Clowns

Clowns has a unique history. While in college, taking composition lessons from Michael Horvit, I had written a number of shorter works. After completing one, he turned to me and said, “Let’s do something BIG! Think about it for a week and let me know what you are contemplating.” I was just finishing reading the short story by Tolkien on Fantasy, entitled “A Leaf by Niggle,” and it came to me that it would make a great piece for orchestra and narrator, similar to “Peter and the Wolf,” but quite unique, too. ‘Niggle’, a painter, was a very silly character, and very clown-like in many ways. He had two strongly conflicting sides to his personality, so I wanted to depict him with a bi-tonal theme. Dr. Horvit liked the idea, so I set about ‘designing’ a leitmotif for each character, action, or mood. In its final form, it was in two acts and around 30 minutes of music in length. Unfortunately, during a change of location, we moved a box of trash and threw away the box which contained that work, along with everything else I had written to that point. I was crushed, because I could not hope to recall the vast majority of the piece, and I had no spare time to try to reconstruct it. But the Prelude and opening of the work, along with the Finale, stuck in my mind. I reconstructed the Prelude and first ‘scene’ around 2010, but in 2016, got around to deciphering my memories of the Finale, which originally was a wild, downhill bicycle ride. No longer having the middle 25 minutes of the work, I worked the two remaining sections into a piece and, maintaining the underlying humorous intent, entitled it Clowns, because not only would the original title not make sense, but the music reminded me of clown acts I had seen in circuses and in cartoons, not to mention Red Skelton, Emmett Kelly, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin routines and movies.