BY ELAINE KLAASSEN
Where you are born is the luck of the draw.
We don’t choose our birthplace.
Why is THIS my home? The rippling
grain, the lone tree, the curling creek
beds and endless sky. The prairie is my home.
Not the desert, not the mountains, not the sea,
not the fjords, not the forest.
Many people begin their lives in an
F-sharp-minor accident of birth and find it
necessary and urgent to wind their way
to a new home, perhaps in C Major.
I chose numbers from domino pieces
in a totally random way to arrange the
pitches of this composition’s theme.
Many random factors, such as the location
of our birth, our first moment of fear, or
the color of our eyes
create our own personal reality starting
at the moment of conception.
Just as the composer
shapes the impersonal pitches,
the random information,
the chance events
with skill and determination,
so does every person
faced with impossible
adverse combinations
shape their own life
with skill and determination.
Or not.
I have been writing music with parallel narratives for about 30 years. I performed my third set of pieces with narratives last fall, Piano Stories III. There were 10 of them and Southside Pride is publishing one a month until they are done. This piece was recorded by Mark Klaassen and performed by myself on piano.
