Randabout

Randabout was a commission of the American Music Center’s Live Music for Dance program for a new piece by choreographer and fellow NJ Arts Council Fellow Randy James. As the commissioned composer, I had to satisfy the requirements of two artists – the choreographer and the soloist – as well as my own musical sensibilities. I’d never worked with a choreographer before.

I visited a number of rehearsals of the Randy James Dance Works to get a sense of how Randy and the dancers worked. Although I was interested in discovering what concepts went into their work and the kinds of evolutions that emerged from their processes, I particularly wanted to get a feeling for what they responded to in music and how they incorporated it into their expression. I had extensive conversations with Randy and the dancers about what they heard in music and how they responded to it in dance.

I also met with Bart Feller, the flutist who would perform the work. I knew that Bart and Randy went back a long way; in fact, Bart had been president of Randy’s board of trustees, so he already had been fairly deeply involved in Randy’s work. But I also needed to determine his musical preferences and sensibilities and arrive at a design for the music that Bart found involving, one that would give him the kind of opportunities he most enjoyed on his instrument.

In the end, we decided on having Bart play four different instruments: piccolo, flute, alto flute, and bass flute. The initial concept called for an unaccompanied solo work with Bart switching off among the instruments. I wrote a draft and ran it by Bart. After incorporating Bart’s suggestions, I sent a synthesized version to Randy. He said the solo instrument wasn’t sufficiently evocative to him and came back with the idea of using a flute ensemble instead. The only way we could accomplish that was to have Bart play accompanied by a recording of Bart. I wove material from the original draft into a 21-minute ensemble piece – a concertino for assorted flutes accompanied by an ensemble of assorted flutes – and sent a synthesized version of this to Randy. He suggested some judicious cuts, bringing the piece down to about 15 minutes.

After making the final changes I came up with a set of parts for Bart to record and Bart and I went into the studio. We paid for the studio time from what we had originally budgeted for renting a bass flute for the performances; instead, Bart borrowed a bass flute for the recording session and all the bass flute parts were in the recording. The recording process relied on Bart’s unerring intonation, since we recorded each part separately and I mixed them together afterward. Although the piece is designed to use a live performer, as a result of the recording session we had a completely recorded version as well.

Thereafter it was out of my hands. I sat both fascinated and helpless as in front of my eyes a dance majestically yet mysteriously evolved to the music I had written until, gradually, the dance melded itself to the music in my mind.

I saw my contribution as creating music whose elements would provide different kinds of opportunities for Randy and the dancers to respond, within a musical construct that was convincing on its own and idiomatic for the flute. Based on my contact with Randy and the dancers – as well as the constraints imposed by the recording process – those elements are gestural, thematic, timbral, and textural rather than the kinds that generally underscore classical ballet: rhythmic devices or constructs that evoke a story.