Bang on a Can

"What hath God wrought?" were the first words electronically uttered in a long-distance communiquè by none other than Samuel F. B. Morse himself. They were a harbinger of the communication flood to follow. Today, most of us cannot even remember what it is like to be limited in communication to those who are within earshot of our call. This piece is a short exploration in three parts of the famous sentence that opened the floodgates of chatter. The first section is a statement of the Morse code rhythms that spell out "What hath God wrought?" The second is the soundtrack to an imaginary silent film that documents the crescendo of chatter in our lives, and the third is something of an elegy for a silence and solitude that we now have to fight for. The piano chords are taken directly from the pitches on the keypad of a telephone that correspond with the words W.H.G.W? The guitar and percussion parts are also telephone references (purely the old-fashioned kind... not the cellular kind. I couldn't bare to use the Monty Python theme or Für Elise, or the myriad other "ring-tones" we have today). The clarinet sings John Henry, as this is the song that most exemplifies the futile fight against the persistent pace of technology.