REMEMBERING DAVID: ECHO VARIATIONS

Composed for the Bowdoin International Music Festival as a memorial to David Gamper (1945-2011), sound artist, and longtime member of Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Band.

Composer's note:

The “theme” for the variations is a musical spelling of David’s name; much of the subsequent pitch material derives from twelve-tone extensions of the basic motto. The instrumentation was chosen because David played both clarinet and cello; in addition, his Bowdoin senior-year honors project was a composition for solo horn and 20-second tape delay system.  (It is interesting to note that, even as an undergraduate, he was interested in the electronic transformation of acoustic instrumental timbre, plus the creation of “loops” and echo effects.)

Accordingly, REMEMBRING DAVID contains many repeated ostinati patterns (“echoes” of a sort), melodic passages passed from one instrument to another, and echo-sonorities produced by playing the clarinet and horn into the resonating chamber of a grand piano.

I had been requested to employ a few quotations from J. S. Bach. No problem (!), since Bach is a staple of the solo cello literature, and David enjoyed the cello suites. I’ve also added a fragment of a Brandenburg Concerto, and brief reference to the Lutheran Chorale that Alban Berg had quoted in his violin concerto (another memorial piece). Finally, the appearance of the latter hymn tune led me to explore two other hymns of my own choosing.