THINGS ARE

Composer's Note:

It feels like Milton Babbitt has always been part of my musical life. In graduate school at Columbia, Perspectives of New Music arrived, and we rushed to read it, spending weekends calling each other to discuss the ins and outs of Milton’s latest wisdom. Later I met him. During the intermission panel of a concert we shared, he mentioned something about Bill Evans. I was astonished to discover a side of him which pulled me back into the years I had spent as a suburban kid listening to jazz in smoke-filled New York jazz clubs. We both knew the words to all the jazz standards which I later heard him perform with Bethany Beardsley at a party. Slowly, I realized that he had subconsciously given me permission to let this formative part of my past enter my music. I began to realize that the jazz chords that were in my ear were often revoicings of Schoenberg and Stravinsky’s harmonies which I had been obsessed with for years.

Things Are for flute and piano moves between these two worlds. It starts playfully in a passage which the flutist Jayn Rosenfeld thinks sounds Babbittonian (she wanted me to call the piece Babb Bits). Later in the piece there is a hidden jazz standard which neither Jayn nor the pianist Steve Gosling were aware of at their first rehearsal.  The ending summarizes some of the gestures and harmonies of the piece in a slow coda, as my sadness grew remembering the brilliant, enthusiastic, and overwhelmingly generous musician I had known.