The festival “Voyages: Montréal-New York” runs April 2 through 6 next week at the Theatre la Chapelle (3700, rue St.-Dominique) in Montreal, and my new electric guitar quartet lies smack dab in the middle of it, on April 4, the all-guitar concert. More info at guitarist Tim Brady’s web site.Â
The new 13-minute piece is titled Composure, after a 1986 quotation from the New York Times by the brilliant essayist-novelist Marilynne Robinson that I’ve quoted here before:
The literature of expostulation, of Catastrophe, is taken to be very serious. But among people carried along in a canoe toward a waterfall, the one who stands up and screams is not the one with the keenest sense of the situation. We are in a place so difficult that perhaps alarm is an indulgence, and a harder thing – composure – is required of us.
That insight resonated powerfully with my own apostasy against modernism, and composure has been a central aim of much of my music – perhaps all of it. This particular piece does rather go over a waterfall at one point, but it keeps its, er, poise, and comes out calmer, if sadder, on the other side. I’ll be there.