ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES
by Jim Bonney - for concert band [approx. 5 '30"/ Grade 3]
score and musical examples coming soon!
On June 2nd, 2006 - the last official day of school for St. Charles East High School, Nicole Alaniz was killed in a tragic automobile accident. She was a flute player. She was sassy. She was an honors student. She was a rebel. She was a punk rocker. She was a writer and a poet. She was a friend to everyone she met - and by all accounts, she is still very, very missed. She was 17 years old.
I was asked to write a piece in memory of her - a celebration of her life, not a lamentation of her passing. The title, Angels with Dirty Faces, was taken from something she had written, and in this piece, I worked in as much of "her" as I possibly could.
I assigned a letter to each note of a scale -- so the letter "A" would be the first degree of the scale, "B" would be the second degree, and so on... when I ran out of scale degrees, I just started over... so if we were trying this on the C major scale, it'd look something like this:
... and if you took all the notes that corresponded to Nicole's name, it came out sounding like this:
I tried this with a bunch of different scales and modes, and found that Nicole's name turned out to be a really gorgeous melody... and if you stack the notes on top of one another, they spell out a complete 9 chord. So I ended up using this note/spelling to create most of the content of the piece. In the midst of all these intellectual games, however, I din't want to neglect the most important part of the piece: the spirit and energy that was Nicole's.
[Score and Parts = TBD + shipping & handling]
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