My strange attraction to long and difficult novels lead me to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. One of the most iconic moments from the book is a passage where the main character Tyrone Slothrop is given truth serum, and recalls an exchange of letters where he asks the Kenosha Kid:
"Did I ever bother you, ever, for anything, in your life?" The answer comes back
You never did.
The Kenosha Kid
Slothrop meditates on different possible grammatical arrangements of the six-word answer: "You never did the Kenosha, kid"/"You? Never. Did the Kenosha Kid?" This led me to wonder how could this be applied to music. My piece explores the ways six notes can be rhythmically rearranged, in order to create a different sense of phrasing.
Side note: there is an excellent twitter bot that posts different punctuations of the six-word answer, in ways that make no sense in actual english, but are highly amusing because of that.
"Did I ever bother you, ever, for anything, in your life?" The answer comes back
You never did.
The Kenosha Kid
Slothrop meditates on different possible grammatical arrangements of the six-word answer: "You never did the Kenosha, kid"/"You? Never. Did the Kenosha Kid?" This led me to wonder how could this be applied to music. My piece explores the ways six notes can be rhythmically rearranged, in order to create a different sense of phrasing.
Side note: there is an excellent twitter bot that posts different punctuations of the six-word answer, in ways that make no sense in actual english, but are highly amusing because of that.