Memorious 17 / The Accounts

Issue 17 of Memorious literary journal is now live over at their website memorious.org. The Accounts is featured, with Katie Peterson's poem and the full recording of my setting. Also, a composer's note on the piece, which in typical Gullickson fashion cites a trip to an isolated canyon as one of the piece's primary influences. I was serious about the paper-sack map. It's on my wall.

This project was a blessing. I'm grateful to Katie Peterson for her beautiful poem, to Rebecca Morgan Frank for her work with Memorious, and of course to Eric Malmquist for his efforts to mount the concert, find players, organize, and publicize, not to mention including me in the project to begin with.

I was so fortunate to perform the piece with a number of old and new friends. Angela Tomasino stepped in to sing the vulnerable vocal lines with spot-on color and control. (She was Angela Latkowski for the concert, which fell on the weekend before her wedding!) Eric Malmquist and Brian Baxter, favorite and familiar cohorts, came out of semi-retirement to play bass and percussion respectively. Our violist is another IWU comrade, Ben Weber. The horn players for movements 3 and 5 are Frank Harriman and Ania Kucia.

Memorious deserves special props for naming their journal after the gorgeous Borges story "Funes The Memorious":

"A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge--all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumberable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. I don't know how many stars he could see in the sky."