About that mystery piece...

You may recall, as an assiduous reader of this blog, that in organizing a large tub of music manuscripts while on Retreat, I came across a piece in the back of a spiral-bound music notebook that I had no real memory of composing.

It appeared to be a choral piece: there were lyrics scribbled in here and there, but they were barely legible, which suggests that the text was so prominent in my mind at the time that I felt no need to be tidy.

There was a title scribbled at the top: SAMPLER, and that’s all that I had to go on.

Armed with that info and a few words I deciphered from my scrawl, I was actually able to track down the source of the text:

Sampler by Sarah Salter, image from Colonial Williamsburg foundation

This is a needlecraft sampler by 12-year-old Sarah Salter, from 1779. (You can click through the image to read more about it.) Right above the picturesque scene of sheep and trees and birds is a moralistic text: "Swift as the sun revolve the day we hasten to the dead, Slaves to the wind we puff away and to the ground we tread."

Just one of those cheery 18th-c. reminders that we are as dust. I don’t remember why it appealed to me other than its aphoristic tidiness. At any rate, I apparently tried to set it to music in a wobbly canonic setting, and apparently I did so in this century, since the first part of the notebook is given over to sketches for William Blake’s Inn, which I didn’t start serious work on until 2003, when Nancy Willard gave me permission to set her book to music.

Here’s the point: Last night I was the guest speaker in a Zoom call with Gary Gute’s class on creativity at the University of Northern Iowa, where I fielded some very perceptive questions from the students. (They are using Lichtenbergianism as a text!) At one point I asked which of the Lichtenbergian Precepts was my “favorite” or go-to, and I said that both ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS and AUDIENCE guided my work. I related how, in the past, I would post my compositional attempts over at dalelyles.com and keep my audience up to date as I progressed through the various levels of my incompetence.

So let’s do that here. I clearly never finished the piece, and it is encrusted with my usual mistakes that a “real” composer would never make in their ABORTIVE ATTEMPT. For example, the opening phrase: Is it modal? Is it minor? Should that G be a G# or even an A? What’s with that odd central section? Can one piece accommodate both bog-standard V-of-V harmonization and the dizzying chromaticism of the end? Stay tuned.

Have a gander: SAMPLER | score | mp3

Now you can follow along as I try to see whether I can make this thing work.