The Prince of Venosa Expands to Fill the Observable Universe

• 3 Flutes

• 2 Oboes

• E-flat Clarinet

• 3 B-flat Clarinets

• B-flat Bass Clarinet

• 2 Bassoons

• 2 E-flat Alto Saxophones

• B-flat Tenor Saxophone

• E-flat Baritone Saxophone

• 4 F Horns

• 5 B-flat Trumpets

• 3 Trombones

• 1 Baritone

• 1 Bass Tuba

• Timpani

• Percussion (2 players: Tubular Bells, Bass Drum, Suspended Cymbal, Tam-tam)

• Organ

This piece was technically a commission, but not a paid one. I approached the Colorado Wind Ensemble in 1989 and offered to write a piece specifically for them if they promised to perform it. After hearing some of my other pieces, they agreed, requesting something along the lines of my Chamber Concerto for Violin and Winds, a good-natured, not particularly challenging piece from a few years before. But being a brash young fellow, I went and wrote something different — and not just a little bit different, but a lot different. In hindsight, I give the CWE credit; they could have told me to get lost, but they stayed true to their word and performed the piece. Unfortunately, it wasn't the best performance one might hope for, but these things happen.

When I decided in 2017 it was time to input the whole piece into Finale, I took the opportunity to make a few revisions, most noticeably cutting six bars from the saturated polyphony just before the "crisis chords". I made a few more minor changes in 2021, and a few more in 2025. But most everything else is intact.

Thirty-six years after the first performance, I'm finding that my relationship with this piece has evolved. Every time I've gone back to look at it again, my first impression is always, "This is never going to work, it's badly conceived from the start, nobody's ever going to understand it, etc." But the more I work on it, and the more I look for things that should have been done differently, the more I wind up with a conviction that I actually still stand by this piece, as an accurate expression of what was in my head when I wrote it. Nevertheless, my sense of what it all means is subtly different now.

The original program notes, which until now I had reprinted in the score, made a big deal about how "at its core" the piece is all about different sorts of shifting perspective - historical, cultural, and cosmic. To be fair, I'm sure I really was thinking about this when I was composing, but my opinion now is that expecting an audience to grasp and appreciate this up front just because you've put it in print is self-indulgent and artificial. It surprises me a bit that I wasn't more forthright about the relation between the human wish for immortality and the literal meaning of "Moro" - "I die". Of course, the full text of Moro lasso makes it clear that death is being used as a metaphor for love (very Italian, that). Still, the fact that I marked the boundary between "inner pain and tragedy" and "reconciliation and expansion [filling the Universe]" with the entrance of the horns literally quoting "Moro..." has to suggest - whether or not I was willing to admit it when I wrote it - that this represents the moment of death. Evidently I didn't see the subject-matter kinship between The Prince of Venosa and Strauss's Death and Transfiguration (even though I had played the latter in university symphony about a decade before). My version of transfiguration has absolutely nothing to do with Strauss's very Christian vision of beauty and reassurance; but the underlying question is the same. And with that association, there is a lot more ambiguity as to how a listener might interpret the other episodes in my piece - which I am choosing to see as positive.

I would love for this piece to be performed more (or, at least, again); but I recognize that it doesn't cater to the conventions of wind ensemble/symphonic band music at all. Performers and especially conductors have to be willing to commit to the concept and, in particular, follow the directions in the final aleatory section to the letter. I won't give away the small stage illusion here, but this fourth major part of the piece is a strictly guided improvisation involving the entire ensemble; and I know from too many past experiences that some people think "improvisation" means "make any weird noise you want." Following the guidelines is essential to making it work, and this includes extending the improvisation long enough to balance the two preceding sections. The score specifies 5 minutes minimum; in the CWE's performance it was — alas — twenty-four seconds. (Maybe patience had worn a little thin by that point.)