Bang on a Can

Plonsey Episodes 1-9
(Everybody Does This)
Nostalgia of the Infinite
This composition is dedicated to my first college friend: Supermarky (a.k.a. Chris Maher), who inspired me to first compose, and who has subsequently given me many great ideas which I have borrowed. My first thought was to write an episodic piece that would introduce me and my music to New York, a retrospective of every idea I've ever had, and it also seemed like a good idea to incorporate the simple-minded bass/chordal accompaniment builtins of my toy synthesizer, since my one-year-old son Cleveland liked them pretty well, and then I found out that BoaC guitarist Mark Stewart had just purchased a daxophone, which is a fancy piece of wood with a bow, and that led me to write a lot of music with skewed and inexact intonation, and I've never known when to stop piling up layers of abstract and delayed counterpoint... The piece consists of nine episodes of an ongoing sitcom: in most of the episodes there's a melody, a harmonic accompaniment, distantly related counter-melodies or noises, and a bass line; with a couple feverish and queasy solo interludes and non-hierarchical (tumultuous and disordered) transitions. The pianist plays a lot of Haydn with rhythm and harmony twisted around, and the drummer gets to play the drums. Then there are bits which everybody does together (DAH-duh-DAH-duh-DAAAAH-duh-DAH-duh) as an homage to longtime friends and to friendship (specifically, in honor of Sheep's Clothing, an anarchic ensemble founded by Martin Bresnick twenty years ago in New Haven), whose presence derives from the notion that Music is a timeless realm which extends all the way back to our common origin, from which archetypal enigmatic bits emerge as pictures of infinity, as a manifestation of Nostalgia of the Infinite. --Dan Plonsey