by Christopher Fulkerson
The genesis of this little piece is a long story, and it became the basis of an even longer story - it is the first piece of the Festival to have been composed. It was commissioned by the Northwestern Science Fiction and dinosaur buff, David Hall. He approached me through correspondence with an idea that he acknowledged to be rather strange, that of my writing a piece which would somehow represent the vocal sounds of dinosaurs - I was to make some real effort to approximate their sounds. Mr. Hall sent me some rather good drawings of dinosaurs and wrote commentaries on their speculated vocal abilities, going so far as to try to reconstruct their vocal ranges on the basis of the size and shapes of their craniums, etc. I was pretty dubious about all this, and I found little to assure me that there was anywhere any certainty about the sounds dinosaurs used to make, but I accepted the commission on the basis that I could write something that would, through the filter of the imagination, speak to his request. I had to hang pretty loose to sublimate the conditions of this commission, but gradually we agreed on a type of piece; I felt that woodwinds would be best, and that antiphony would correspond the best to the callings across space that I was being told the dinosaurs may have made. Eventually this calling across space put me in mind of the first line of Thomas Pynchon's masterpiece, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, which hence provides the title of the piece. Somehow both the sounds involved and the good-humored absurdity of it all made enough sense in the context of Pynchon's novel that I could proceed in good faith. The piece was no longer "about" dinosaurs, but Mr. Hall was satisfied with the concept as I had developed it. Dinosaurs became V-2 rockets. It seemed like a plausible transformation. Pynchon's offbeat humor helped. I have also made use of some of Pynchon's words in CELESTIAL SIXTIES I and CELESTIAL SIXTIES II.
I made a metrical plan for a short piece for two antiphonal woodwind quartets, which could if desired be sung by a vocal octet if virtuosic enough. At the time I did have a basso profundo in Ariel who could sing the low B flat that appears in the piece, and my sopranos had already sung things for me that were similar to some sections of this piece. But I have thought of it as basically a fanfare for woodwinds in the tone of an introduction.
I was very pleased with the tone that the piece struck. This was the first piece I wrote in which the methods, designs, materials, and expression all really seemed to work and sound as I wanted my music to be. Strange as the steps toward the fulfillment of the commission may have been, they too seemed to work. Whether it sounds like dinosaurs, or V-2 rockets, or both or neither, it has a quality of something being suspended in space, and a suggestiveness in its frolicking, bustling activity, that seems to be making an announcement consistent with these kinds of things, like any fanfare. When it came time, later, to write a piece for my vocal ensemble Ariel, I wrote a longer piece that has more of a "screaming" character, and I used the same types of materials, and many of the same ideas, in that piece that I used in this one, including the idea of antiphony. So I called that piece after another line in the Pynchon, THE SCREAM THAT PEAKS PAST FEAR. That piece comes closer to the sounds of (artful!) screaming, really is a vocal piece, and has been sung several times by different Ariel octets. So a fuller explanation of the title of this little fanfare comes by listening to its companion piece. I have a plan to write an entire "screaming" oratorio, possibly to include Alan Ginsberg's well-known poem HOWL, a poem that could be described as a goodly screaming, as the main body of a trilogy that would include these two pieces. Thanks to the offices of our mutual friend Thomas Parkinson, who gave me Ginsberg's New York telephone number, I spoke with Ginsberg and told him about my plan, which he liked. (He remarked that somebody in San Francisco calling themselves Kush, possibly a rock band, he wasn't sure, had already set parts of it. I have not located this group. Mr. Ginsburg seemed to have no thought that because one person might have set parts of HOWL, somebody else couldn't also do it. Ginsburg was polite and mildly intrigued but seemed to want to get back to a rather boisterous-sounding dinner party that was going on at his house. I hung up knowing I had not really made much of a connection with him.) Such an oratorio would include the two ensembles so far used. The vocal octet would again be situated within and around the audience, and the two woodwind ensembles on the extreme sides of the performing space. There are many other ideas sketched out for this projected oratorio; time will tell whether I find the time to write it.
The ensemble of antiphonal woodwinds used in this piece is also employed as an obliggato alternative to the viola fanfares at the beginning of THE CAVERNS OF THE SACRED RIVER.
This piece was completed in 1985, and is two minutes long.
The score is fourteen pages long. Hard copy of the score is $5.
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