The Composing Process Part 2

Other motifs: the heartbeat. There are a lot of variations on the dearly beloved "lub-dub," because I felt that the poem devoted so much energy to describing people in desperate situations -- on the street or some dead-end hotel, in mental hospitals, laid out on junk or, god help you, in *Denver* -- places where I could imagine that your sole consolation is the fact that your heart continues to beat.

Carl Solomon/I'm with you in Rockland: the poem is dedicated to Solomon, (Ginsberg met him during a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital in 1949). The music for part 3 sets the rhythm of his name against the recurrent line from the poem, in Afro 6/8 time.

The derivation for the other material is more abstract. There's a recurrent atonal line, which is an absolute bear to play, drawn mainly from the Dolphyish inspiration. There's a fair amount of augmented major 7th harmony, as bright as major can be and intended to underscore the happy or intense passages. There's a country tune that came to me in a dream: I'm six years old and watching TV in my jammies. It's a cartoon of a train speeding along, while a country group sings a tune called "A Cloud Came O'er the Hill." This is the only time in my life I was able to remember and notate music that came in a a dream, and I never thought I'd have a use for it, but it's used to underscore the section in Part 1 where he describes how the greatest minds, some of them, simply melted into perpetual travel. The music used under the passages about the joys of man-on-man love is new, intended to convey the joyous nature of those stanzas.

I'm probably omitting something, but these two posts cover the main sources. Getting it on paper, once I had a framework and a collection of possible motifs, melodies, grooves, and colors, was a simple question of hard work. Once I had it roughed out, I was faced wth putting it in front of musicians and asking them to play it. Oy.