Wait For It Everywhere
Robinson McClellan
About this work:
This piece reflects my own feeling of intimacy with death on an everyday basis. Below I have included the texts, which I think speak for themselves. The piece uses extremely free speech rhythms and loose coordination between singers that may challenge the performers but can reveal surprising moments of beauty. As a result of this loose coordination, every performance can be quite different from the last.
I composed this piece in a unique way that was entirely new to me. First, I created the melodic lines by singing and recording them. This involved some improvisation. After I had sung a lot of ideas into the recorder, I selected those I liked best and put them into sound editing software. I then arranged the 6 parts together by cutting, pasting, and dragging bits of sound around the computer screen. After a lot of this mixing and matching, I ended up with a recording of the piece (with my voice on all parts), before anything had been written down. I then transcribed the recording into musical notation. Finally, I called my friends, asked them to come over and sing the piece, and the result (with 6 different voices in real time) is what you hear on the recording posted on this site.
Program note copyright 2003 by Robinson McClellan.
The file posted here are:
1. Sample score (pp. 1-7)
2. Title page and performance notes
3. Recording (2 excerpts: pp. 4, 9-10)
For a full perusal copy or to purchase a score, please visit my website.
TEXTS:
To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it...let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.
--Michel de Montaigne, Essays trans. M.A. Screech
Text used by permission of Penguin Press, London, UK.
Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death...
--Martin Heidegger, Being and Time trans. John MacQuarry and Edward Robinson
Text used by permission of Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tubingen, Germany.
Year composed: 2002
Duration: 00:06:00
Ensemble type: Voice, Solo or With Chamber or Jazz Ensemble:Two or More Solo Voices without Accompaniment
Instrumentation: 3 Soprano, 1 Alto, 1 Tenor, 1 Bass
Instrumentation notes: This piece is for six solo singers, divided into two trios: SSS (or T) and ATB. It involves some possibly tricky coordination between singers, as well as extreme vocal ranges (to high B), especially for the sopranos.