mod wheel go spinny

instrumentation: clarinet, bass clarinet and electronics
duration: 10 minutes
written in: 2022–24, revised 2025
written for: Égide Duo 

As a college sophomore in 2002, armed with nothing but a cheap keyboard I bought at Radio Shack, the old piano in my parents' basement, an empty plastic jar that had once held pretzels, a friend's squeaky car window, and my laptop's built-in mic, I created a piece of digital avant-prog that I called "MBFEGW" — short for the rather silly "My Big Fat Evil Greek Wedding."  I'd only been making electronic music for a little over a year at that point, so my methods were very basic.  But over the years I never lost affection for the piece, with its convoluted angular melodies, asymmetrical Eastern-Europeanish meters and abrupt shifts of tone, and the idea of updating it was always slinking around in the back of my mind.

The right opportunity finally came 20 years later, when Égide Duo commissioned me to write a piece for clarinet, bass clarinet and electronics.  I recreated the piece from scratch, this time using synth and sequencing software, and now with decades' more experience controlling electronic sound.  In many places I gave the performers melodies from the original piece;  in others I added newly written parts for them.  In the end, the piece is quite different in flavor from the original, despite keeping almost all of its notes and rhythms.

The new title combines two things I'm fond of.  First, the mod wheel (short for "modulation wheel") on a synth keyboard, which is often used to trigger a warbly pitch vibrato in live performance.  (See, for instance, the keyboard solos in Thomas Dolby's "Commercial Breakup" and Eskaton's "Le cri.")  And second, "dress go spinny," a meme popular among femme trans women that describes the joy of twirling in a skirted garment for the first time.  Hopefully the experience of playing the piece has a bit of that gleeful energy.

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