COMPOSITIONS

The third act follows Gawain as he departs the castle of Sir Bertilak (alias the Green Knight) to meet the Green Knight and fulfill his end of the wager he made at the beginning of the work (ostensibly to withstand an axe blow to his unarmored neck). After meeting the Green Knight at his “chapel” - a valley overhung by jagged rock cliffs - he does indeed, after much mockery and prolongation from GK, fulfill his end of the bargain in the form of three withheld blows to the neck from the Green Knight. Identities are then revealed to a furious, then chastised Sir Gawain: he had done well, except for accepting a magical girdle from Lady Bertilak (under direct command of Morgan le Fay, the witch) to protect himself. The entire structure of the work is revealed to have been an elaborate test-of-chivalry in which Gawain, thinking he was acting of his own free will, was in fact funneled along predestined guidelines.

The mix of fatalism, defiance, insouciance, and confidence with which Gawain meets his fate seemed somehow to find its ideal expressive parallel in the blues. The work is structured around both small and large scale B-minor blues form: the opening material (after the sax improvisation) follows a 12-bar form, and there are larger moves to the IV and V later in the piece. Throughout the work, Gawain’s expressive language is a transfiguration of the some of the feelings that the blues brought to me - not easily described in words, but (I hope) readily heard in the music.