Tortoiseshell Music Home of composer Nathan Curtis

Score: 

Concertstuck-cc.pdf

The Three Situational Sketches were exercises in broadening my compositional horizons, so to speak. Usually, when I work on composing, I seek out a specific location: my desk, a piano in a practice room, a secluded corner of a park. In these sketches, however, I tried to reverse the process, looking for opportunities to compose wherever I found myself, whatever the situation. This shook up my compositional routine in many ways: it forced me to compose without preparation, to write away from any musical instrument or other form of auditory feedback, and, in these cases, to form complete musical ideas in a short period of time. These have proven to be very valuable skills, even when I follow my usual routine.

Perhaps appropriately, I did not initially set out to shake up my modus operandi when I embarked on this project. John McDonald suggested that I write a short duet for an upcoming concert, and proposed the bassoon as one of the two instruments. I chose horn as the second instrument, thinking that it would be a good match for the bassoon both registrally and timbrally. However, I had no idea what I would write for these instruments until about a week later, when I found myself in the situation that led to "Concertstuck." No, that's not a misspelling of "Konzertstück," German for "concert piece," but an English coinage: concertstuck, stuck at a concert. I was at a concert, sitting through a piece I did not enjoy. It was a mediocre performance of one of those baroque pieces that gets overplayed on classical music radio: Water Music, the Brandenburg concerti, the Four Seasons...it could have been any one of those. I didn't want to leave, as there was an exciting contemporary piece coming up later, but fortunately I had brought staff paper and pencils with me. By the time the program turned to music I was interested in, I had written a little over a minute of music, and found myself at a suitable ending point. The music was noticeably different from other things I had recently writte: it was less obviously melodic and more spacious, with a few moments of hocket between the horn and bassoon. I decided that my impromptu composition was a good start, and kept my eye out for other chances to repeat the experiment.

A few days later, I got my next opportunity, resulting in the second and third movements, "There and Back Again: One Line, Two Line, Red Line, Orange Line." As you might guess from the painful titular allusions, these movements were composed during a round trip on the T, greater Boston's subway system. I wrote the bulk of "There" travelling from Davis Square to the New England Medical Center via Downtown Crossing, finishing the last few bars in a waiting room at the NEMC; "Back Again" was written on the ride back to Davis. When I first entered the Davis Square station, I immediately noticed two sounds: the 60 Hz hum of the fluorescent lighting, and a saxophonist playing on the platform. These both find their way into the beginning of "There," but get swept away by the coming train. The train pulls out and picks up speed, and as we arrive at our destination, it sems like the same saxophonist has managed to meet us there. "Back Again" is very much about returning; it consists of brief canonic episodes alternating between a half-assed retrograde (each measure is in retrograde between the two instruments, but the measures are in the same order; this way I avoided having to plan ahead to figure out when the voices would cross paths) and forward motion.

The Three Situational Sketches are not earth-shattering or profound. But they are neat little pieces, and writing them was a very fruitful exercise. It helped me to rely on my mind, rather than my tools, which is always an important skill to have. Today, I often try to take time to compose in unusual spaces, and works like Loopholes and Doina can trace their lineage, at least in part, to the Sketches.