Better, and Back to Work...
Last night I took care of a project that has needed doing for quite some time now, a listing of the "McKay" folio, which is a sheaf of formative Uncle Dave compositions on matching 22-stave Alpheus orchestral paper. At Christmas in 1977, David Moser McKay, my composition professor at the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati, purchased a 100 sheets of this paper. As I was one of five students in the class, I was issued 20 sheets, of which I now only have seven. It took me years to find them all and put them together again, and then years more to make out the list below.
There are 28 formative compositions and one which I would consider "non-formative," as by 1987 I was finally on my way to composing on the page in a manner that one would consider "scoring" as opposed to making sketches that only I could understand. The earliest pieces are from January 1978, and continue to about the end of the school year in June - I played my first student composition recital on May 17, although on that occasion I programmed pieces written out in another notebook. The whole of "The Call of Ctulhu" appears on a single sheet used in January 1981; fugitive sketches from 1982 and 1984 also show up in various spots on pages not used in 1978. Finally "Humlet" from 1987 is jotted into a corner on one page, and that shows the latest use of any of these papers.
As is typical with my sketch pages, the intended length of works can be radically different. In this case, several fragments consist of only a measure or two, and most of these are found in the 1984 group. "The Call of Cthulhu" works out to 180 measures plus, but is crammed onto just 10 staves with a ton of repeat signs. Whereas the first of two sketches relating to the earliest of the pieces, "Ricercare in G minor," is very uneconomically spread over something like 12 staves but only achieves like 6 meaures. With me, I have a "name that tune" relationship to my sketches, and only need 2-3 beats of an idea to prompt what it was that I was aiming at. I really hope that I don't die before I have a chance to suss them all out. So a 6 measure sketch contains, really, a wealth of information as to the destiny of an entire piece, whereas by itself it might only play a few seconds in actual length.
Orchestral
The Call of Cthulhu (January 1981). This is a complete piano skecth of an orchestral piece, written to please my friends in Dementia Precox who were all confirmed Lovecraftians. That Metallica have since usurped my title is no big deal to me, as my piece is better than theirs.
Saturnalia (December 1982)
This part of the middle is another orchestral piece, as scored for piano, of which the rest exists on other standard size pages. This is just an instance where I ran out of room on a page, and ended up drifting onto part of a folia sheet for a few measures before resuming onto another.
Both pieces are complete in sketch, and in January 1989 I used a four-track and an electronic keyboard to create simulations of the finished works, though somehow managed to lose the tape of "The Call of Cthulu." If anyone was monitoring the Art Damage program in 1989 and happened to capture this, I'd sure like to have it back.
Chamber
Ricercare in G minor (January-February 1978) scored for flute, clarinet, violin , cello & piano. At the time I was confusing the meaning of the term "ricercare" with that of "fugato," and that's what this is - a fugue-like piece that really isn't a fugue. Studying this score recently I discovered that the reason that this didn't get very far (11 measures total) is that there is a flaw in the subject; subtract one unnecessarily repeated quarter-note and the texture would develop comfortably as it should. But I didn't notice it at the time, and I'm not so sure this little student piece has much of a future - it's mainly one of those things that make a composer go "D'oh!"
Piano Quartet (January 1978) scored for 2 violins, cello & piano. This single movement work originally took up another folia sheet entire, so that accounts for one missing folia. Unfortunately though, that means I have a phrase indicating a turnback to music that is no longer extant, followed by a coda. The coda is based out of the first section of the piece, so I might be able to use that as a clue to at least reconstruct Section A, and then replace Section B altogether.
String Quartet No. 1 (February 1978). My first short and pithy, Webernian string quartet, just two little fragments of it. But the finished product was not much more than that.
Quintet (March 1978) scored for the rather interesting combination of four guitars and double bass. This was a single movement piece, and I'm not so sure it got farther than the 15 measures that appear here. Obviously a realization of it now would involve four electric guitars, bass and probably a drummer.
Sunflowers Op. 3 (April 1978) scored for solo flute, and dedicated to Michelle Starosky, a cute hippie chick who played the flute that I had a crush on in high school. This was sort of intended as "Density 21.5 Junior," although at age sixteen I didn't have the chops to pull it off. Some of this was recirculated into "Ancient Decoration," a flute piece written in 1985 for John Ruzsa, who, like Michelle, never played it, although I did hear that one in Torrance in 1994 or so when a friend from Tower came over with her flute and read it for me.
Synthetic Construction No. 1 (April 1978) and Synthetic Construction No. 3 (April-May 1978) for violin, cello & piano. These two pieces, with a third which exists in a revised version in a differerent notebook, constitute my original "Opus 1." They were supposed to be structured like haiku - first movement, 5 measures, second movement, 7, last movement 5.
This is the back page of the folio. At one time it was affixed, along with three pieces of purple ribbon, to a black cardboard backing that held it and a now missing score page for the first two movements. All I have for the first movement is a piano patch of 2 measures.
I heard this work played by an SCPA student trio at the time it was written. Violin was Laura Hazelbaker, I can remember what the kid who played the cello looked like but am drawing a blank on the name - he also played in the percussion group at school. Pianist was my buddy Stu Schwartz, and the only one in sympathy with me during this tryout.
I don't remember anything about the readthru of the first movement. But of the second, which is scored for violin and cello alone, I remember quite a bit. A lady who was visiting from a religious school, perhaps even God's School and Bible College in Cincinnati, came in and heard this one. It was a Ruggles-like canonic piece, highly chromatic and not centered in a key but discreetly avoiding most harmonic clashes. It had kind of a hurry-up ending prompted by the predetermined length of seven measures, but I thought that, for me, this little composition was a really good one.
After listening to it, the lady said, "It reminds me of trees and flowers and bees and plants - outside things in God's world." The first comment ever made about my music that wasn't something like "David, could you please stop making that racket?" I was transfixed; I thanked her for her comment, and then she left.
Then the bubble burst. The others just doubled over in hysterics after her departure. McKay then explained that see, this is what people think about contemporary music - they just don't get it.
I was crushed. I thought that her comment was genuine - still DO, in fact. They thought that she was confused by what she heard because of her culture, a nice little white lady from a Christian college. I perceieved that, yes - she WAS a little confused by what she heard, but not very, and she was willing to accept it for what it was, and likes it.
It was all downhill from there. In the third movement - just 5 bars - the tempo was agonizingly slow, and no two players are heard at one time, with lots of silence. My models for this kind of very short composition should be obvious to many; Webern's Op. 7 or 11, Cage's Pastorales, etc. But the violinist and cellist had no experience in, or respect for, this type of hyper-condensed composition. The giggled all the way through the silences and they'd break up howling when they had to make a sound. Stu tried to shush them up, but it was no use.
McKay was furious - not with them, but with me. He asked me, three times - "David, do you consider this an acceptable performance of your piece?" He was doing the right thing as my instructor, encouraging me to speak up for my work and insists that they play it right. But I was simply too shattered by the experience to continue, and said yes. Mr. McKay came out of it figuring that I didn't have the balls it took to be a composer.
The folia containing the third movement is complete, but the black cardboard backing at one point became wet and bled all over this score. It is VERY hard to read, but it's there. In a re-scoring of the original, I would simply magnify the time values to aid reading, which I should've done in the first place, but didn't know to. I have just a two measure patch to the piano part for the first movement, and nothing more.
This is getting kind of long. Think I'll need to "part 2" it, as there's laundry to be done and Bengals to watch.
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com