Orbiting Garden

Program Note

Orbiting Garden was commissioned in 1988 by Toronto’s Music Gallery for a concert in memory of American composer Morton Feldman, my last composition teacher, who had passed away a year earlier. It was funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and premiered at the Music Gallery by pianist Anthony de Mare on April 8, 1989. Initially, I felt conflicted about the commission, partly because of my rocky relationship with my mentor in the late 1970s and early 80s (we parted company on non-speaking terms) and partly because, only a few short years after my Ph.D. defense, my musical aesthetic had expanded to also include the opposite side in the ideological universe from that occupied by his music and ideas. (Feldman is quoted as having said, “you drew a large circle and included me; I drew a smaller circle and excluded you.” Soon after graduation, that “you” became "I" and vice versa) Initially, I thought of Orbiting Garden as an act of defiance against Feldman’s coercive pedagogy, but also as a counterproposition for inclusivity to his declared exclusivity. Unbeknownst to me at that time, Orbiting Garden contained the seeds of my subsequent development as a composer, including my single-minded obsession with the microcosm of rhythm and myriad minute relationships which still informs most of my music. It took me then the better part of a year to create these fifteen minutes of music, struggling with primitive technology and a perpetual outsider’s understanding of classical musical instruments. The original version of Orbiting Garden ended with the vocal lament by Chari (pronounced “Khari”) Polatos a dear friend who was struggling with bouts of heroin addiction through most of his life. (The recording of this improvised lament took place at the CBC Radio studios in the midst of one such bout.) In 1992, after Chari’s tragic death in a traffic accident and while I was creating a version of the composition for accordion and audio, I decided to append the vocal ending with the coda of the revised version, allowing the on-stage soloist to conclude the composition. A few years later, in the rapidly shifting sands of technological change, I lost my original computer files of the audio, including the tempo track with the accompanying click track. Partly because of this, and partly because of the fiendishly difficult solo piano part which requires MIDI-like rhythmic accuracy, Orbiting Garden dropped out of circulation. In April 2019, the thirtieth anniversary of its premiere, I decided to revisit this composition, significantly revamp the solo piano part and, with a lot of help from Aaron Tsang, a colleague and dear friend, we carefully and sparingly retouched the dated audio without disturbing its timestamp, thus restoring the original composition to active life once again.

In 2023, the remarkable marimbaist Theodor Milkov heard the composition and decided to perform it on the marimba. I was in disbelief for a while, since this composition is borderline impossible on the piano, but his performance at an international percussion festival in Athens that I attended convinced me and everyone attending that nothing is impossible for the rare humans who constantly dismiss the appellation “impossible” and prove every naysayer wrong. This version for marimba is the result of his guidance and notes. So . . . this is my new Orbiting Garden for marimba: less of a “garden” since the time the piece was originally composed (due to the rapidly accelerating climate change,) but still a dream for the future.