Renga for classical guitar, bassoon and electric guitar (2002)

Jennifer Fitzgerald

A renga is a series of connected haiku. Each of the pieces is associated with a Basho haiku and the three movements form an interdependent narrative – each player overlaps with the preceding player’s music. I tried to reflect the nature of haiku through the restricted pitch material that I chose. Haiku writers are capable of expressing a vast array of emotion, meaning and nuance within the seemingly most limited of poetic constraints. Classical haiku is often strong, brash, scatological and funny.

It is always a pleasure to write music for my friends and for their very distinctive musical voices. The added force of that second musical personality dares me to venture into fresh compositional territory, to explore a somewhat different voice. All three pieces “do what they can” with rather limited pitch material – I sought to feature each performer’s style and subtlety. I wrote marc faris first as a class project for a course that marc and I team-taught a couple of summers ago, with his highly nuanced drone textures and bowing techniques in mind. The piece relies on marc’s musical sensitivity and adventurousness to vocally imitate his sonically formidable electric guitar sound and to play and sing microtones between the two dominating pitches.  The setting of marc faris also endeavors, as haiku writers do, to emphasize the sound and breath inherent in the words themselves.