Pine Knoll Blues (2019)

Challenging, up tempo, about 7 minutes. $15; order here. With this work I bid my fond farewell to the Strings Chamber Music program at the Greenville Fine Arts Center upon my retirement from the FAC in the spring of 2019.  It was a great joy in my career to work with the talented students in this program – teaching them theory and history, as well as composing for them – and collaborating with their enormously gifted instructor, John Ravnan.  I could scarcely have been more fortunate.

The music opens with a symbolic motto: the first three pitches – F-A-C# – are transposed three times, thereby including all 12 chromatic pitches; it is rendered in 31 notes for my 31 years at the FAC.  Later it is repeated verbatim, or, in 25 notes to represent John’s 25 years at the FAC, as he also retired that spring.  At bar 139 there is a brief, possibly humorous quotation of Happy Trails.  Other than these items, it’s a 12-bar blues, with a fair amount of motivic consistency in melodic elements. A terrific video by the students who premiered the work in the spring of 2019 is here.