Stuff in My Drawers Day: Convocation

It was seventeen years ago yesterday that I performed the first movement of The Hero, a four-movement, 21-minute symphonic work for a wind ensemble of 20 people. Not feeling up to the task of making friends with 20 musicians, I did the next best thing and created a piano reduction of the score and then hired an accompanist.

Had I thought ahead further, I would have hired an accompanist with 20 fingers, not 10 -- one finger for each member of the wind ensemble to address the fact that nearly every note from the score ended up in the reduction. It wasn't a reduction so much as a stave clogging, similar to the effect you see on I-95 towards Kings Dominion every Saturday morning.

Here is an excerpt (605KB MP3), from the performance (recorded on cassette tape in our state of the art recording lab). I really should have paid Pam Trent more money.

I also should have made the first movement about two minutes shorter, as I seem to have a track record of getting very tired whenever a song ends with an extended cadenza (see also, the Arutunian on my recital).