10: Firing Up

Of course, I didn’t spend those ten or so weeks in the middle of 2008 just making charts and diagrams.

Mao's Last Dancer - Chi Cao and Camilla Vergotis perform Dance of Longing

In between attending the Mao’s Last Dancer editing suite and thinking about that score I also began composing the concerto.

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The most successful sketch started  just above the range of human hearing, gradually adding lower notes until all the notes of the first mode were being played but voiced as an F overtone series. It was orchestrated, as I had planned back in 2006, for pitched percussion, harp, piano and Virus synthesizer. Starting in deep space, stars glittered, slowly and mysteriously forming the F chord at which point the solo horn was born, entering with a crescendo from nothing on a long sustained F. It was the realization of the opening idea that came to me in a Rozelle cafe two and a half years earlier.

This beginning was about three minutes long and I sketched two or three continuations as well as a few isolated ideas, but found that it really wanted to stay orchestral, without a soloist; I had difficulty thinking in concerto terms. I was also aware of a desire to stay on the one mode.

I battled with the notation also; should it be precisely written with barlines and time signatures or should it be written freely like the second movement of Baba’s Birthday and the solos of Night Is What Remains?

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So there was still a lot to sort out when I put the concerto aside to begin work on composing and recording the score of Mao’s Last Dancer.

Recording Mao's Last Dancer