Beck YOU ARE ALIVE

JEREMY HOWARD BECK

YOU ARE ALIVE for jazz trumpet, 2 trombones, tuba, and percussion

(Score) [09.15.13]

Why You Call Me Boo Music

Instrumentation Jazz Trumpet* Trombone 1* Trombone 2* Tuba Percussion (crotales, vibraphone, suspended cymbal, kick drum, chimes) *Mutes required: plunger, harmon and straight mutes (all brass except Tuba) Duration: approximately 6 minutes Program Note I first met dancer and choreographer Haylee Nichele in Juilliard's Composers & Choreographers workshop. We had been paired with each other mostly against our will (and somehow without our knowledge—we had barely met), and when it came time to produce a new piece of music and dance for the workshop's annual performance, we were acutely aware of how not-your-first-choice we both were.

Haylee's only knowledge of my music was of e Wound at the Heart—the piece I wrote for Composers & Choreographers the previous year—and we agreed right away that, whatever we ended up doing together, we both wanted to do something that was very, very much Not at. at piece was a product of the most traumatic year of my life, and composing it was a kind of self-administered purging, vomiting, exorcism.

Haylee, too, had just made it through a very difficult time, and early in the process we set out to make a piece about the simple joy of being in your body. As much as e Wound at the Heart was about emotional and spiritual death, this would be a piece about life.

But, as John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," and a childhood friend's tragic loss made writing a simply exuberant piece impossible. e phrase "you are alive" was something I saw in a photograph, after September 11, of graffiti at Ground Zero, and at that time I found those words to be a great comfort. is time, the words—and the piece that resulted from them—are meant for my friend, to remind him: even after everything that's happened, you are alive.

I am so deeply grateful to Haylee for her artistic brilliance, for allowing me to take the big risks, and, most importantly, for her friendship.