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Click on the recorder to hear the first movement (electronic rendition) |
Estel (Hope) was written in 1965 while I was teaching at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and living on Manhattan's lower east side. The composition is in four movements: Estel, Fancy, Lament, and Dance. The overall title "Estel" means "hope" in the Elvish language of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I titled it "hope" because of the confident, assertive character of the movements -- in particular the first and final movements. This piece was sent, in 1965, to the eminent recorder performer Franz Bruggen, who referred to it in a letter to me as "A real contribution to the modern recorder repertoire." A few copies were sold in a little shop called "The Recorder Shop" in Manhattan. The piece then lay unnoticed and unplayed (except by me) until the 1990s when I performed it in Berkeley, CA and it received a laudatory review by Carolyn Peskin in The American Recorder magazine, where it was likened to "American Indian flute music."
Although the melodic line and internal structure is certainly different from the American Indian traditional music, there is a certain spiritual or "longing" quality that might strike one as similar. Once, while traveling in southern Mexico, I played this piece while waiting at a remote bus stop in the countryside. Native indian people nearby heard the music, came up and told me that there were two kinds of music: popular, and spiritual. They then explained that what I was playing was "spiritual music." This was a most gratifying audience!
The score of the first movement is scheduled to be printed in an upcoming issue (Summer or Fall 2002) of The American Recorder Magazine, along with more detailed notes explaining the melodic and harmonic structure of the piece.
Stan McDaniel
April 2002