My First Geode

The Rant

WORLD PREMIERE! Brandon Blankenship, bassoon. Mivos Quartet. 
Violet Light, by Rex Isenberg.

Notes:
It's about a composer and bassoonist Deolus "Decie" Husband and Edwin Alexander who met at MSM in the 70's . They lived great lives together, active in the Washington Heights community, and the NYC music community. The composer was writing a piece for the bassoonist and a string quartet, but they both died of AIDS before the piece could ever be finished. In memory, their family established a fund to sponsor composers at MSM, which Rex then won, not knowing anything of their story until after he had already graduated. He then met a mutual friend, who told him all of the husbands' story. Rex, a gay composer himself, felt so moved to write a piece with the same orchestration, allowing their story to live forever. Their love story seems to be told through each movement, meeting in flamboyant gestures, sweeping, harp-like scales, heart flutters in trills. In Merengue, their life was a fun dance, sometimes more difficult and less fun, but they always did it together. And finally, their loss of each other to the AIDS crisis. The fight against the disease in the last section of Elegy, and the final call to be remembered in the very last measure. 

Brandon M Blankenship