A subscriber post on Substack on some rare pieces by Bill Dixon and his relation to extended (or compressed) songform.
In 1979, Dixon wrote a piece called ‘Places’ for the soprano Jennifer Keefe. Premiered at Bennington at an Erik Satie tribute concert organised by composer and Bennington Faculty, Vivian Fine, with work by Dixon and Fine in the somewhat unlikely company of Virgil Thomson and Emmanuel Chabrier. Performed by Keefe, tenor saxophonist Stephen Horenstein, and Dixon on piano, the piece initially had a wordless vocal part. A couple of years later, another of Dixon’s Bennington students, singer and theatre marker Shellen Lubin, added lyrics, retitling the piece ‘Dusty Rose’, and recording it in a voice-piano version on a programme devoted to her work on WBAI-FM in 1983. (Uploaded to her own Youtube channel this year, it has six views.) Neither of these performances is otherwise publicly available [...]
This isn’t programme music, representation or mimesis. Which is to say, for Dixon, those ‘Places’ could be anywhere/ Nantucket. New York. Vermont. Wisconsin. Firenze. The place of the music. Places are emotional states too. States of mind, containers and expressions of feeling. “At one moment there can be this almost silent vortex of what be called textural sensitivity—all is fine—all will be fine. And then, faster than the visibility of a bolt of lightning, the metamorphosis of all that is opposite descends”.
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