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Cody Wright, Daydream (2001)
“I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land...”
Daydream was originally intended to be one movement from a suite for sax and percussion that was to be called A Day in the Life. The idea for the suite was to take various words that could be associated with everyday activities in life: Go, Eat, Sleep, Daydream, Flirt, etc., and find a way to represent them musically. However, I started with Daydream and it took on a life of its own, separating itself from the suite idea.
The texture of the work is imitative of a dream, no real linear development, presented in a soft cloud of patches here and there to be sewn together by the dreamer upon waking. When we dream, we perceive things in fragmentary chunks, and when we awake we derive some sort of meaning from them, The meaning can be specific or ambiguous, and often presents itself on many different levels.
At the time I set out to compose Daydream, there were several high school shootings taking place across the country, and there were even threats at my younger brother and sister’s high school. I started thinking about positive role models, and how there don’t seem to be too many of them out there for young people these days. I had also been reading about the black civil rights movement, which brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the foreground of my thoughts. The most obvious next step for me was to use excerpts of his “I Have a Dream Speech” delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963. However, I pulled most of the material from the last speech he gave, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, delivered at Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis, April 3, 1968, the night before his assassination.
The recorded material consists of excerpts from this speech, which have been processed to create harmonic pitches, which then provides the harmonic material for the vibraphone. The sax’s pitch material is almost entirely derived from We Shall Overcome.
The piece may initially seem like a reflection on the civil rights movement, however, although I would be happy if you found it to be a positive representation of what those people went through and ultimately achieved, that is only one of many possible interpretations. Keeping in line with the original idea, Dr. King’s words will hopefully infuse a sense of hope and comfort on top of whatever meaning you happen to derive from the work.
Daydream is dedicated to my brother and sisters, Casey, Chelsea and Tiffany.
Cody Wright’s music has been performed at La Schola Cantorum in Paris, New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall in Boston and at CAMI Hall in New York City. Mr. Wright graduated cum laude with a B.M. degree in Composition from New England Conservatory in Boston, and is a member of Pi Kappa Lambda. His principal teachers have included Alan Fletcher, Morton Subotnick and James Tenney for composition, and F. John Adams for conducting. Cody Wright completed a year of graduate composition work at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, and will continue graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University this fall.
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