Here and There (2018)

Composer note
At one of our explorative lunches in 2017, Steven Schick proposed an intriguing project: that I compose an extended work for “speaking percussionist.” He mentioned Beckett’s Cascando which entails a quirky alternation between words and music. After examining this possibility, I thought about other Beckett texts I had set, realizing that one, Texts for Nothing IX, had a particularly unexpected, Dantesque conclusion that would provide an intriguing basis for the proposed work, taking the voice beyond “speaking” and fusing it with percussion sounds. The text brims with alternative pairs, also concerns, as is often the case with Beckett. There is a figure hoping to find “a way out, somewhere.” I identified the commonplace phrase “here and there” as the most fundamental pair. The “here” identifying a local positioning that challenged and contained, while “there” offered a liberating alternative.

The soloist is asked to respond to three sorts of challenges: delivering the text with only occasional colorations by unusual vocalizations of percussive events, performing simply as a percussionist, and (these are called Arias), sections that closely blend text delivery and percussion.

The “Here” station includes a bass drum, a tam tam, a large guiro, and 3 small metal objects chosen by the performer. “There” has only a vibraphone. During the course of the piece, “There” and its pitch resource is visited twice, then a third time when the final text section is presented with its support.

Much of Here and There concerns the favored theme of Beckett, where an individual is searching for escape: “There’s a way out somewhere.” But atypically, in this instance, there is an almost Dantesque release.

Here and There was written in close collaboration with the extraordinary Steven Schick, who, at every juncture during our two years of explorations, urged me to seek what I was imagining rather than to limit in any way the nature of this work. The piece is, of course, dedicated to him, and was premiered on 27 February 2019 on Wednesdays@7 at Conrad Prebys Concert Hall at the University of California San Diego.

— Roger Reynolds