INVISIBLE CITIES: 21/55
With the summer ending and the Fall fast approaching, I thought I would make a post about a piece I am writing, and mark a bit of progress.
But First:
There are a lot of things coming up in the next few weeks:
TBQ (this friday Sept 16)
TBQ performances in Seattle this Friday at Gallery 1412 and on October 5 at Vermillion. Check here for details. We hope you can come and hear this new music and celebrate the end of summer with us!
(Plus you don’t want to miss Leanna’s solo bass flute set at the Gallery on Friday.)
TBQ + Leanna Keith @ Gallery 1412 Sept 16.
“Traces:Sarah” performed in Santa Cruz
A rare second performance of a new piece. I wrote “Traces: Sarah” in 2019 for harpist Melissa Achten. The premiere was in 2020 days before we know what Covid even was. And on September 30 2022 Melissa will perform it again in Santa Cruz as part of a really amazing program of music called Ritual Schizophonia. More info about that concert here.
(Santa Cruz peeps, see you there?)
Excerpt - Traces Sara (2019) by Tom Baker. Melissa Achten, harp.
“DEEPLY LODGED” - ALBUM RELEASE
On September 1, a new album (CD and Digital) of my music was released on Common-Tone Records (CTR). The album is called Deeply Lodged, and it contains three recent works of mine, including a piece for solo piano, a piece for quartet, and a song cycle for soprano with trumpet and vibes. I hope you can take a listen at the link below, there is much more information here.
You can buy the Limited Edition CD here.
READING LIST (and more harp)
I am just finishing a fantastic book by Annalee Newitz called “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans will survive a Mass Extinction.” (She is perhaps more optimistic than me, but the ideas are fascinating.) I am co-opting the name “Scatter, Adapt, Remember” for a new piece I am working on, commissioned by The American Harp Society and the aforementioned Melissa Achten. It is for harp, guitar and marimba, hopefully a premiere in 2023.
FISHIING REPORT
I took a break and visited some family and friends in Idaho, and spent a couple of days fishing with my good friend Greg. We had a great time fishing on rivers that I would call “home waters”. Warm Springs Creek, a tributary of the Big Wood River in Ketchum Idaho, and Silver Creek (the so-called graduate school of fly-fishing) near Picabo Idaho. The fishing was great, the scenery was fantastic, and the company could not have been better.
INVISIBLE CITIES 21/55
And finally, the progress report on the string-quartet-cycle:
In the summer of 2010 I had a dream that I was attending my own memorial service. Though it was not a particularly sad dream, it did start out as a performance anxiety dream: I was in a large warehouse that had dozens of services of all kinds happing at the same time in different rooms. I had to check many rooms until I found the right one, and I feared I might miss the whole thing, which I somehow knew would be marked as truant on my permanent record. When I did finally found the right room, I sat down in the back row and perused the memorial program. On the back was a list of my complete works as a composer. I looked over the list and had wonderful, nostalgic memories of the conception of this or that piece, or fond feelings toward this or that performer. Then, in a rather sudden moment of dream-clarity, I realized that I had never written a String Quartet! And then I woke up.
So began this long cycle of string quartets. The first sketches quickly turned into a master plan to write a cycle of 55 pieces for string quartet. The inspiration at the core of the cycle is a book called Invisible Cites, by one of my favorite authors, Italo Calvino. Calvino’s book is a magical and fantastical tale about a conversation between Marco Polo, the erstwhile explorer, and Kublai Kahn, the great emperor. In each of the 55 chapters of Invisible Cities, Polo describes to Khan a city he has supposedly visited (both characters know that Polo is crafting and improvising these cities). The descriptions are beautiful, poetic and profound; they create a magical world of strange and mystical places. The musical pieces are my interpretation in sound of these imaginary cities.
The piece has progressed in fits and starts, but at the beginning of this summer, in anticipation of my sabbatical, I turned my full attention to it. I wrote 9 pieces this summer, to complement 12 that had been written over the past decade. And it is my intention to finish all 55 pieces by this time next year.
Hitting 21 is a kind of a milestone for me, and I feel like I am finding my footing with this piece and that there is some momentum. I will keep you posted, dear imaginary reader, and check-in in a few weeks with an update.
AND FINALLY, COFFEE
In my post last month, I mentioned I have some time for coffee dates if anyone is interested. The big news is I have a DATE! (I guess I have at least 1 non-imaginary reader…)
Anyone want to get a cuppa?
