ShortStops was composed and realized on my home computer in 2006 and 2007. In most of my music for the last twenty years, and given the computer’s lack of need to breathe or rest, I have been reluctant (or unable) to allow silences to interrupt the musical flow. In this piece the music comes to complete halts, at times abruptly cutting off flurries of activity. Later on, musical connections are made across the pauses as the music moves toward a quiet close. Try as I might, I can not posit any connection with the plays or salaries of baseball shortstops.

As I remain an adherent of the old-instrument (or old-software) wing of electronic music, I do not begin with any prerecorded or sampled sounds. The computer creates the music by sending instructions (data) from a score file to an orchestra program specifically designed for this piece, all of whose instruments are blocks of computer code. A marimba-like instrument heard rushing about at the beginning of the piece, is new to my palette and is featured throughout.

ShortStops utilizes 12-tone rows that reorder the three diminished seventh chords rather than the chromatic scale. This means that parts of each row resemble corresponding parts of other rows, but no two are absolutely parallel. Overlapping instrumental lines often present related set forms in the same rhythm but at different speeds. As the piece progresses there are several instances where pairs of voices are heard in this not-quite-parallel mode. Lines are laid out rhythmically by dividing lengths of time into measures and beats that accelerate or slow down. The fact that the score is created using a text editor (but not on music paper) strongly predisposes me to use copy and paste tools to create continuous variations of earlier material.