After graduating from Stanford in 1984, I was fortunate to get two big breaks from Earle Brown. I met Earle for the first time at the 1985 BMI Student Composer Awards, where to my surprise he was on the jury that year. I was 24 and had studied his works for many years. If it had not been for Earle, I would not have been invited there.
The piece that got his attention was Pentateuch, a grand divisi orchestral work in quarter-tones, including three choral groups and soprano solo with strong hints of György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis. Pentateuch was used to fulfill the requirements for my masters thesis. Because of its unwieldy and impractical size (back then, only blueprint shops could make copies of oversize paper and reductions were prohibitively expensive) Earle was the only judge who took the time to open it up and give it a look. ‘I had to fight for your score,’ he told me. ‘No one else wanted to look at it.’ Earle did not mind ‘rolling up his sleeves,’ so to speak. It was serendipity that he was a judge that year. My life changed!
Shortly after meeting Earle, I received my first commission. Earle presided over the Fromm Music Foundation and asked me to write a piece for sinfonietta (one each winds and brass, percussion, piano and string quintet). The piece, called Trailing Vortices, was based on a musical interpretation of photographs of trailing vortices and other flow phenomena in Milton Van Dyke’s An Album of Fluid Motion. I discovered the book while browsing at the Stanford Bookstore. Milton Van Dyke was a Stanford professor in fluid mechanics and even signed the book for me! I spent the good part of 1986 composing the piece. In a sense, Trailing Vortices is a tone poem, however instead of program music with a story line, photographic images of flow phenomena are musically depicted.
Trailing Vortices was premiered at the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 1987. A few months later, it was performed at the Gaudeamus Festival by the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra with Ernest Bour, conducting. Here is the recording of the live performance at the VARA radio headquarters in Hilversum.
Music, Polyphony and Polyrhythm 