On today’s date in 1996, Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the San Francisco Symphony in the first performance of Lost and Found, a five-minute toccata for orchestra. Its composer was Steve Mackey, an American whose music Tilson Thomas championed and recorded.
Mackey wrote: “On more than one occasion Michael has used the word ‘wacky’ to describe my music. Composers usually blanch at such attributions — nobody wants to be captured in a single word — but I can live with ‘wacky’. It is not a common adjective, does not end with ‘ism,’ and clearly the rhyme with my last name personalizes it. My music tends to explore fringe modes of consciousness rather than brand name emotion or logical thought.”
He also avoids conventional titles. His Concerto for Electric Guitar is titled Tuck and Roll, and among his other works can be found Banana/Dump Truck and Eating Greens.
Mackey said, “I think a lot about momentum, inertia, and even gravity, allowing the music to get stuck and tip over, lurch headlong, tumble with limbs akimbo as well as to move fluidly gives it a ‘road runner’ cartoon kind of physicality, a fantasy, but not completely unhinged from the physical world.”
Steven Mackey (b. 1956): Lost and Found; New World Symphony; Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor; BMG 63826