Back during my last semester at Drury, I needed something for the annual composer’s recital (because there’s no way that the Mass was going to get played), so I wrote this short piano piece. Carlyle said it’d work better as a percussion ensemble, so I rewrote it for that, hijacked the “percussion methods” class going on that semester, and had it performed. And people loved it.
So I set that aside, moved to Oklahoma, and…picked it up again and revised it. I added a couple of movements, and somehow managed to get the third movement played by the K-State percussion ensemble (my first validation as a real composer!)
And for the past couple of years, I’ve largely left it alone. I’m still not comfortable with the percussion writing (I think the difficult parts are too hard and the easy parts are too simple for an ensemble to play it), and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it.
And that’s when I decided that Pipe Dreams needs to be a band piece.
Well, at least that third movement, the first part that I wrote. It’s a lot of fun. It’s short(ish). It’s catchy. It’s the closest I’ve come to Steven Eiler in terms of melodic genius. And it needs to be played more often.
So that’s my plan over Christmas break.
