TAKES TO THE STAGE

for Franklin Cox

Takes to the Stage is a study in floating rhythm, and temporal disengagement. It was motivated by experiences of rhythm and form that result uniquely from the non-arbitrary but complicated mixtures of musical language emerging in commercialized "public" spaces. If public aural life, and a public's musical tastes, can be carved into zones of commercial attention, then a composer might be able to uncarve them by emulating the overall rhythm of those fragmented spaces, now in the more collaborative, conscious, and intentional space of a concert hall. Instead of broken meaning, we have an unauthorized meaning remade in the act of hearing.

To communicate that possibility, Takes to the Stage, for solo cello, consists of six pages of assembly instructions and six pages of music; the instructions guide the musician in a game-like survey of other pieces on an intended recital program. The cellist then fills the existing score rhythms with various sounds, ideas, and time-relations uncovered from those other pieces. I request that the piece be played near the middle of the concert, however, in the complexity of human memory, we might also think of this music as a way of embracing, facilitating, or 'staging' the other music. (In this way, Takes to the Stage strives to make an intercompositional rhythm that might expand the normally experienced role of timespans and rhythms, into a realm of floating differentiation that is normally reserved for the more polytonic and articulate worlds of loudness, melodic shape, and harmony.)

If the work is successful in this regard, then our other experiences of time-mixture -- in advertisements and other aggressively divisive attention-ploys, might, every once in a while, be allowed to coalesce into a kind of accidental rhythm that becomes something unexpectedly musical and whole.