Tortoiseshell Music Home of composer Nathan Curtis

Recording: 

Panic-and-Repose.mp3

If you listened to the recording, you might be tempted to say that in naming this piece Song and Dance: Panic and Repose, I got the subtitle backwards. After all, the "Song" is calm and relaxed for the most part, while the "Dance" is nervous and agitated. That's because the subtitle refers not to the mood of the music, but rather to the mood of the composer.

In the spring of 2004, during my second semester at Tufts, I was working on a piano sonatina, to be played at a concert in April. I made a promising start, but as the concert got nearer, my progress slowed down. In fact, when I had my weekly composition with my professor, John McDonald, about two weeks before the concert, I had not written a single note since the previous meeting, and wasn't even close to finishing one movement of the sonatina. I had two weeks to somehow triple or quadruple my output from the previous month. Less than two weeks, really, since I'd need to give the pianist a chance to rehearse everything. I considered cancelling my lesson since I didn't have anything to show for my efforts, but in the end I decided to go and tell my professor about my predicament.

John's response was quite refreshing. "Forget about the sonatina," he said. "Put it away. If it's in you, you'll go back to it and finish it another time." Well, that's nice to hear, but what about the upcoming concert? "You don't have to have anything for the concert, although I agree it would be nice if you did. Why don't you try writing something that you can play on the piano yourself, so you don't have to worry about giving a performer enough time to practice?" In two weeks? I couldn't write a single note all last week! "Well, let's see. Maybe I can help you get started."

John took a blank sheet of staff paper, and wrote down a few notes. One chord at the beginning of the top system, two chords near the middle of the page, and one more chord close to the bottom. He then urged me to fill in the rest of the page myself, starting right then. I had never had to compose written music on the spot -- though I have done a lot of improvisation, in many different contexts -- and although I was sitting at a piano, I decided to compose without touching the keyboard. By the end of the lesson, I had filled about a third of the page, and only then did I play back what I had written. It sounded pretty good.

Encouraged by this start, I went to a practice room to keep writing. By the time I went to the NME rehearsal later that afternoon, I had filled almost the whole page, and though my notation was rough and incomplete, I had a good enough idea of the piece in my head that I could play it all the way through. It was a complete movement -- not as long as the planned sonatina, but enough to stand on its own. In a few hours, I may not have quadrupled my output from the previous month, but I'm pretty sure I exceeded it. A heavy weight had been lifted my shoulders. I was so relieved that, in the next weekend, I composed a companion movement, using a theme I had jotted down in the laundromat a few weeks earlier, but had ignored in favor of the now-forgotten sonatina. This second movement was fast and rhythmic, a bit off-kilter but definitely dancelike. I decided that the first movement, being slow and freely moving, was therefore a song, obviously lacking words, and perhaps less tuneful than Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte, but a song nonetheless. The song was written while I was stressing out over not having anything for the upcoming concert, while the dance was written precisely because I was no longer worried. So there it is: song and dance. Panic and repose. It makes perfect sense when you look at it from my perspective, though of course I also relish the apparent chiasmus of the title.