015 - Auntie Lardass

I got a lot of mileage out of this tune.

Perhaps I should first explain the title. This is one of the rare instances where I deliberately imitated another composer, in this case, Frank Zappa, and more specifically, his tune Uncle Meat. If his uncle is meat, mine is fat / lard, hence Lardass.

I did this shamelessly because my first composition teacher, an amazing man who shouldn’t be forgotten but is, Gerald Kemner, once famously told the composition class I was in “If you hear something you like, steal it.” I love that he gave us license to learn from the music that we enjoyed by imitating it.

I was only able to find two pictures of Dr. Kemner online, this one:

And here he is as part of the Tiberius Klausner / Gerald Kemner duet - the first time I saw them they performed an outrageously complex work by Pierre Boulez - Kemner was one helluva pianist.

But I digress.

I first encountered Frank Zappa’s music when I was around 12 years old via the album We’re Only In It For The Money. This was when the album was new. To say it blew my mind is an understatement. A few years later I encountered Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica and I was never the same musically again. I absorbed other musical iconoclasts like Varese (thanks to Zappa), Cage, Satie, Partch, etc… but it was early Zappa and Beefheart that bent me in that direction at a young age.

When composing this piece something I’ve noticed about Zappa is he frequently uses stepwise harmonic motion, often with sustained notes or added 2nds, so that’s what I did here. The harmony steps upwards from C - D - E - F# - G back to C then steps down to Bb. The phrase lengths are consistently 6 bars.

The accompaniment is a basic bass / chord alterations which sound like it could be in any meter until the melody settles into 3.

This piece became part of a collection of “Marches” for saxophone quartet. I didn’t feel like gracing it with the title “Lardass” in that collection so its new title became Quadrupedalism, a term that identifies a developmental problem in adults where they never learn to walk on two legs (it happens).

Note the little fanfare figure in bars 5 and 6. This is a quotation of the telephone ring from the movie In Like Flint. Apparently it’s pretty easy to download it as a ringtone these days.

And here is a video of the h2 quartet performing this piece arranged for them under the title Quadrupedalism:

This arrangement was further reworked for mandolin orchestra and included in the collection Moments of Zen, 21 Character Pieces for Mandolin Orchestra. Unfortunately, it’s never been performed.