Really short and sweet today! McDoc worked his first OB night shift last night, and even though I got a pretty good night’s sleep, I guess I have sympathy exhaustion or something!

Once when I was a master’s student at NYU, my teacher, Robert Sirota, told me that I should try writing some funny music. I think he advised me to do this because I was afflicted with your garden-variety tortured-artist-existential-angst (or TAEA, as a pharmaceutical company who would potentially develop a drug to treat the condition might refer to it), which is the kind of thing that can simultaneously fuel and completely discombobulate one’s composing. Of course, I didn’t take his advice at the time — a tendency to ignore such counsel is very much a part of the TAEA symptom profile. But since then I’ve thought about it now and again, and I’ve known exactly what I would write for if I were going to act on his idea:

drumroll….

A duet for piccolo and double bass.

Maybe call it “The Elephant and the Butterfly”… 🙂

Since I neither own nor play piccolo or bass, I’ve used MIDI sounds to create this recording. Now, I warned you in the initial post about this project that the MIDI sounds would be cheesy. And they are! Very cheesy, mmmmmm, cheese! But the cool thing is, this could actually be played in real life by real players, and I hope it will be at some point in the near future, in an expanded form.

Click play to listen:

[audio:http://missmusicnerd.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/audio/TheElephantandtheButterfly.mp3|titles=The Elephant and the Butterfly]

Thanks for listening!