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Thought I'd share this with everyone before it gets performed this coming friday. At which point I plan on FINALLY posting the last few pieces I have recorded so people can actually tell what my music sounds like.


It's a a kind of piano song set to the text of "A supermarket in California," by Alan Ginsberg. I have the performer both play a piano line and operate an Ipod, while they speak the text out loud. The music is based on a set of cluster chords, and two major chords with a couple of melodic fragments. It's a very impressionistic work. The assignment was to make it "alleatoric" which is why I included the ipod.

The performer begins by playing low low cluster chords, then a melody set to the text, then arpeggio's of higher clusters, then finally just clusters in different ranges.

The text:

quote:

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What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

Where are we going, Walt Whitman?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.

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