The World Premiere of ANTAEUS, Concerto for Doublebass and Orchestra will be performed at the April 2 concert in Chapel Hill's Memorial Hall and on April 3 & 4 at Raleigh's Meymandi Concert Hall.

One of the most popular questions I get is “how long did it take to write?” It is an impossible question to answer as the entire creative process is not delineated in billable hours.

One answer would be to say that I began the day Scott Freck called me February 15, 2007. Another would be that the first note was not actually written until I sang it to Lenny in Duck and Dumpling February 28. Still another could put it at the first date of our working collaboration, which, as I have it, was May 6, 2007—a good two months after meeting and deciding on ANTAEUS as the title.

In creating ANTAEUS, I met with Lenny four times over the summer of 2007: May 6, June 7, June 12, and July 16. My calendar showed I worked at home on the concerto June 4 , 5, 8, 11, and 12 and then three days in August: 21, 25, 28. The previous five days hammered out the bass part and the structure of the whole; the last three, composed all else around the bass. In the parlance of my profession, I would call only the three days in August “composition”, as it were. All else was sketching.

I have a sketchbook for notes, but mostly the day-to-day is documented in my journals. Our first musical meeting, May 6 was simply discussing the other concertos I’d heard and what I thought, hearing Lenny play some excerpts. No, it was June 7 that was a difficult one, according to my journal

“I tried talking him out of solo tuning. He tried talking me out of c# minor—the key I hear it. I came home, bitched to Leda, swore, took the bass in vain, then the slow movement came to me full-blown and I fixed the first movement.”

After that, things started coming into focus.

“At 4pm Monday I called Lenny. Not hearing from him I called again Tuesday morning and set up a meeting for 1pm. [This one was] Much better. I’d copied everything by hand in three keys: c# minor in which I hear it, b minor for solo tuning, and, on a whim, a minor following Bottesini’s lead (which would be solo tuning to the orchestra’s b minor). Not so much surprise, Bottesini was right. We quickly confined our session to the a minor excerpts.”

In part, we had to find a way to talk to each other. Most non-musicians think, for example, that all bass players must “speak flute” when, in fact, all musicians have little in common with each other than the score. Lenny and I had to find our method of communication and once I clicked on the written excerpts in three different keys we were able to find the key in which we could “speak,” as it were.

That day, June 12, I came home and copied out the bass part to all three movements and sent it off to my copyist to create manuscript paper for the orchestra with the bass part already printed into it—when it came a few weeks later it came to 130 pages for me to fill in!

Our meeting of July 16 proved only more successful in our fine-tuning what I was hearing and what Lenny could play. We tweaked the second movement considerably and constantly tweaked the cadenzas that were a part of both first and third movements.

Flash forward through the summer to my journal entry of September 1, four months later, where I pronounce “ANTAEUS is done!” August 21st I took off and wrote the second movement by lunch and sent it off to the copyist. Tuesday the 25th I took off work and in twelve hours (8-8) had completed the third movement. Friday the 28th I took off and in ten hours composed an unprecedented sixty (60) orchestral pages, finishing movement one!

“All told,” my journal states, “ANTAEUS orchestral composition—as this was much more than orchestration as I had no clear idea of any of it—took three days, one day per movement. In retrospect the moment hit the weekend prior, somewhere between the second and the third movement. The way I took to Movement 3 was unreal. I was writing as fast as I could really. Thus the last movement completed (the first movement) was simply waiting for the toilet bowl to fill with water before flushing again. Nothing more.”

Nice metaphor, though I think now a recharging battery is perhaps more apt.

But just because composition was finished didn’t mean the horse was out of the barn. The most agonizing aspect of the profession is proofing, go over note by note so that the rehearsals go swimmingly and do not grind to a screeching halt over an unintentionally clashing B-flat and B-natural. But I travel with my proofing and have fond memories of a couple experiences with ANTAEUS in this regard.

Proofing the ANTAEUS score in DC when Barack Obama stopped traffic outside our hotel with an impromptu speech and we dashed down to be among the first to hear him. Proofing ANTAEUS parts in Minneapolis in the exact same room in the exact same hotel (what are the chances of that?!) where five years earlier I’d proofed my Toni Morrison collaboration.

I remember solemnly giving the printed solo bass part to Lenny before a Messaih performance that December and delivered completed work to the library early in the new year—exactly one year ago that I write this blog of its travail.

But even that wasn’t the end of the saga as Lenny called later that spring to say that maybe I could write him a THIRD cadenza for the second movement as well! Bass players, I tell you! After examining the patient thoroughly I determined it could not withstand the stopped time of another cadenza, BUT I COULD write one that would come after the second movement finished and before the third movement began. This was fun, actually, coming back to a work six months after it was finished to provide perhaps a little something new to the design, like an architect asked to rethink the bathroom or a balcony off the master bedroom or a wetbar for the walk-in basement split-level rec room.

So I wrote Lenny a third cadenza and working together again after a few months off was a wonderful reminder of why I took this assignment on to begin with. I like Lenny! And I do a mean Lenny impersonation due to our concentrated time together. Gosh, do you think he does a mean Scearce impersonation himself?

Looking forward to his premiere of our baby this weekend!