Purchase the score here, and the score and parts here.
Commissioned by ThreeForm. Premiered on January 21, 2020 at North Carolina School of the Arts.
"There’s a real advantage in deeply investigating and becoming skilled at something and then realizing your real interests are a little to the side of that."
- Kate Soper
Over the last few years, I -- like so many others I know -- have made some significant shifts in my creative practice. As I grow older, I've occasionally entertained the self effacing thought that perhaps these shifts betray some sort of character flaw; a flakiness or inability to stay grounded in one creative process. So when I read the above quote from composer Kate Soper in Sound American Magazine, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt like she was speaking to what I've sometimes perceived as my isolation; to my unease about not being squarely situated in one creative practice or another. And much to my surprise, when I shared this quote on Instagram, I found myself flooded with responses from friends, all of whom also felt a deep resonance with this sentiment.
As much as I try to be in complete control of my life, I find that there's always something imprecise about the end result. I need to remind myself that this imprecision is actually something worth celebrating, not deriding. Plans and designs can go out the window as life takes on its own form.
That was the case with A Little To The Side: I started this piece with a very limited set of musical materials, with the intention of carrying those materials throughout the piece. By and large, that happened -- but there are plenty of moments where the music veers off into unscripted territory, taking on a life of its own. In my music, I'm always wrestling with the tension between what should be pre-meditated and what should be left up to inspiration. (This, incidentally, is not too far from the tension between what must be composed and what must be improvised.) A Little To The Side has a little bit of it all.
Ultimately, the experiment of A Little To The Side was, can I write something that sounds like jazz but requires the approach of chamber music? It's a question that obsesses me, and represents something fundamental to who I am as a musician. I'm grateful for the opportunity to explore this creative terrain, and I'm grateful to ThreeForm for asking me to explore with them.
And I'm holding Kate Soper's quote as an affirmation to myself; that it's not only permissible, but actually adventageous to chase my creativity down whatever foxhole it wants to lead me. The path will be longer, but the journey will be mine alone.
