In Memoriam Jennifer Anne Fitzgerald
As part of its festival commemorating the 80th birthday of T.J. Anderson, Tufts University is presenting a memorial concert for composer and Tufts graduate Jennifer Fitzgerald, who died of breast cancer last December at the age of 32. Many performers, including members of pulsoptional, which Jen helped found, will be performing works written by and in memory of Jen. I will be performing my composition Lyric Homage, a tribute to Jen's Lyric II, on bass trombone.
Jen was a PhD student at Duke when I was an undergraduate there, and years later I happened to choose her undergraduate alma mater for my graduate studies. During the spring of 2002, I was assisting pulsoptional (then called CSMG) in the performance of a new work by Robert Zimmerman, and so I got to play alongside Jen and her cohorts. One afternoon, I was warming up before a rehearsal, and Jen overheard me playing multiphonics on the bass trombone, and mentioned that she had written a multiphonic piece for solo tuba that I might be interested in. I was indeed quite interested, and at the next rehearsal, Jen gave me the score to Lyric II, originally written for David Liquori. Unfortunately, I did not have enough control over my multiphonic technique to play Lyric II at the time. Since then, I have gained a greater facility with multiphonics, and after hearing of Jen's death, I wanted to try my hand at her piece once more.
Unfortunately, when I searched through my pile of 7+ years of accumulated scores, I could only find the first page of Lyric II, and I distinctly remember the complete score being two pages long. I asked John McDonald if he had any leads for tracking down the second page, and after he came up empty, he suggested that I write a piece in response to Lyric II. Initially the idea was to write an alternate version of the second page, extending her work in my own compositional language, but in the end I chose to interpolate between phrases of the her original composition. I certainly hope to find the missing second page and perform Lyric II in its entirety someday, but for now I offer my own work in tribute.
