles are:
- Voyage
- Revelry
- Hardship
- Thanksgiving
TNW is something of a rarity: a piece that didn't begin with a snippet of something I composed long ago. On the contrary, I completed the first movement just over a year ago. The piece has a dual program. It depicts both/either a physical journey and/or an emotional one.
As you can see, I like programmatic titles. I think it's my writerly instinct, and more specifically my taste for fiction. As I discovered in a poetry workshop I took a couple of years ago, I try to make a story out of everything. Also, it occurred to me that if writers used the kind of genre titles composers use (Symphony No. 1 in G, String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat, etc.), the shelves at Barnes & Noble would be filled with books called Novel No. 1, Poetry Anthology No. 6, Self-Help Book No. 14, and so on.
I did, however, use genre titles in Minutiae, a suite of short pieces.
- Petite Prelude
- Minute Minuet
- Slight Sarabande
- Miniature Mazurka
- Foreshortened Forlane
- Wee Waltz
- Insignificant Intermezzo
- Poky Pavane
- Compact Canzonetta
- Meager March
- Baby Bourree
- Tiny Tarantella
Many years ago, in an experimental phase, I wrote a suite called The Bitonal Ballroom. It consisted of a few dance-like pieces for piano. Each hand played in a different key. The pieces were very short (mercifully so, I'm sure), and they all had pseudo-clever, mostly alliterative titles. (I remember “Minuet in the Middle of the Road” and “Bourree with Betty Boop”; the latter incorporated Ms. Boop's characteristic “boop-boop-a-doop” motive. What can I say? I was all of nineteen at the time.)
Decades later, I revisited the idea, and even salvaged a snippet or two of music for Minutiae. I abandoned bitonality (you're welcome), but I stuck with the idea of keeping the pieces short. Along the way I played a bit with form. There's a tiny sonata allegro movement in there somewhere, as well as a passacaglia, a simple round, and a fugue.
Tin Pan Alley is another of those long-gestation pieces. Its genesis was a piano sonata I wrote in college. I must have run across that Dvořák quote, the one where he predicted that African-American music would would become the foundation of American classical music, because for a while there, I was playing around a lot with jazz and ragtime. I began the sonata with ragtime in mind, and until recently I called it Ragtime. The first version was—surprise!—awful. I returned to it in the late ’nineties and reworked it extensively. I’ve decided to call it Tin Pan Alley, because very little of it is truly ragtime. I think it sounds much more like a Midwestern white boy's take on jazz and ragtime.
- A Brisk Walk
- A Lonely Morning
- A Blue Funk
