Program Note:   

I was 14 years old in 1975 — the perfect age to revel in the madness of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which was released that April. The opening “sennets” celebrate that summer’s muggy afternoons as my buddies and I pretended that we were Henry’s “happy few” at Agincourt (“Let the trumpets sound the sonance and the note to mount” from Henry V IV, ii) until dusk fell, fireflies gathered into clouds, and we swung heavy sticks at one another in mock combat just as my sons did when they were the same age forty years later.

The “cortege” that follows is sun-drunk and sweaty, overshadowed by the grownup reality of older brothers serving in Vietnam and the sobering up necessitated by our parents’ arrivals home from their jobs downtown. Trash can lid shields were piled behind the garage; the sticks were returned to the wood pile, and amber light streamed through dining room windows as meat loaf and canned green beans were eaten while Walter Cronkite told us the truth.

After dinner, energy still to burn, the “tuckets” accompanied us as we streamed back into the darkened yards, overtired but unwilling to cease running around the neighborhood looking for a melee. At the end, calling our names from front door stoops, our folks rounded us up the way that the knights got rounded up at the end of Holy Grail. The resulting musical hot mess sounds like the way emptying our pockets at the end of a summer’s day felt — fragments of Scott Joplin, Satie, a snatch of the University of Wisconsin Fight Song, misremembered hooks from 70’s AM radio — in short, the musical marbles of a Wisconsin childhood rolling across the floor, remembered and written down with all the quirkiness intact one humid week at MacDowell in July 1989.