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| Walsh Collection, Book I | |
| Date Completed: | June 12, 1984 |
| Duration: | about 22 minutes |
| Instrumentation: | violin |
| First Performance: | September 15, 1986, Roger Zahab, Christ and St. Stephen's Church NYC |
| Comments: | performance of 1. First Nocturne and 2. Double |
| Program Notes: | The twelve varied pieces of Walsh Collection are inscribed for TDW (my dear friend, Timothy Drew Walsh) and were written over a period of four years during my first days (and nights) in New York. I remember my concern to find some unique feature to highlight in each piece. Some are closely associated with people and events in addition to Tim: no. 5 uses a technique shown to me by Tison Street, no. 8 was written for Jesse Duranceau to dance to; no. 9 - a reminiscence of an evening spent with Ben Whittenburg in a tavern on Rutherford Island, Maine, and one, no. 4, was written using chance operations. During an evening of Scrabble with Richard Englehart (who proposed the system by which the title was found) a book case full of diverse texts was used to derive these words (one word from each shelf) in exactly this order. We threw dice to count and find which book? which unit or chapter? which paragraph? which sentence? which word? and were given this: Rest there-in of the inevitable. (I tried to remove some of the bleak chill by slightly modifying the words for the title.) Written for my own use, I performed some of them many times, others had to wait until I gave the first complete performances in New York City: Book I on September 15, 1986, at Christ and St. Stephen's Church, 120 W. 69th Street, and Book II on December 20, 1987, at Washington Square Church, 135 W. 4th Street. RZ |
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