Retro-Contem

As a result of Bruce's arriving at Trisdee's party a day late, I conceived the idea that we might do a joint concert of wildly contemporary music ... contemporary, that is, vintage 1979 or so ... a nostalgic evening, just the two of us. After all, if one person can timselip by 24 hours, could not two people timeslip by 35 years?

I found this poster from the year 1978 which advertises a concert. The first half is a Bach cantata, the second the world premiere of an unnamed two-piano composition by Bruce Gaston and myself.

This piece is very interesting in that I wrote extremely detailed programme notes for a piece that did not in fact exist yet, and then Bruce and I improvised the piece to fit the programme notes later. Improvisation is an interesting art, especially when one is doing it with someone as wild and creative as Bruce ... you dare to play everything, living in the moment, knowing it will never come back. This 30 minute piece was an amazing spectacle and had someone tried to compose it, would have taken probably weeks of carefully working out textures, heterophonies, and so on.

The piece was a wild success and it was recorded by Anton Regenberg of th Goethe Institute, but that recording has disappeared off the face of the earth, I think. So we will try to do it again....