String Quartet #2, Sketches from a Fakebook Landfill
Jack W. Stamps
About this work:
This work is a kind of soundtrack to a dream. In this dream, I fall from a
plane, from a very high, into an enormous landfill containing nothing but
discarded jazz fakebooks.
After I hit the ground, I get up, staggering and a little dazed. I walk around. As I regain awareness, I begin to pick up random fakebooks and flip through them and throw them back down, as if looking for something meaningful. At times, I pick up wet, pulpy handfuls of loose pages and pick through them. At other times, I find myself staying a while in certain passages from cleaner sheets that I pick from the air as they slowly blow by.
The work is not meant to tell a linear account of the dream, but rather act
as a kind of collage of the sketchy memory of it; a wet, pulpy handful itself, in which the various elements of the traditional string quartet structure
might behave nomadically and become rearranged in non-traditional ways.
I remember the declarative voice of the pilot of the plane over the intercom, just before I fell, quoting Frank Zappa…
”Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny.”
Year composed: 2007
Duration: 00:14:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:String Quartet
Instrumentation: