All Your Thens for Now

Dream-Variations on Mingus

All Your Thens for Now was commissioned by Abby Fisher and Alexv Rolfe in 2013, which now feels like a lifetime ago. Nevertheless, it remains one of my most popular pieces, and I am grateful to the many percussionists who have played it. The piece’s central anxiety—that a life-changing artistic opportunity might arrive in the form of an absurd dream and disappear before it can be captured—is still strangely familiar and deeply funny to me today. Here are the original program notes, lightly edited for clarity:

LH: “Did the thing with Mingus on the golf course actually happen?”

TD: “re: Mingus–definitely not, I was 9 when he died. But it was a real dream I had.”

All Your Thens for Now is a setting of photographer Tim Davis’ prose poem “The Ladies’ Tee,” a retelling of a nocturnal encounter with Charles Mingus on a golf course combined with stream-of-consciousness dream-variations on Mingus’ own Self-Portrait in Three Colors. The vibraphonist-speaker takes on the role of a photographer, trying to capture moments for preservation and posterity while the rambling, disjointed text highlights their ephemerality and transience. As the possibility of a career-defining masterpiece slips away, the audience—repeatedly addressed as “you”—gradually becomes the subject of the work.

Score Preview

This preview only contains the first two pages, since the text is under copyright. Purchase via Gumroad to see the full 25-page score.