PLAYING THE MIRACULOUS GAME (1987) orchestra, 14:30 min.
instrumentation: pic,22(e.h.)22; 2220; timp-perc; str (flutes double on harmonicas)

When I was a child my family played a musical guessing game we called "Miraculous." My father would sound out the first notes of a song on his harmonica or my sister's toy piano, and the rest of us would shout out the name of the song as soon as we knew it. The songs in the piece are those from my own memory as well as those of my maternal grandmother and great-uncle. The form of the piece was patterned after a faded quilt my paternal grandmother made. Hanging in my house, the quilt's design—triangles forming spinning squares—evoked all kinds of musical images. The melodies are used in fragments, straightforward as sung, or superimposed on one another. A ballad becomes a fiddle tune, which turns into a jig; a flash of memory is silenced by forgetting. The day I finished sketching out the piece the quilt fell from the wall.

Commissioned by the Winston-Salem Symphony.

Published by Peermusic Classical.