Origin of “The Thunder Song,” begun circa 1950 in Belmont, Massachusetts
I am two years old, standing at the back door of our kitchen, formerly the laundry room of the big old farm house that we rented half of, watching the rain pour down and the lightening flash beyond the faded green screen door. I am “singing” the wordless “Thunder Song,” my first composition, which, decades later, became the first theme of my string quartet of that name. Try this: say the name “Gordon” out loud the way people really say it, with the second “o” silent, slurring the “d” into the “n”. Now repeat that “dn” sound a few times and note the tip of the tongue pressed up behind the upper front teeth, no sound coming out of the closed mouth, just a hum coming from the nose. Now pre-pend the sound “uh” and ap-pend the sound “duh” to the accented “dn” in the middle, and say the three-syllable “word” a few times: uh-DN-duh. It sounds African, not English. But that was the entire “lyric” for the “Thunder Song.” I “sang” it over and over. There was something engaging about it, and also something wrong. It would be about a decade before I realized that the tune was crooked, with the 4/4 meter being broken by a 3/4 measure just before each phrase-ending note was held. That broken meter may have been rooted subconsciously in impatience: Why wait out a “dead” and obvious whole note when I could move-on a quarter note early and give a little kick of energy to the cycle? I thank my folks for reminding me of that song every now and then during my growing years, bringing up the tune or the “lyric” or the name, so I never forgot it. The crookedness grated on my rational sense of symetry and pattern regularity, yet when I attempted to iron out the wrinkle, the tune deflated into banality.
Eventually my folks’ 50th wedding anniversary in 1995 was coming up, and Dad suggested I do something with that song. That is when I finally embraced the crookedness and wrote the “Thunder Song” movement of the string quartet using the Amiga computer, huddled in his old camper that Frances and I had brought down from Boise, Idaho, to our place in Watsonville, California. I sang and played new variations of the piece, stretching and developing, even exploring a minor “get down” treatment that has a bit of deliberate blues flavor, before the final synthesis. Especially memorable is the hot, humid evening when I was working on that section, slipping out of my clothes and dancing in the bedroom as the computer played what I had written, in a continuous loop, while I sang various improvised instrumental lines, stopping every now and then to make notation entries before restarting the high-tech playback and the primitive movement of my bones.
As of this writing, the four-movement quartet has enjoyed two readings in Idaho: one in McCall, Idaho, with Jim Cockey and Lois Fry playing viola and first violin respectively, and another in Boise with Tom Tompkins (my brother) and his wife Jill on those instruments. The technical difficulties became obvious in each case but so did the success of the musical material. I would like to revise the piece in a new edition someday. Oops … not to forget the initial 1995 reading of just the “Thunder Song” movement during the wedding anniversary get-together, when Dad got to hear his only deadline, ever, for my music come to fruition.