QTP2T (2022)
Premiere: pending
for concert band
Approximate duration: ca. 3' 33"
Difficulty: Hard (Grade 5--6)
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Instrumentation
picc, fl. 1 & 2, ob. 1 & 2, bs. 1 & 2, cbsn (or cbcl, cl. 1, 2 & 3, b.cl., a.s., t.s., b.s., picc trp, trp 1 & 3, hrs 1, 2, 3 & 4, trb 1 & 2, b trb, tb, db, perc: timp, glock, vibr, xyl, mar, tamb, trgl, b dr, cymb, cow bell, whistle, duck call (or something similarly quacky: kazoo, car horn, etc.)
PROGRAM NOTES
Originally intended for full orchestra, this is one of several pieces that was birthed around the time of my graduating from the Mannes College of Music in 1990 as I headed into the Real World to make a living. The tone of the opening suggests that I was deep in study of Prokofiev at the time, though I don’t recall. The structure reached a fairly advanced stage of completion, and I even went so far as to fully orchestrate the opening presto section. The piece was then shelved for reasons I can in hindsight only speculate about. The primary probably being that the piece was of a type that would be looked on askance in the “serious” classical music world, and therefore had little chance of performance.
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In the late 2010’s I was introduced to the concert band world, with its much broader acceptance of musical styles and enthusiasm for just such tonal frivolities as this. And then, in the spring of 2022, I became acquainted on Twitter with the remarkable Brian Lips, a long-haul truck driver based in the U.S. Midwest who was pursuing an interest in classical music at a later stage in life, in particular learning how to play the violin. During our interactions I was introduced to his impossibly cute, sweet, impish son Sean. And out of the blue one day, in the spring of 2022, I was reminded of this aborted scherzo, with Sean inspiring the resulting playful, dreamy middle section. The newly ideated piece seemed tailor made for the concert band world.
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The opening and closing presto sections are almost entirely unchanged from their original gestation thirty years earlier. The middle section never got very far originally, as I recall, so Sean’s inspiration is entirely responsible for the completion of the piece.
The original orchestra version was titled Scherzoid, but in addition to not being particularly original (there are already several other similarly titled concert music pieces ) it didn’t seem to reflect Sean's bumptious inspiration. Anyone who has seen or interacted with him cannot deny that he is a Cutie Patootie, a term that his mother very cleverly abridged to QTP2T. As a title, this seemed both appropriately whimsical and a nod to the contemporary predilection for abbreviations. So LOL cuz Sean is as QT AF.