Michael Cooke

 
Incomplete Thoughts was born out of the news that the SFCCO would not have all the bassoons they normally have for the May, 2013 concert. I stopped the piece on which I was working, and came up with another: a contemporary passacaglia where the bass line was in one time and the other instruments in others. I was thinking to use either multiple conductors or metronomes with earpieces. Desiring inspiration, I looked though some of my incomplete compositions for a bass line, and found something useable in a draft of an opera from many years ago. The figure went through some modifications and was given a lazy lilt in 7/8. I wanted to layer fragments of music on top, which were inspired by scraps of music not yet finished and other incomplete utterances. As I felt the work should be written in a stream-of-conscious-manner, an interruption motif came into being as a way to switch thoughts. While I eventually decided that the original idea of multiple times might be hard to pull off, I came up with other ways to have multiple times. In the end, I hope to have created a thought-provoking work that is more than the collection of Incomplete Thoughts that began it.

There is a quote from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s letter to his father on November 8th 1777:

I cannot write poetically, for I am no poet.
I cannot artfully arrange my phrases so as to give light and shade.
Neither am I a painter;
Nor can I even express my thoughts by gesture and pantomime, for I am no dancer.
But I can do so in sounds.
I am a musician.

This quote inspired me to create a collection of pieces I call Love Letters. They are usually for piano, last about 3-5 minutes and are written for or about someone dear to me. Twenty years ago I decided I want to write one based on my father’s initials, GAC. But every time I sat down to write it I was unhappy with the results. After my parents visit this summer, I had a feeling time was running out and I sat down to try again. I finally heard something I was satisfied with and in a couple of weeks I completed the piece I have been wrestling with for twenty years. Not only did I use his initials but I used his full name by putting rests in place of letters not used by music notation. I also added in my own name at the end.

Notation of My Father’s Name

Notation of My Name

My father is very interested in running and has run marathons all over the world so the A theme last 26.2 measures (26.2 miles is the length of a marathon) and the B theme is reminiscent of the music in the movie that inspired his desire to run “Chariots of Fire”. The finale is a culmination of all themes that runs on to the end.

As I was finishing this composition I started to hear strings playing the B theme at finale so I decided to orchestrate it for chamber orchestra. On September 25th 2010 the SFCCO premièred this version.