New Age Dancing 7 - Dance Music, Mind, Body & Soul.

New Age Dancing 7

EARTH JOURNEYS
What These Pieces Are:
Earth Journeys are variations on the tune Happy Birthday. When I started them in earnest in 1990 I decided to use them as a way of learning to work with audio samples in addition to wave form synthesis that I had been doing since 1967. Up until 1990 I hadn’t learned the intricacies of sample technology, so I made this series as a way of solving that inadequacy. They have evolved as a musical version (almost) of Joseph Cornell assemblages. The pieces are also mini-portraits of each person. I try, In various ways, to make each variation a  relevant aural reference for the person to whom it’s dedicated. For composers this usually means including a sample from their own work. Such is the case for Laurie Spiegel, Steve Drews, Stanley Silverman, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Curran and other composers on the list. For others, I try to include a recognizable sound like the airplane motors for Steve Poleskie who made art by sky writing over various cities. In other cases, simply the aura of the variation will suggest a period or an event from the person’s life as in the doo-wop quote I use for my old high school friend Sam Gorovitz or the quote from Verdi for musicologist and Verdi specialist, David Rosen. Throughout the series I use the birthday tune in many guises. It’s presented backwards, upside down, upside down and backwards, or as a sequence of pitches without the familiar rhythm, etc., so the tune itself may be unrecognizable in many of these variations. In others it is very obvious.
How They Came About:
In 1977 or ‘78 I had a dream about a calendar. It was open to some month. Various people, some I recognized, some I didn’t, started popping their heads out of the calendar’s day boxes. It was just like the closing sequence of the old Rowan and Martin LAUGH-IN TV Show. Stars popped their heads in and out of boxes delivering one-liners. As the visual scanned toward the end of the month, a haunting beautiful music could be heard, some of the most interesting I’d ever encountered. It struck me, because I rarely have dreams with audible music. Although I “knew” the music was “Happy Birthday” it in fact sounded nothing like the song we all know. As if in response to this strange occurance, Lily Tomlin’s smiling face appeared out of the next to last day on the calendar. I started writing birthday party variations for Trudy Borden, whose birthday falls on the next to the last day of August. I invited the Hocketts (a family in Ithaca famous for academic excellence and their love of music) and a few other friends to come share in performing our newly composed variations on Happy Birthday for Trudy for several years just for fun. These early variations are mostly by the late Chaz Hockett and me for clarinet (Chaz Hockett), bassoon (Don Robbins), violin (Nancy Robbins) and cello (Carrie Hockett).
Then, in 1990 I received a letter from composer/poet Ann Silsbee’s husband Robert asking for a personal story of remembrance to present to Ann on her 60th birthday. I thought of the dream and made one of the variations for her using computer/synthesizer technology, this time with more than a “party” approach. Ann passed away in 2003 as have several others on the variations list, so I have called the whole collection EARTH JOURNEYS to signify that birthdays can be thought of as a birth into another dimension whether it’s coming to or departing from an earthly existence.


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