Category: keyboard

This is the final movement of a short, 4-movement piece, entitled A Random Day, that starts with The Little Room Under the Stairs followed by A Memory Discovered in the Pocket of a Coat Long Unworn. There’ll be one more movement between Coat Long Unworn and this piece, Sitting in One Kitchen Amid Echoes of Others.

A Random Day along with two other short multiple movement pieces are intended for another BandCamp digital album that I’ll discuss in a later post.

I’ve sat in so many kitchens. Seemingly countless others. It’s the heart of any home.

As an undergraduate at the University of the Pacific Conservatory of Music, my composition teacher was Stanworth Beckler. I learned so much from him. As with all real learning it’s not the information that’s presented in lessons and lectures, it’s the off-hand comment, almost in passing that sticks with you and guides and comforts you decades later. Several of his stick with me to this day.

Beckler taught a course one semester that was the result of his own in-depth study and analysis of ALL of the compositions of Igor Stravinsky. What a course! For the longest time I carefully kept his handouts. But…life. I no longer have them. If there’s any Beckler students out there who have those notes I will happily pay for their duplication and postage. They’re priceless.

Anyway…After listening to the complete works of Stravinsky over a semester and hearing Beckler’s analyses, one day I had the distinct impression that Stravinsky’s oeuvre is his own self-instruction in how to write music. That may seem like a peculiar observation for someone who wrote The Rite of Spring; he knew how to write music! But, alas, you have to learn all over again, every piece, no matter how long you’ve been doing it, ever since we entered the non-common-practice period (pretty much post Wagner to the present day).

I too am still trying to figure out how to compose and each piece I try to chip away at a new skill a little bit. (No, I won’t tell which skill it is for this piece.)

We lived in an old, rambling two-storied* parsonage (my father was a Methodist minister) and we lived in the house owned by the church. I was in the first year or two of elementary school. Our house was big enough that there were front stairs descending into the hallway just inside the mudroom and stairs in the back emptying directly from my bedroom (!), down into the kitchen and continuing directly on down into the the basement (but that’s another story ).

Underneath of the angle of the front stairs was a triangular shaped little room with its own little triangular door.

I don’t remember if I ever actually ever even entered that room, or if I simply wanted to and fantasized about doing so. Memory is a very malleable thing. My emotional association with that room was not at all like the frightening little room under the stairs that Harry Potter was confined to. For me, the association with our little room under the stairs is warmth, comfort, books, a place to be away from the world and close the door behind me, a place all my own…emotional privacy.

I suspect that’s a false memory, built entirely of wishful fantasy.

Here’s a picture of me on the front porch of that old house, at that exact age, 8. You can probably intuit all there is to know about me just from that photo!