Fire and Gravel

When I was in college, being an avid reader beyond my coursework, I devoured a book written in 1883 by Ignatius Donnelly entitled Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel. He proposed that within human history and preserved in legend and geological strata, our planet passed through the tail of a comet producing a rain of fire, stones, and hydrocarbons upon the earth. Many were his naysayers, and I’ll not go into the merits of his theory here. Donnelly thought outside the academic consensus box, and I appreciate original ideas.

The imagery of the catastrophe he described pounded and burned its way into my imagination, producing a song in complex meters. I remember showing my ideas to Lief Nicolaisen, the bass guitarist and vocalist in Brumus, our band at the time. I hadn’t completed the arrangement, and unfortunately we didn’t pursue it. I wish we had.

All these years later, I found my original rudimentary notation of this piece in a notebook. I’ve worked snapshots of the pages into my video. Whenever I see my early notation scribbled on the staffs in ink, I recall Maestro Frederick Lesemann scolding me, “Use pencil. You’re not Mozart.” I eventually conceded the point, but I love seeing these ideas so confidently and indelibly hitting the paper in my brazen youth.

I wrote a lot of music back then, for everything from solo piano to large ensembles, with meager hope of ever hearing them performed. I was an English major, after all, wading along the shore of a stuffy, academic, musical conservatory culture. Authentic music students had their own compositions and assigned pieces to worry about. As for faculty performers .... well, they were faculty. When I joined their ranks as a fellow teacher, however, my prospects didn’t improve. Some of my works got performed in truncated form by my various rock bands, but most remained silently sleeping in my notebooks.

Until now.

The Ersatztet provides top-notch performances of my works. Stunningly and compellingly so. I can’t be happier with the result. I hope you will be, too.