Orion
for percussion and piano (2008; 10 min.)
In 2006, I resurrected a wellspring of my musical self. After fifteen years of scrambling for tenure, going through a divorce and raising two children, I found enough slack in my life to return to free improvisation, with which I had once been deeply involved. When I started up again I immediately felt that a lost part of myself had returned; the same feeling occurred when I resumed going to artist colonies and playing jazz in the years immediately thereafter.
Orion is one of a string of pieces I wrote shortly after resuming life as an improviser and which were affected by improvisation in the best possible ways. Because one must let go and let intuition get in the driver’s seat when improvising, in these pieces I found myself newly able to tap into something mysterious and vital and to trust it; the resulting music often turned out to be simple on the surface but full of fine attention to nuances of tone color, pitch and expression.
The title came later, as they often do for me. Naming the piece for the starry hunter who dominates the winter sky feels appropriate to me on several levels. With their prismatic twinklings, their whispers and their vast, lonely reverberations, the outer sections of Orion seem to evoke the night sky in its beauty and mystery. The middle section, more earthbound, is full of animal vigor and power, like the hunter for whom the constellation is named; he seems to coalesce out of the sparkling particles of the universe and then dissolve back into them.
performed by Therry Miroglio, percussion and Ancuza Aprodu, piano