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.