Prior Art (2004)

Just a few feet away from my studio, several hundred sheep are making their way through the field, led by a shepherd wearing a black cape and driving a pickup truck. Is someone filming an epic biblical movie? No, I am assured, these sheep are real. The shepherd passes through here every year. The cook always takes him a beer.

Eventually, the flock goes on its way, but five lambs are accidentally left behind. Someone calls the police, and two officers come, and they try to contact the shepherd. No one knows what to do in the meantime, but the lambs are cute, so everyone (including the policemen) starts taking photos. Finally, the shepherd drives up in the pickup truck to retrieve his lambs. But the lambs don’t want to be retrieved; they are happy here with lots of grass, lots of attention, and no roaming. The shepherd and policemen have trouble catching the lambs, but after an hour they do finally get them all into the truck, and the shepherd drives away.

These sheep can’t have anything to do with this piece, which was nearly finished by the time they visited. But I nevertheless feel some strange connection. Maybe the sheep simply make a good illustration of my surroundings, which in turn influence the music I write. Maybe there are visual similarities, however coincidental, between the layout of the score and the arrangement of the lambs. Or maybe they offer some impossibly corny metaphor about my compositional process: maybe the lambs are some abstract musical ideas from my past works which I revisit in this piece. So then am I the shepherd who comes back to get them, only to find them unwilling to come? Or am I one of the policemen who just takes pictures of them because he doesn’t know what else to do? And how exactly does one take a picture of an abstract musical idea?

This logic is clearly going nowhere. I am just myself, writing this piece, contemplating its various connections to my prior art while I look out the window at sheep.

Prior Art was written for Speculum Musicae while in residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.

Use software such as iTunes or WinAmp to listen to this music, which is encoded in MP3 format.