There are certain pieces in the saxophone repertoire that I’ve continued to put off learning again and again. Well, it’s not really that I’ve put them off; I’ll take them out semi-annually vowing to dig in, saying to myself that “this is the time I put this to rest, haha!” only to file the music away on the shelf to be confronted another day. (This is also evidenced by the several unfinished drafts of this very post that have accumulated.) It’s a strange relationship I have with a only a few pieces. Tre Pezzi by Giacinto Scelsi is one of them, as is the work currently on my stand and pictured above, Berio’s Sequenza VIIb. The problem is that I hold these works in such high regard that I feel to play them any less than perfectly would be doing them a gross injustice. It sounds neurotic, yes, I concede that, but what stops me from following through with them is that I think that I’ll never play them as well as they should deserve to be played. Adding to this obsessiveness in the case of the Berio is that there are 6 different fingerings for C# (concert pitch B). What’s the big deal? Well, there’s a B that sounds through the entire work and making sure that all the fingerings are perfectly in tune is quite challenging:

The effect is really cool, but it’s enough to drive an intonation eccentric up a wall. But here it is: I am learning Berio’s Sequenza VIIb. Hopefully by declaring this publically, I’ll be bound to some kind of nebulous ethical agreement in which going back on my word would constitute a serious breach of something. The occasion for my performance of the piece will be revealed when we announce Mobtown Modern’s second season.