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World Premiere Experience
By Gordon Bowie
You asked for a note about the world premiere performance, and I’ve got to tell you it was a heady experience even for one such as me, who is used to performing and receiving applause.
The story goes back a ways, to 1997, when I attended a Doug Yeo recital in Jordan Hall together with numerous other trombone players who knew Doug from the trombone-l listserv dedicated to the trombone and its pedagogy and issues. Doug played the serpent on two pieces in that (mostly trombone) recital, and that was the first time I had ever heard one. Later that same night it snowed 3 feet and Boston was totally blanketed. Although I was impressed by the musical potentialities of this ancient instrument I did not immediately set out to write for serpent. Instead, because I was trapped with another bass trombone player at the Fenway HoJo for 3 days by the freak April Fool’s snowstorm and we ran out of duets for two bass trombones to play, so I wrote “Second Bass Blues” reflecting on the moment after the concert when we had been standing outside the second base line of Fenway Park at midnight in a howling blizzard looking for someplace to get a bite to eat. I dedicated the piece to Doug Yeo.
Later, in 1998, when Doug was regularly performing my “Second Bass Blues” as an encore with his daughter Linda, also a bass trombone player, he asked me to write for serpent. I agreed, and brought some sketches to a 3-day low brass workshop at North Central College, near Chicago, where Doug was chief clinician and I was composer in residence. Because the serpent is an ancient instrument with limited mechanical possibilities, I had tried to make my music follow the natural notes for the instrument and respect its limitations. He played through my sketches with ease at sight, said he liked the ideas, and then uttered the fateful words: “No limitations to key, chromaticism, or technique: challenge me.” So I completed the piece with an eye to making it more virtuosic and challenging, and delivered the finished score and parts to him in the fall of 1998. He now says that it is the most difficult and virtuosic piece ever written for the serpent.
Fast forward ten years, and the right venue, right orchestra, right conductor, and right audience finally became available in order to bring this piece to the public. On Saturday night November 23, 2008, and again on Sunday afternoon, people heard the “Old Dances in New Shoes” for serpent and string orchestra, played in public for the first time ever!
Mary and I rode up to Boston on the train on Friday Nov. 21, and stayed at the Millennium Bostonian right across from Faneuil Hall. It was too blisteringly cold to be able to do much shopping, but we tried until we froze. We were joined by Gavin and Sara, for the Saturday night concert. After a pleasant supper, we went over to Faneuil Hall where I participated in the pre-concert lecture by NPR’s Mary Ann Nichols, whom some of you may remember from her days at WGMS in Washington. Doug demonstrated the serpent and the ophicleide, and then the concert began with Haydn’s Symphony No. 10. We clearly had a first-class orchestra for this project!
The mood was absolutely electric in the hall when Doug took the stage and positioned himself with his serpent. The first two movements showed off Doug’s tone and technique and my melodic writing, and then in the third movement, the fur began to fly. Doug’s virtuosic technique was astounding. The audience was by that time fully engaged in the piece, and you could feel the excitement in the hall. The fourth movement has a lot of wit and humor written into it, and the audience was really in on the joke, You don’t often look at a classical music audience and see everybody, literally everybody, smiling ear to ear as they listen. In the fifth movement the greatest virtuosic challenges are posed, and Doug flew through them with aplomb. He wiped his brow at the end of the toughest section, and as the movement ended the audience burst into spontaneous applause. Gavin leaned over and whispered “I’m surprised you are still friends!” Until that moment I actually had not realized how incredibly difficult and virtuosic that was for serpent, but it was not lost on the audience. After the finale there was huge applause and a spontaneous standing ovation for Doug, then for me as I came up to the stage front, and we each took numerous bows.
I may be biased, but the rest of the concert, while entertaining and excellent, seemed to be anticlimactic. Sunday’s performance was much the same, except the energy level in the hall was a little less, something I’ve noticed before with matinees, and the ovation wasn’t standing. Doug’s playing was once again outstanding, and after a post-concert Q&A with composer, conductor, and performer, we went out to have dinner together. Monday, Mary and I took the train home and I was still on “cloud 10,” but the realities of arriving home in Washington DC began to calm us down, and it was certainly good to be out of the bitter New England cold.
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