Favorite Things Redux
/Last Monday, I answered a question that a podcaster asked of someone I follow: What are your five favorite creative works? That was a toughie.
But then, also, I thought — what are my five favorites of my creative works? Even though the choices here are way more limited than the universe of creative works, it was just as hard to pick these.
William Blake’s Inn
Having just remembered Nancy Willard on what would have been her 90th birthday, I think this should come as no surprise to you. This song cycle, based on Willard’s Newbery–Award–winning A Visit to William Blake’s Inn, holds first place in my heart among all my works. It invites the listener/viewer to enter a strange, magical place and return — literally a Hero’s Journey. I think the Epilogue is one of the finest things I’ve ever written. (score)
Fragments from a Mass in C
This one is kind of ironic. It’s the remnants of a mass I wrote decades ago when I was just stretching my wings, and if I still allowed the public to see all of it, you would nod sympathetically at all those ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS.
The original had all the movements of a mass except the Credo:
Qui tollis
Quoniam tu solus
[Credo]
As I was pulling up all my music in the ill-fated Finale and exporting every piece to a .musicxml file that Dorico could open, I decided to revisit those movements of the mass that worked. I tweaked a few things, especially the role of the soprano soloist in the Agnus Dei, and “published” it as Fragments of a Mass in C. As a piece of absolute music, it’s quite nice. (And for a beautiful staging suggestion for the Agnus Dei, see here.)
Seven Dreams of Falling: Dream One
This one breaks my heart. Back in 2014, a friend introduced me to her friend, the poet/playwright C. Scott Wilkerson. He had a play, Seven Dreams of Falling, which had not only been produced but published, and he was interested in turning it into an opera. Sure, why not? and we jumped in.
He would send me text, I would do my usual sweat-and-tears thing, and bam! we’d have a scene.
We had finished Dream One when Scott had to hit pause to finish the work on his PhD. We never got back to it. He was busy, I was busy, but soon we’d be back at the ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS.
But we didn’t. He moved on to other projects, I was starting up 3 Old Men, the whole life thing.
Then two summers ago, Scott suffered a stroke and died. There would be no more libretto from my author. I recently began considering whether I should pick up the pen — after okaying that with his estate — but when I picked up my copy of Seven Dreams (which I hadn’t read since we started the project), I was shocked to find that though I remembered the script being in seven “dreams,” like the opera, it was not. It was multiple scenes that bore little resemblance to the structure of Dream One, for example.
So my one and only grand opera is also a fragment. (I sense a theme here.) But what a glorious fragment it is!
Dream One (18:19)
1. “Let us joyfully gaze” – Chorus | piano score (pdf) | mp3 | orchestral mp3
2. “Fly and fall” – Daedalus, Chorus | piano score (pdf) | mp3 | orchestral mp3
3. “I am alone” – Icarus | piano score (pdf) | mp3 | orchestral mp3
4a. “Hark, the sound of screaming fans” – Theseus, Daedalus, Ariadne | piano score (pdf) | mp3 | orchestral mp3
4b. “My mother, bored and pampered” – Ariadne, Theseus, Daedalus | piano score (pdf) | mp3 | orchestral mp3
4c. “And what of us”/”Let us joyfully gaze” – Daedalus, Theseus, Ariadne, Chorus | piano score (pdf) | mp3 | orchestral mp3
Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy
Believe it or not, in my ABORTIVE ATTEMPT on this post, I didn’t include my book! I know, incredible. But of course it has to be one of my favorite creative works. Doesn’t it?
The labyrinth
My favorite place on earth. (Sorry, Grand Canyon — but you’re second!) It is serene, it is welcoming, it is comforting. It provides me with inspiration, solace, and celebration.
I began building it on Labor Day, 2008, finished the basic structure in December, and have been improving it ever since: the fire pit, the sculptures at the compass points, the southwest and northeast spots for meditation, the endstones, and the endless, endless maintenance.
Runners-up: “Music!”, the finale of the children’s opera I didn’t win a competiton in Germany with. (Music here, but no text because copyright; essentially the penguins and the opera company sing about how beautiful it is to have music. The steel drums you hear at the end are because the orchestra has been ragging Uncle Otto the whole opera about the cold.) || 3 Old Men, my theme camp originally designed for Burning Man but now a known entity at regional burns around the Southeast. (This should probably be one of my top five, actually.) || Azure Stone (piece for solo violin and piano) | score [pdf] | SoundCloud || and this mug that I made at GHP 40 summers ago.
