Morris Rosenzweig

Clarinet and Fixed Media

Composer's Note:

In late August of 2005 I was finishing up a piece for the New York New Music Ensemble called Past Light. Its last movement is a kind of character sketch parade, and was at that point piecing together some music around a famous tune – “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” - known mainly for its use in New Orleans funeral processions, typically played en route to the cemetery by one of the prominent marching society bands there.

At the same time, news began to flow about a significant tropical storm which was rapidly turning into a category 5 hurricane, seemingly headed directly for New Orleans: Katrina was on its path towards killing thousands of people and disrupting the lives of millions, both in my home town, and throughout a wide region. In the next days I sat glued to the television watching in shock as high winds ripped the roof off the Superdome, as a huge throng was left stranded for days at the Convention Center, wilting in 92 degree heat, without drinking water or other provisions, and at the footage of neighborhoods, well known to me, destroyed by the vicious storm’s swirls and blasts.

The New York New Music Ensemble commissioned another work from me in 2007. I decided to write a three-movement piece for 6 instruments on the concept of homelessness titled Rough Sleepers. I wanted the second movement to be about Katrina, and wrote a slowly paced lament using the a-a-b layout of a single blues chorus stretched over 7 minutes,  with hints of funeral march tomes, and peppered with short bits spoken by some of its witnesses.

Some years later, the clarinetist Laura Carmichael asked me to recast this movement for her: I converged the original material of the 6 instrument version into a free standing work for solo clarinet, accompanied by an electronic backing, with additional sound source objects tattooed onto its surface.

I tend to avoid writing sad music unless called for; sadly, this piece is a necessary exception; it is what I heard directly in response to Katrina’s aftermath. To whatever extent I knew the various witnesses who speak in the piece when I wrote it, they have become increasingly more present to me over time; I hear them clearly, independent of my cue –  seemingly by their own will, always with the same inflections, and often.