Lady Mondegreen Sings the Blues
Bruce J. Taub
About this work:
Lady Mondegreen Sings the Blues was written during the spring and summer of 1995 and is dedicated to Edwin London who asked me to write a piece for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony. I decided to compose a piece that would feature the wind players and percussion (including piano) and not include the strings. It is the third piece of mine that he has performed/premiered and I am very grateful for his support of my music over the years. The first piece was Of the Wing of Madness (1986) and the second, An Often Fatal Malady (1991) which was also commissioned by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony. This new work shares a lot of similar musical material with a piece I wrote in 1994 entitled Lady Mondegreen's Dances (a sextet) and is, therefore, in some ways a sequel to it. My friend and colleague, Hayes Biggs said (intended as a joke), "Why don't you call it Lady Mondegreen Sings the Blues? So, I did. At first, I thought that the title was too outrageous, but it began to make a lot of sense to me. Let me explain:
A mondegreen is a word that is constued as it is actually heard, not as the speaker intends it to be heard. Coined by Sylvia Wright in 1954 (Harper's), the word refers to the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" and how she recited it as a child: "They hae slain the Earl Amurray,/And Lady Mondegreen." The damsel bleeding loyally beside the slain Earl was in her romantic imagination and the last line was actually written "and laid him on the Green." After reading an article about this by William Safire in the New York Times, it occurred to me that mondegreens happen quite naturally in music all of the time; that everyone hears a piece of music quite differently. The title also made a lot of sense to me for a piece dedicated to Ed London because of his jazz background and especially because many of his own titles are mondegreens. The series Psalm of These Days (I - V) came to mind immediately.
The piece is in three sections played without pause and is symmetrical. The first and third are in the same meter and tempo and also share musical material. The percussionists play mallet instruments only in the middle section using drums only in the first and third. The percussion (with the piano) often play quite independently from the rest of the ensemble (actually in different meters) and you often get the feeling that they are playing at different speeds. Lady Mondegreen Sings the Blues is published by C.F. Peters Corporation.
Year composed: 1995
Duration: 00:10:00
Ensemble type: Band:Wind Ensemble
Instrumentation: 1 Flute, 1 Oboe, 1 Clarinet, 1 Bassoon, 1 Alto Saxophone, 1 Horn in F, 1 Trumpet, 1 Trombone, 2 Percussion (General), 1 Piano
Instrumentation notes: fl(=alto), ob(=EH), cl(=bcl)