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11 For Instruments (2) A commission from Arraymusic the following year, 1980, prompted me to write another collage piece with a scenario of players-inmotion . The request was for a quintet of mixed instrumentation, and I conceived a work that could be played by any five instruments—i.e., that would not be concerned with timbre or idiom but only with musical action and interaction. I excluded percussion instruments and polyphonic media such as keyboards and plucked strings; the “any five” would be single-line instruments of the conventional orchestra and band families, with no more than two instruments of the same kind. As well as perambulations , entrances, and exits, the scenario called for actions typical of live concert performance—using the clarinet pull-through, emptying the spit from the horn mouthpiece, removing hair from the bow or rosining it. I wanted to celebrate these familiar gestures by having the players draw attention to them at moments when they weren’t playing. Further, the players arrive onstage with their instrument cases still unopened, and I devised percussion passages to be played on the cases—which therefore had to be of a hard material rather than canvas. Where Taking a Stand focused on stands, this work focuses on cases: the double-entendre title, suggested by Kathleen, is Case Study. It evolved, in music and in movement , as a satire on performing behaviour. A knotty compositional problem was how to make an interesting solo part at the beginning that could be played alternatively on many different string and wind instruments of a middle range. The practical common range proved narrow, and I had to make phrases using only the smallest intervals. Copying parts for a wide variety of conceivable transpositions was an unforeseen task in preparing the piece: depending on the ensemble chosen, the same part might be 215 played by a viola using its distinctive clef or a horn in F with the required transposition. After the Array premiere, I organized a concert with student players at the Faculty of Music in which Case Study was performed three times by three different ensembles in succession—brass quintet; string quartet with flute; and saxophone quartet with double bass. I have never been asked to compose a solo de concours, a test piece for an instrumental contest. The closest I have come is the Sonatina in Two Movements, which I wrote in 1981 at the request of my friend Stephen Chenette. His trumpet students at the Faculty of Music, he said, needed a fresh, new work suitable for their recital programs. The Sonatina was first played by Dan Warren at his graduation recital, with Sue Chenette as pianist. Warren has gone on to a distinguished professional solo and orchestral career. I examined my memory for associations with the trumpet and identified some of my favourites: the cornet solos of Herbert L. Clarke from the turn of the century, with their homely sentimentality and their show-off cadenzas; the conversational licks of Louis Armstrong, again largely on cornet rather than trumpet, in his early blues recordings; and the music of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, in LPs which my children had worn out with many replays. Spending the previous Christmas week in Mexico City, I had enjoyed hearing the mariachi bands in the parks— the performers giving the music their all, their hands protected against the chill in gloves, with the fingers cut out so that they could play. These associations are all reflected in the Sonatina. I studied the Sonata by Peter Maxwell Davies but didn’t feel I could make my work quite as demanding as his. Near the end of the second movement, the piano and trumpet play together in fast-changing rhythmic values rather in the manner of the mirror-action exercise in which two people face each other and copy each other’s rapid gestures and expressions. This was demanding enough. Apart from All the Bees and All the Keys,1 it was nearly twenty years since I had written for a symphony orchestra. In fact, the flurry of 1967 centennial commissions being over, the 1970s were not a peak period for orchestral composition in Canada, and this may have been John Roberts’s motive when, around 1980, as head of the Canadian Music Centre, he persuaded the Toronto Arts Council to initiate a series of orchestral commissions to Toronto composers.The first commission went to John Weinzweig for his Divertimento No. 8 for tuba and orchestra. Roberts suggested...

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