[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/146493147″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
A notated improvisation realized with Matthias McIntire and Danny Clay www.matthiasmcintire.com/ dclaymusic.com/home.html
Recorded Live at Zion Lutheran Church in San Francisco
September 15, 2013
Program Note:
“A Crazed Girl” is a setting of the similarly titled poem by William Butler Yeats. The tragic poem is a literal telling of Yeats’ relationship with the mentally unstable Margot Ruddock. Her infatuation with Yeats is analogous to that of the sea. Yet at once impassioned, both impartially move forward without her.
That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, ‘O sea-starved, hungry sea.’
Plum Green is three movements of clashing and blending two distinct colors. The piece was begun in December 2010 as a commission from Benjamin Opp to be premiered at his 2011 Faculty Recital. Because of its size and magnitude, Plum Green was Kyle Hovatter’s “Thesis Piece” for his graduate studies at San Francisco Conservatory.The piece is dedicated to two fantastic musicians and friends, Benjamin and Samantha Opp.