Composing Spotlight: Duet of Dillamàro

As an undergraduate composer, the standard M.O. for accepting commissions is to accept every serious request you get (where the seriousness scale bottoms out with the drunk guy at a party in a beanbag chair slurring, "Dude, write me a song.") At this point in your composing career, publicity is more important than money, so you usually commit to writing a song in exchange for a performance or recording, rather than hard cash. The main reason to set a cash price is to deter the less serious requests, or the ones that you simply lack the time to do because you're too busy playing Starcraft in your dorm room all day long.

In my fourth year at Tech, I was approached to write a duet for string bass and horn. The performer didn't really have a specific idea in mind -- he just wanted a piece that "sounds like a piece written when a 20th century composer arranges a Bach fugue or prelude". I was not particularly interested in this commission because most duet writing is about hitting enough notes in succession to imply a harmony. Why waste time scrimping and pinching notes when you can just write for a larger ensemble with a bigger palette, unless you care more about challenging yourself technically than making good music?

For this reason, I set a price of $25 on the commission, hoping that it would go away. Unfortunately, it did not deter him.

The resulting piece, Duet of Dillamàro, was completed in record time (probably about a week), and employed time-stretching devices like "rubato", and "DC al Coda" (which is Italian for "this piece will be one minute longer if you restart it from the beginning for a while"). The title may have been an anagram. Normally, I liked to give the performer a few chances to play the draft piece to smooth out any rough fingerings or obvious technical issues. In this case though, the performer handed me $25, said it was perfect, and then I never heard from him again.

I would later learn that the performer was majorly in love with a specific horn player who did not reciprocate, and he commissioned the piece solely to invent time that they could spend together in the practice rooms, so the relative quality of the music was irrelevant to his aims. "Will you perform on my recital, look, I commissioned this duet for us" seems to be at an almost creepy level of adoration, but people do weird things for love. Tragically, the horn player shut that down pretty quickly, and it's likely that this piece was never even practiced more than once.

I most likely spent the $25 on two haircuts at the military barber shop across the street from campus.