Friday, January 02, 2004

What Wrong Note?

Here's an interview with banjoist Tony Trishka. I heard him play once and he is quite good. He describes a concert he once played:
The interesting thing is that some guy in Kansas, Paul Elwood, who was a banjo player and a modern classical composer, said he’d like to write a banjo concerto for me with a percussion ensemble base on “Avondale” So, innocently, I said, “sure”. The next year, around ’84, he came up to me and he had actually done it. He handed me all this crazy music. I ended up doing this three movement piece with the Wichita Percussion Ensemble in front of 500 people, and it’s the most nervous I’ve ever been. It was the first time I ever wore a tuxedo. The whole piece was completely atonal. It was called, “The Void Beneath the Coffee Table”. It’s a great piece of music. I made a mistake right at the beginning of it, but no one could tell because it was atonal.
Via the other blog in Dm.