For the record Watrous was definitely paying an homage to Stuart Dempster,
for whom composer Robert Erickson wrote _General Speech_ which is a
semi-theatrical setting of MacArthur's farewell address for solo trombone,
using every variety of vowel resonance and consonant articulation
available. (Dempster's book _The Modern Trombone_ is extremely valuable
and the original edition included a recording of his performance of the
Erickson work.)
One work likely to be in the background of Chihara's _Forest Music_ was
_Usable Music II in Bb_ by Chihara's one-time UCLA colleague Douglas
Leedy. (The Leedy work was commissioned for Tanglewood and proved so
controversial that the composer, unlike Chihara, was conspicuously not
invited when Tanglewood recently did their "class of '38 Festival".)
Usable Music II requires all of the wind players to vocalize texts from
Piston's _Orchestration_ book through their instruments. Leedy, who had
been an orchestral hornist in the Bay Area alongside Dempster for many
years, also wrote a solo horn piece, Perspectives (1965), including all
manner of vocalization into the horn, including singing, humming,
laughter, growling, pseudo-speech and speech. Leedy's earliest work with
speech into the horn used the phrase "if elected, i will go to Korea."
Another work in which the use of air through wind instruments is used to
great effect is Holliger's _Pneuma_.
Daniel Wolf
Frankfurt
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