How does one mourn lost possibilities? A friend recently lost a pregnancy - a life has ended, a life as close as possible to her, yet a person she could never meet. This piece, written for her and her husband, grew out of one my daily pages before it became a fully fledged piece. It is a musical meditation, or maybe better, a catalyst for meditation, for assimilating grief; it is austere, quiet, with some simple processes, quiet chords, and wisps of unrealized melody. It is meant to evoke possibilities, for a listener to possibly imagine more from each bit of melody or lose oneself in extra-musical thought. While revising, I continually found myself conscious of my breathing like I rarely am. The (musical) possibilities fall within some highly prescribed parameters, and all options when taken into account lead to many thousands of different possibilities. There are, to my mind, four types of aleatory combined here. Aleatory in music means “chance” and often comes from a composer asking a performer to make choices, or here, more poetically, it could mean “possibility.” The vast differences from performance to performance while maintaining a highly distinct musical identity is made possible by the variables in: * Form via number of repeats, both of small sections (1-8 measures) or of large sections (for the A section: 12 minutes, played up to five times); * Open instrumentation, meaning any monophonic (mostly one note at a time) instrument, played with or without electronics, with parts for SATB instruments and allowing free octave transposition; * Graphical interpretation - the non-piano players have dots and squiggles that don’t look like normal music notation, which they interpret and play ‘out of musical time,’ or more properly, with or without regard to the regular pulse of the music. For example, they can match the general contour of a line, play one out of a few specific notes of a chord for any length of time, or play short notes, and each of these things can occur metronomically ‘in-time’ or can seem to float out of time; * Small, individual note choices, most particularly in the piano part, where 2+ possibilities for a pitch are given and the performer must choose only one, potentially changing an entire section’s contour, its feel of ‘lift’ or ‘fall’ or meandering. Even if as much as possible (instrumentation, repetitions, location, performers) remains the same between performances, there should be subtle differences in the actual notes played. Elegy No. 5 is for piano / piano with electronics / piano with up to four instruments / piano with up to four instruments with electronics, and is meant for a very reverberant space; each ensemble configuration can play the short (A) or long (sections A + B) version, with a range of options regarding repetition and general tempo, giving valid performances a range of 10-75+ minutes. Nearly Forgotten is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Nearly Forgotten at jonathanrainous.substack.com/subscribe
