hammerspace (2014, rev. 2023) 3'

program note

In 2014, I wrote a collection of little pieces for my friends in the great ensemble Musikfabrik. I called the whole thing hammerspace, a term I had learned from watching way too many television cartoons. ‘Hammerspace’ is the place behind a cartoon character that can hide anything. Bugs Bunny can reach behind his back at any moment and pull out something surprising – an axe, a disguise, an anvil, another character, a car. The space behind a character can contain anything, of any size and shape, no matter how implausible or unexpected, based only on the needs of the storytelling, the imagination of the writers and the skill of the animators.

The idea of ‘hammerspace’ always seemed like a metaphor for composition to me. Composers also make their way by calling for players to do both expected and unexpected things, presenting musical situations that combine the familiar with the unusual, the experience we think we want and the experience that challenges it, that we didn’t expect, and that we didn’t know was possible.

The series of individual pieces I wrote for Musikfabrik all tried to embody this duality – the things the instruments were made for, challenged by something they weren’t made for. Of all the pieces in that set, the one I liked the most was for a trumpet player whose played melody is shadowed by another, which is vocalized. It is my hope to revise and update all the pieces in the original set, but for now this version for trumpet and voice is all that remains of the original.

I wrote hammerspace for the amazing Marco Blaauw, and the piece is dedicated to him. The duration is approximately 3 minutes.