The opening melody in this work was penned in late November of 1993 when I was studying at LSU. I had just returned from spending the Thanksgiving week with my Aunt Cindy in Pensacola. This melody became the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back in the saga of my departure from LSU. Obstinately, I decided to cast my pearls before swine and took this tune to my composition lesson with Dinos Constantinides. I sat watching the ever-reddening face of that fat little Greek man as he gazed upon the notes. Suddenly, he began to squirm and writhe, heaving his mass from the rolling chair that transported him about the office. He stormed to the door, flung it open, threw my score into the hall, and bellowed in a very thick, affected Greek accent, “You get out of here. You not good enough to be in graduate school.” (Later that day, one of Dinos’ lackeys showed up to inform me that my lesson had been rescheduled and that I was to bring three pieces in the style of Anton Webern.)
The following year at East Texas State University, where I had transferred, that melody would become the second theme in a piano concerto that was withdrawn before it was even finished. The day that I took the melody to my composition lesson with Dr. Ted Hansen was perhaps the most memorable of all of my years of lessons. Dr. Hansen was a marvelous man and the most important of all my teachers. The lesson itself I don’t remember so much, but rather what transpired thereafter. We exited his office, said our goodbyes, and Dr. Hansen traipsed down the hall in his drab, old, once-black, trench coat. Partway down the hall, he half-turned, making eye contact over his shoulder, and said, “That’s quite a tune.” He died two years after Cindy on the same day.
I was flying by the seat of my pants with that first piano concerto. I didn’t yet have the skills to grapple with the immensity of the form, and what I really didn’t have was time. I was trying to get a master’s degree, and the work was my thesis. I withdrew the work immediately after graduation. The first 35 measures of Mariposa were lifted note for note from that ill-fated concerto. The supporting themes developed over the years as I improvised on the main tune. This became one of those pieces that I played whenever I was asked to play the piano at family gatherings and the like, something I enjoy almost as much as a root canal or a colonoscopy. Most of the material in this piece was reworked anew, though not all. Some of it remains as I originally conceived it in the early 1990s. At its heart, this work is the reanimation of a young man’s vision tempered with an old man’s experience.
Dr. Ted Hansen (1935-2018)
