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Work

Good times! : a celebration of the life of Blair Milan, 1981-2011

by Tim Hansen (2011)

Score Sample

View a sample of the score of this work

Audio Sample

Performance by Adrienne Pope, Mark Broschinsky, Victor Caccese, Gleb Kanasevich, Thibault Bertin-Maghit, Edward Neeman, Julian Pellicano from the CD Selected works by AMC represented artists

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Selected works by AMC represented artists

Non-Commercial

This item is not commercially available from the Australian Music Centre. We regret that we cannot offer it for sale.

CD

Selected works by AMC represented artists : vol. 15

Library shelf no. CD 2271 [Available for loan]

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Work Overview

This piece was composed for the Norfolk New Music Workshop in June 2011. A few months before the residency, a very close friend of mine, Blair Milan, passed away very suddenly from undiagnosed leukemia. I knew that I had to write a piece to celebrate Blair's life, especially since the date of the concert was June 25th, which, serendipitously enough, would have been Blair's thirtieth birthday. My task was complicated however by a condition of the residency that I was to compose a piece in the spirit of the unique genius, American composer Charles Ives.

Amongst other things, Ives' work is characterised by sudden and unexplained changes in mood, key and tempo, superimposition of apparently unrelated material, and an unapologetic love of quotation and pastiche. It were these elements I chose to focus on in my piece.

It just so happened that Blair and I worked together on a number of theatre productions over the years (Blair was an actor). The biggest show we worked on together was a black comedy piece set in a circus freakshow called Death's Waiting Room (directed by Danielle Harvey, script by Sam Bowring). In this show, Blair played a confused transvestite by the name of Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette was confused because she was convinced she was biologically female, and she longed to be male. Nothing the other characters could do would convince her that she was, in fact, a male like she wanted to be. As dry as program notes like this can seem, let me assure you this situation was pretty hilarious.

I tell you all this because Marie Antoinette performed a (very dirty) song in Death's Waiting Room called "Weed" in which she touted the imagined joys of being male. I wrote the music for this show before I had ever considered composition as a career, and despite the naivety of my work at that time "Weed" had a great harmonic progression in the chorus, which essentially consisted of a descending chromatic scale in the bass: A minor, C, B, B flat. Despite weeks of my refusal to acknowledge this as a valid basis for the piece, the muse (and probably Blair) won. Good Times! is based upon this harmonic progression in a wide number of guises and transpositions.

Work Details

Year: 2011

Instrumentation: Clarinet/bass clarinet, trombone, piano, drum kit, violin, double bass.

Duration: 10 min.

Difficulty: Advanced — Rhythmically challenging

Dedication note: Dedicated to Blair Milan

Commission note: Commissioned for the Norfolk New Music Festival, 2011

First performance: by Adrienne Pope, Mark Broschinsky, Victor Caccese, Gleb Kanasevich, Thibault Bertin-Maghit, Edward Neeman, Julian Pellicano — 25 Jun 11. The Music Shed, Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate, Norfolk, CT, USA

The piece has also been orchestrated for: Clarinet/bass clarinet, trumpet, piano, keyboard, percussion, cello, double bass.

Subjects

Performances of this work

18 Oct 2011: at ExhAust - new music out of Australia (Galapagos Art Space (Brooklyn, NY)). Featuring ExhAust.

25 Jun 11: The Music Shed, Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate, Norfolk, CT, USA. Featuring Adrienne Pope, Mark Broschinsky, Victor Caccese, Gleb Kanasevich, Thibault Bertin-Maghit, Edward Neeman, Julian Pellicano.

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