Blog: Music from Long Ago
Music from Long Ago
Meditation for Clarinet & Piano (1976)
In the summer
of 1968, in what seemed like a huge room, sunlight filtered in as I, notebook in hand, approached the stage.
The notebook contained sketches from the most recent 12 months or so.
I remember the moment when at the age of 10, I had played on the piano- without thinking- something I wanted to hear and feel again.
From the misery of my first six years of music lessons, I remember enjoying only two little pieces, one by John Thompson, the other by C.P.E. Bach.
Given my intense dislike of music lessons and the piano, it surprises me that composing was an early creative outlet.
In the five years before that, I wrote a couple of short stories, which my father "corrected." One was a satirical piece about the brother of Noah. It might have been called "Moah's Bark is Worse than his Bite."
At the age of five, I proudly presented my "concoction" to assembled guests. I called it "Liquid Pizza." I guess words were important to me even then.
My father frowned on my culinary experiments. "It was not right for a boy to play in the kitchen."
My dad, a cartoonist then humor writer for print and radio told me my comic strip, "Twilight Man," was not an acceptable title.
It probably was more than a decade later that I once again enjoyed writing very short humorous stories. Dad turned out to be a good writing teacher who needed monthly filler pieces for some of his publications. He had become a very small time publisher by then.
In 1976, my sophomore year at Juilliard, I was a bassoon major. After a few failed attempts to get a composition teacher, I finally got some lessons with Stanley Wolf. The "Meditation for Clarinet & Piano" was one of two pieces I brought to my first lesson. A composition student introduced me to other comp majors, "This is Ken. His new piece is like 'The Rite of Spring' for clarinet & piano."
Mr. Wolf did not think much of my piece. Being eager to please, I completely reworked it for my second lesson. As with the first version, my manuscript was in ink, spiral bound.
Mr. Wolf liked it a little more but decided that since I had already copied it into ink, presenting it spiral bound, that he preferred us going on to a piece at an earlier stage in the compositional process.
I do not remember finishing any pieces during my months with Mr. Wolf. I do remember that he taught me a lot.
He sent me to David Diamond, saying Diamond's process, especially the interest in counterpoint was closer to mine than Wolf's.
Yes I had become fascinated with renaissance counterpoint although it was years before that translated into being one of my central techniques.
So the version here recorded is the one after I had had the grand total of one composition lesson- after nine years of teaching myself and a wonderful year of studying Palestrina style counterpoint with Phil Lui, a doctoral student. (I did take two comp classes plus a year of theory in HS.... perhaps my ego was too inflated to learn anything from those teachers. I had already, by the age of 15, conducted the senior wind ensemble in one of my works at a Semi-Annual Concert.)
Phil and his wife, Ping, a magnificent pianist reconnected with me and Beth years later. They had started a successful software company. Phil remarked that he knew very few composers. "Surprising," I said. Phil explained: when we were composition students, I knew lots of composers. All the ones I've keep in touch with no longer so much as touch manuscript paper.
I guess I was too stubborn to stop. I was still trying to figure it out.
