Wheeo! EE-YAH! Go, go, go!  Blow, man, blow!  In your Saturday-night suit... "EE-de-lee-yah!"  Drums hammering, rolling crash... didn't give a damn about anything.  He had it and everybody knew he had it.  It was a mad crowd, all urging him to hold it up and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself up from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor.  Stay with it, man, roared the foghorn voice.  Kicking his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs.  Drawing his breath for another blast - Chinese chords shuddering...raised the horn and blew high, wide, and screaming in the air...a long quivering crazy laugh.  Just cries, cries, "Baugh" and down to "Beep!" and up to "EEEEE!"   He tried everything, up, down, sideways, upside-down, and finally he fell back in somebody's arms and everybody pushed around and yelled, "Yes! Yes! He blowed that one!""  Dean wiped himself with his handkerchief and said it was pretty good. 


IV. Saturday Night Suit

[I woke up as] the sun was reddening;  the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was.  I was just somebody else,  a haunted life of a ghost.  I was half-way across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.


III. Red Afternoon

New York in two days.  Lord, I ain't never been there and they tell me it's a real jumpin town but I ain't got no cause complainin where I am.  Yah, what good's a ball, life's too sad to be ballin all the time.  Shheee-it!  I ain't got no money and I don't care tonight.  Dig this guy, man!  Dig the way he sits there and don't move a bone and just balls that jack and can talk all night while he's doing it.  Ah, man, the things, the things I could - I wish - oh, yes.  Let's go, let's not stop - go now!  Yes!  Ah man, don't worry.  Everything is perfect and fine.


II. New York Two Days

The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American Night.  Ah, but do we know time ...because the only people for me are the mad ones, mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous  roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

LIGHT BENDING FORWARD

by Patrick Clark

soprano
bass clarinet
double-bass
accordion

I. Mad Swirl
II. New York in Two Days
III. Red Afternoon
IV. Saturday Night Suit
V. The Race


Notes

"On the Road swings to the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat... and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion."

These notes, from the back cover of the Penguin edition of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, convey the importance of Kerouac's contribution to American literature during the Beat Generation.  These songs are settings of my own selection of passages from the novel.  The alternatingly ecstatic and haunting pumping of the supporting instruments (representing the Moriarty/Paradise duality) most closely approximates the inspiration I draw personally from On the Road.  In the soprano writing, I have attempted to capture the vernacular spirit of the euphoric and manic in the text with rhythms natural to the words.


I. Mad Swirl (But What About...)

Wet Crimson on Chiricahua 
Tone Poem for Symphonic Orchestra
Illinois Symphony, Alastair Willis, conductor

May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, 
leading to the most amazing view.
May your mountains rise into and above the clouds, 
May your rivers flow without end, meandering
through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,
past temples and castles and poets' towers 
into a dark primeval forest 
where tigers belch and monkeys howl, 
through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down 
into a desert of red rock, blue mesas,
domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, 
and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm 
where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, 
where deer walk across the white sand beaches, 
where storms come and go 
as lightning clangs upon the high crags, 
where something more beautiful and more full of wonder 
than your deepest dreams 
waits for you _ 
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls. 
-Edward Abbey

Wet Crimson on Chiricahua (Nashville Symphony)

it is coming, es muss sein, a major snowfall and the magical world that ensues.  "It's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard snow's a gonna fall..."
Peter Henderson, piano

Snow Coming

April is the cruelest month, breeding	 
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing	 
memory and desire, stirring	 
dull roots with spring rain...
- T.S. Eliot

Même (from Music for Scuba Diving)

Sí ch'io vorrei morire (Maurizio Moro)-trans. by Charles Marshall
Lie with me beneath the olive tree
            and there my love give me your mouth’s dark flower;
            let your tongue explore mine like the bee,
            leave upon my lips a smear of nectar.
            Bend your body's bough, let down your hair,
          allow yourself to ripen in my warmth;
            urge my hands to ramble in your garden,
            encourage me to try its curious scent. 
            Mouth, kisses, tongue – Oh let me die! 
            and as the bliss builds to the brink of pain 
            and your soul begins to rage and sigh,
            perish with you in this shadowed heaven 
            where the silver leaves shall let us lie
            all night, hidden from the wild moon.    


Anima dura (from Music for Scuba Diving)

sensuous fear...
Painting  by artist Debra Hurd

Valentine (from Music for Scuba Diving)

Voices calling from a thousand years ago...

In nomine a 16 (from Music for Scuba Diving)

Patrick David Clark was born in St. Louis, MO, and is a composer and conductor, currently adjunct professor of music theory and composition at the University of Missouri.  Patrick is conductor and musical director of the Jefferson City Symphony Orchestra and frequent guest conductor for the Columbia Civic Orchestra and Mizzou New Music Ensemble, and was musical director for The Little Theater’s production of Bye Bye Birdie, Rent, The Odd Couple, and Peter Pan.  Most recently Patrick has been commissioned to write an orchestral work, FE700°C, for the Illinois Symphony Orchestra in celebration of their 20th anniversary, and Snow Coming for St. Louis Symphony pianist Peter Henderson, performed as part of the Sheldon Concert Hall’s 100th anniversary, and a chamber work for The Odyssey Chamber Concerts Series in Columbia, MO.  Orchestral works by Patrick have been programmed by the Seattle Symphony, San Antonio Symphony, Nashville Symphony, Spokane Symphony, and the Nederlands Ballet Orkest.  Chamber works by Patrick have been performed and recorded in The Netherlands and Israel.  Dr. Clark has worked with American Voices as Composition faculty on several trips to both Kurdistan and Thailand.  Patrick holds his Bachelor’s degree in composition from MU where he studied with Thomas McKenney and John Cheetham.  Patrick earned his Master’s degree from the University of Arizona, studying with Dan Asia, and his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University, studying with Arthur Gottschalk, Paul Cooper and Ellsworth Milburn.  Patrick is a Tanglewood Fellow (1997), participated as a composer at June in Buffalo and studied with Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague in Holland on a Netherlands-America Foundation Grant (Fulbright). Patrick was one of eight composers selected to write a work for Alarm Will Sound, performed in July of 2011 as part of the Mizzou International Composers Festival.  The resulting composition, Ptolemy’s Carousel, and many other works by the composer can be heard at: http://soundcloud.com/patrick-david-clark



Patrick David Clark

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