I just returned from the World Premier performance of my brilliant friend Brian Robison’s composition for “library” at MIT. Brian, an Assistant Professor of music composition and theory at MIT, wrote the following blurb for his piece:
The written score establishes an overall template of speeds, volume levels, textures, and timbres, but the moment-to-moment details will be determined during the performance, according to scores selected by the audience from the library shelves during the performance.
When you bring your selected score forward, please open it to the selected passage and hold the pages open as you place the score on the stand, until I nod to indicate that I’m ready for the next selection.
The piece is in five movements. It was a pretty amazing experience, especially watching Brian contort his (figuratively) bulging cerebral cortex and work the various pedals and buttons on his electronic gadgetry with his shoeless toes, all the while playing along on an electric Les Paul guitar with fingertips, picks, slides, and some weird little light vibrator thing. I almost never recognized anything, but others might have. I provided a bossa nova, a mambo, and a seventies jazz score from a fake book. The pile of used scores seemed to run from Bach to Cage to Broadway with most stops in between. The third movement — “Recitative and Aria” — turned out to be quite beautiful, with layers of sound combining to form stunning harmonies (he used a sampling/real-time recording gizmo). Other passages were funny, quirky, dark.
I’ll try to get him to comment here and fill in gaps and correct in the errors in my description.