"There are no two points so distant from one another that they cannot be connected by a single straight line -- and an infinite number of curves."
Composer Lawrence Dillon has produced an extensive body of work, from brief solo pieces to a full-length opera. Three disks of his music are due out in 2010 on the Bridge, Albany and Naxos labels. In the past year, he has had commissions from the Emerson String Quartet, the Cassatt String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Ravinia Festival, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Kenan Institute for the Arts, the University of Utah and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.
Although he lost 50% of his hearing in a childhood illness, Dillon began composing as soon as he started piano lessons at the age of seven. In 1985, he became the youngest composer to earn a doctorate at The Juilliard School, and was shortly thereafter appointed to the Juilliard faculty. Dillon is now Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he has served as Music Director of the Contemporary Ensemble, Assistant Dean of Performance, and Interim Dean of the School of Music. He was the Featured American Composer in the February 2006 issue of Chamber Music magazine.
One of the most difficult things about dealing with tragedy is facing the feeling of helplessness. What can I do, we think, what can I do to fix this? And all too often the answer is nothing.
On Tuesday morning, Josh Hudson, one of our voice students, was killed in a car crash. The campus was stunned by the news – literally dumbstruck, as it happened, because Josh was one of the leads in the production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, which was set to open last night and tour the state in the coming weeks. Needless to say, the production and tour have been cancelled, leaving many musicians wandering aimlessly through the final days of the term.
And all of us were left wondering what we could do.
As the details emerged, it appeared likely that Josh had been a victim of his own recklessness, driving his speedy car off the road in the wee hours of the morning. Luckily, there were no other passengers or vehicles involved.
Last night, I began writing a brief (3-minute) elegy for soprano and orchestra. After foraging through various texts that were dismissed for being either inappropriate or vocally awkward, I came up with a simple quatrain of my own:
Oh youth, who sings the night on fire And drives the hours of darkness through the day, Now rest your voice and climb behind my steady eyes To ride the years and mysteries away.
At this point, after about twelve hours of work, the piece is near completion. I expect to have score and parts done by Monday. It is possible that it will be programmed on the final orchestra concert at the end of the month, as a tribute to the departed, with Josh’s teacher, Marilyn Taylor, singing the vocal line. I don’t know, though, what will come of that. It’s just as likely that the piece will never be performed. Regardless, the composition will have served a purpose in me, providing something to do in response to an event for which no response is fully adequate.
As for Josh, he was a remarkably gifted young man whose parents both passed away when he was quite young. It’s difficult to separate the way he died from the energy he brought to performance – he was never afraid to go to the edge, to push himself into uncharted territory. That quality was one of the main reasons he was cast as the lead in the upcoming productions of the Open Dream Ensemble, the multidisciplinary ensemble my wife works for.
One text I considered using is a wonderful verse from Dylan Thomas that suits Josh quite well – and indeed is lovelier than anything I could have come up with, and a suitable close to this brief tribute:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
