music        news/events        bio        contact        recordings Barely Without Wings A Drink for the Birds in My Head 2000 horn violin cello duration 10' commissioned by The Concord Community Music School first performance: Hugh Daigle, Stephen Best, Emily Taubl Concord Community Music School / May 27, 2000 SCORE PROGRAM NOTE When composing I often find there comes a moment when apparently disparate sources, influences, and ideas suddenly slip together and the work pops into place. Beginning this commission I had only vague ideas floating around; some arose out of the instrumentation and some from knowing that the work would be premiered in New Hampshire—not much to work with yet. I was reading Jonathan Krakauer's Into the Wild, a book I'd resisted picking up thinking it's subject —Chris McCandless, a young man who perished in Alaska after scanty preparation for a wilderness sojourn—would exasperate me. In fact the book is wonderful. I had just read a passage about the solitary mountain death of another young man, Jonathan Waterman, when an hour later I saw a newspaper report of the suicide of his father, Guy. Guy Waterman ended his life high in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, which he knew intimately. He climbed to the peak of Mount Lafayette and stopped, dying of exposure. I found this story so affecting, and when I read that Guy Waterman had also lost his first son, William, (who vanished without a trace in 1973) I had my piece. The music falls into three continuous sections, each consisting of three parts; a blurring and overlapping of held notes; a little processional ritornello; and an accompanied solo. The first section features cello: Bill Waterman's boisterous early life (he lost a leg while trying to jump a freight train) and mysterious disappearance. The second section features violin: Jonathan Waterman, a brilliant young climber whose increasingly unbalanced behavior led to a final, wildly miscalculated winter ascent of Denali and his disappearance. The third section features horn and relates to Guy Waterman. This piece is a quiet meditation on solitariness and on how past loss may haunt the present. I don't presume to have made portraits of these three men, none of whom I knew, and I don't intend to intrude into private grief. However, their stories resonated with me and provoked, or provided, this music. As for the title; as this piece was percolating in my head I repeatedly passed by some graffiti written on a clapboard house near where I lived. I misread "Barfly" as "Barely" but this mistaken reading kept insinuating itself into my thoughts about the music and it seemed to me it said something about a state of mind encompassing sadness, madness, surrender, and a yearning for oblivion.