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Allen Otte was another in the coterie around Herbert Brun at the University of Illinois in the early 1970's (I actually met him in Herbert's office in Stiven House.) He and three others had formed the Blackearth Percussion Group at Oberlin and had come to Illinois to do graduate work. Within a few years they had cut a couple of records on Opus One (a small company dedicated to recording new music.) Herbert himself wrote them a piece called 'At Loose Ends.'
I left Illinois in 1973. Awhile later I heard that all the players but Otte had left Blackearth and refused to allow him to keep the name. So he formed a new trio and called it, perhaps in a fit of generic pique, The Percussion Group. This group has long been in residence at Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
Allen is a natural-born percussionist. Whenever and wherever we were together, he would perform quick little hand riffs on whatever surface happened to present itself: the table top in a restaurant, the countertop in a used bookstore, the side of an escalator. He remains irrepressible.
Ever since I met Allen, I had been wanting to write a piece for his group. Now there are two types of percussion works: that one which uses lots of instruments and explores relations between them; and that one written for very few instruments and explores the range of what can be done with them. I chose the latter, conceiving of a work for snare drums alone. I realized that this instrument is the most 'politicized' of any (that is, one riff will remind one of the parade ground.) The challenge was to see how much distance I could get from such associations. The result was para-DIDDLE for nine snare drums, completed just before my 36th birthday in 1979. It was the first piece I was able to write since I left Illinois.
And then I did something silly (I am even wont to call it stupid): I mailed the manuscript (that is, the only copy, and in a crude state) of the piece to Al. In nearly the return mail I received a letter from Al inscribed to 'Theodore May, Composer.' This was, I knew, the highest compliment he could pay anyone.
The Percussion Group went on to learn my piece from xeroxes of that manuscript (it would be years before I would make a fair-copied score.) And then they took it on tour around this country, and then to Europe and Asia. Finally it became part of a gorgeous two-record set put out by Opus One. That was in the early 1980's. Since then para-DIDDLE has never been long out of the repertoire of The Percussion Group. (Oh yes - Allen also helped land me at least two paid gigs as Composer-in-Residence.)
No composer can ask for more than all that for their piece!
23 June 2006
P.S.: The only thing I might add here is that I feel that I am suffering from what I call 'The Harper Lee Syndrome': fated to be well-known for one work.
Letter to Allen Otte
1 May 2003 Thursday PM
Dearest Al,
(So it's May Day. Is there an Otte Day [there should be]?)
Yes, that was a wondrous gift you sent me the other day!
Here I was, thinking that The Group had just begun rehearsals of my piece, laboriously undertaking the long, arduous process of gradually tweaking it back into The Repertoire. And then, subito, whammo! Not only is the piece so tweaked back, so learned, so - digested - in record time, but it is performed, no less, in public; and then, in equally record1 time, a CD of said concert appears on the doorstep of my pseudo-tudor brick cottage2. Amazing3!
First I bethought myself to do my research. After all, there were those program notes which you excerpted from that larger corpus of so-called linear notes. So I first had Heidi go behind the big clunky morris chair in the living room and retrieve4 me a copy of the booklet5 from your original boxed set.
It is a strange sensation, this encountering of a text written some twenty-odd years ago6. It's hard to tell how much is really good & insightful, and how much is quasi-pretentious claptrap7. Let's simply say that I found it ironic to be reading an extended essay of mine about our relationship to The Past, written in the distant (ideologically speaking) past...
But, yet, it8 is eerily timely, isn't it - given what it speaks about and their relations to present political events. For everything is there, it seems: on the one hand, dialogue (read: 'diplomacy') in all its subtle fluidity; on the other foot, unison brute force (read: 'war'.) I still recall my initial attraction to the snare drum: that it is the most politically charged of instrument's (one riff gives a whiff of gunpowder9.) Of course the fragments of cadences are everywhere in the piece, like various shards of shrapnel. But, then: we must use, not be used, by them.
So I reread my notes10. And then I bethought myself to look at the score. Now the scores for para-DIDDLE are in a box on the very tippy top of the bookcase on my worktable in the dining room11. So I enlisted our other daughter12 Gretchen to clamber atop my table and retrieve one of these scores for me13. What I noticed, in looking through this again after so many years, is the careful attention to every detail, every nuance. I had forgotten how careful I was! And, of course, a good deal of the reason for this meticulous care must be ascribed to you, Allen, who gave me the guidance I needed on all the manifold notations therein.
Finally, then, I sat14 down to listen to your performance of my piece. And I was not disappointed! Your newest member15 seems to have taken to my piece quite naturally (and quickly.) The Group's wonderful performance brought the piece back to me in all its terrible immediacy. All the gestures, all the nuances, all the dynamic contrasts are there. It is all I could ask for.
Thank you, too, for the cover of the CD, which (I assume) pictures the setup for my piece in muted-but-attractive colors: it stands against my bookcase in my bedroom where I can see it whenever I enter the room.
I noticed that I am in very good company indeed on that CD, with Lou Harrison and John Cage16!
So: thank you, my Friend. Please pay us another visit soon. I promise to get you decent pizza!
Love, Ted
P.S. Lipp tells me that there is a 'Brunfest' scheduled for October, and that you'll be playing this piece there. Of course papa-DIDDLE17 could not have existed without Herbert's18 influence - from the political notions that birthed it to the exigencies of the music itself. So it surely belongs in such a festival. Ironically, I wrote the piece while I was studying composition with (of all people) David del Tredici at Boston University. He did not know what to make of it19; and, when each week I would come in with more, he could only murmur, "Keep working."
P.P.S. As you probably already know, I spilled the beans about my knowledge of her disorder to Connie. I guess I just wanted this to be out in the open between her and me. Sorry for violating your wishes (though I made it clear that, in order to pry the information from you, I essentially "twisted your poor little thin arm until to resist further would have spelled the end of your percussion career.")
P.P.P.S. Lipp20 also told me that you saw erstwhile wife Kit recently. Lipp tells me everything. Lipp tells everyone everything about everything!
Footnotes:
1 I suppose this should be related as 'in CD-time', since the recording isn't on vinyl.
2 Which is just a quaint and romantic and comfy and nostalgic way of saying that our house is rather small. (When we first contracted to buy it, my brother-in-law disdainfully called it 'a trailer.')
3 It is especially amazing to me - that is, one who already is reduced to doing only a fraction of what he once was able to do, and that with such an abysmally glacial slowness - that all things done with efficiency and dispatch - as your consummation of my piece - receive my unequivocal admiration.
4 I have not listened to a record for years, precisely due to this physical inaccessibility of the records over in the corner. But even if I could reach and retrieve said record over in the corner behind the chair, I could not play it, since the record player is at too high a vantage point for me to reach. But even were I able to not only retrieve a recording from over in the corner behind the chair, but as well place it on the turntable high atop my piano music cabinet, I could not play it - for the simple reason that our speakers appear to be blown out*.
* Or there is a system failure, as on that memorable day when we were at Richard's in New Hampshire, and Berlioz's Requiem caused the entire system to have a nervous breakdown, dramatically ringing down a curtain of absolute silence**.
** I think I offended poor Richard that day, as I gleefully mocked his fetishistic relationship with his thousand-dollar sound system.
5 Did I ever tell*** you how beautiful I think this booklet was and is, produced as it obviously was with such loving care? Yes, everything about it is gorgeous: the clear and fluid printed text; the pages of score and graphics so carefully laid out; the large and crisp and wonderfully detailed photos. It really is a vestige of the past, isn't it, this attention to exquisite detail which that large (12x12) format allowed. For now we have traded all that away for cramped little booklets printed in miniscule type which afford us absolutely zero subtlety - all for the convenience of digital technology.
*** If not, I'm telling you now!
6 And, indeed, not conveyed to you in the tidiness of a typed copy on disk (as it would be today), but rather words scribbled onto paper in a dimly-lit Howard Johnson's. (Indeed, you learned para-DIDDLE from the first scribbled rough score, didn't you. [What you had to put up with from me!])
7 For example, "We have, then, a type of 'subjective, inner dialogue' of something with its past." The word 'then' suggests that the statement has been proven as a sort of theorem But has it? Then, too: why are those quotes around the words 'subjective, inner dialogue'? Is this an implication that it is a euphemism? Or was I so much in love* with Ives's Essays Before A Sonata that I couldn't help imitating some of his prose-conceits?
* With good reason: these stand, in my view, as the most stupendous prose accompaniments to a work of music (which itself was, and is, a stupendous achievement.)
8 Or rather they: for the piece itself shares in this timeliness.
9 More euphonic would be: "One riff gives a whiff of syph." But it isn't about sexual excess - or is it?
10 And many of the other composers' notes for the album as well.
11 I mean: my 'study suite.'
12 My suggestion, if you ever get crippled, is to immediately have two tall daughters. They can come in very handy.
13 Why, you are surely asking, don't I move the records out to where I can reach them, and the record player down where I can use it, and the scores down where I can access them as well? Because, my friend, our house is TOO DAMN SMALL! There's no place to put anything**.
** The irony here, of course, is that, since your heroic building-on project, you now have a house which is TOO BLOODY BIG. Is there no justice?
14 A rather redundedant remark, since I'm already sitting down. ('I'm so sore I can neither stand nor sit.' 'If you're telling the truth, you're lying!')
15 I guess I missed the transition long ago: what happened to Youhass? (I know there was also a Benjamin Toth - resident male chauvinist pig - in there too.)
16 At the same time, I was acutely aware of the absolute difference in our philosophies of composition. For none of these other pieces was through-composed, was it? (perhaps some of the Harrison?)
17 Ha Ha Ha!
18 In particular, Herbert once told me, "Anyone who writes parts in unison had better have a damn good reason for doing so!" I think I found that reason in para-DIDDLE; in fact, I probably created the whole piece around that simple stark notion!
19 On the other hand, he understood the little chopinesque nocturnes I wrote (on his suggestion) quite well!
20 Recently, in his spirit, I tried signing an eMail to him 'May'. But I couldn't quite bring myself to do it.
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