I Zoomed with Mitch Evett and Josh Murphy... After nine months of COVID isolation, I admitted to them that I just wanted to create something bright and sparkly, something that would have a glossy Instagram glow. I also wanted to write something that the students would call a “bop.”
Son of a Gun is taken from the second chapter of Quentin Tarantino’s film The Hateful Eight. In this scene, Major Marquis Warren, John Ruth, Daisy Domergue, and Chris Mannix (the new sheriff of Red Rock) are on their way to town. Major Marquis Warren does not like or trust Sheriff Mannix.
Motordom is my musical interpretation of artist Keith Sonnier’s light installation entitled “Motordom" Shifting patterns of red and blue light, generated in neon and argon tubes, develop in horizontal bands all around the lobby of the Caltrans building. The tubes evoke taillights streaming down the freeway.
I have never been to Olympic National Park, so I followed Brown’s example and combined my own experiences with what I learned from an artist who followed the Hoh River Trail, studied the Hoh Rainforest, and revered the Blue Glacier. We should follow her lead and do the same. We must “give [ourselves] a moment to feel this very mobile sense of how the balance is.”
Ferries are a mode of transport I have never encountered until I moved to Vermont in 2003. I left California after college, and while trekking to Burlington I found a vessel that would transport me magically over the endless Lake Champlain.
When asked to re-imagine a Brandenburg concerto, I was thrilled: this gave me the excuse to write for a Baroque ensemble...I make my musical offering in the form of a toy trolley, one that will bridge the gap between my twenty-first-century contribution and Bach’s eighteenth-one, taking us to an imagined time and place that I have never traveled.
This is the piece I wanted to write for the last eight years but was never cool enough to write it. Around this time I had a friend who introduced me to some songs by The Meters and a song by Ernie and the Top Notes, Inc. called “Dap Walk.”
