(each of these symbols represents one of the three movements, all the symbols together make up the title of the sax quartet and should be used in the program as the work’s title instead of “three paintings”)

Program notes:
This work grew out of an idea that came to me while attending a recital in a small hall with doors on both the right and left sides of the stage. One could enter the stage from one side, walk completely across the stage and exit through the other door. An article written by R. Murray Schafer (“Music, Non-music and the Soundscape” found in Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought published in London in 1992 by Routledge) speaks about how people come to a concert before the music begins and stay until after it is over. Buildings are designed to keep all outside sound outside. We have made music into a thing, a machine that can be turned on and off rather than the ever present living creature it is. Music should come and go, always be alive, sounding somewhere even when we cannot hear it. Excited about bringing music into a different light, I began to think of a way to change our concert philosophy. Automatically, Sea World came to mind. People come to the stadium seats to experience the killer whale, Shamu. Even though the show begins at 3:00pm, people begin to show up around 2:30pm. But where is Shamu? Is Shamu alive at 2:30pm even though he is not to be seen? Shortly after 3:00pm with the crowd completely full, Shamu is brought into the main tank through a door on the side. The whale performs by simply being alive in addition to doing tricks he learned from the trainer (composer) that are unnatural to whales. But mainly people just want to see a live whale. Our concert philosophy right now is comparable to college lectures on whales. Students walk in, a teacher presents facts, shows slides, and even presents videos of lives whales, but a real live whale is never seen in the classroom. I’m not saying real music is not being performed today; I for one have experienced many concerts with real, nearly supernatural music. My aim is to create a piece that begins with the philosophy that music is alive and exists before it enters the music performance hall and that it can be passed around from performer to performer. So I began to think of how music could be seen as alive before it enters the room, as if we are coming to see something that just passes through like water through a saw mill. I came up with the idea of music coming from outside through one door, passing across the stage by performers like bags of sand in a work line, and out the other door. From there I expanded the piece to moving music around space in three different ways (all can be seen as canons). To visualize the three basic ways sound could be spatially passed, I created three simple paintings using black and white paint. The first movement is that of passing music across the stage from right to left (horizontal – x). At a deeper level, it is about the entrance of living music from outside flowing through the music hall. Using all twelve pitches, this movement supplies all the materials for the other two movements, as if performers took living music from outside and created something from it (like the trainer teaching Shamu tricks). The second movement is that of passing sounds all around the room (all directions – the infinite combination of vertical and horizontal – x,y). And the last movement is passing sounds up (the last dimension in a 3-dimensional world – z).