Concert Band - Digital Download SKU: A0.1030824 Composed by Neal Endicott. Contemporary. Score and parts. 35 pages. Neal Endicott Music #1249. Published by Neal Endicott Music (A0.1030824). This piece was originally titled Istn’t it Enough, drawing inspiration from the famous passage from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I changed the wording slightly to be more encompassing of different modes of perception (thought is a broader concept than sight and the word think created better melodic material than the word see, using the method described below) I provided an alternate title to more clearly convey the meaning behind the piece. That is; that the only church that I will ever need is the one I find in musical expression and in the beauty of the natural world. Though Adams’ meaning was meant to convey the primary reasoning for his atheism-a reason that I use as well-I also see it as an admonishment of our need for constant stimulation. Adams felt-and I feel-that people need to take the time to slow down and enjoy life: we need to enjoy the beauty of the garden (both literally and metaphorically). That, quite simply, is what this piece is (or at least what it is to me). Among the compositional techniques that I used in this piece is one that I have been using quite a lot. I call it crypto-serialism. The basic concept is that I will take a piece of text (the Douglas Adams quote, in this case) and convert each letter to a number between 0 and 11 and then convert those numbers to musical pitches, where 0 = C, 1 = C#, etc. The technique offers me a way to draw actual musical ideas from the text itself, which I see as a means of creating a deeper connection to the text. The piece is dedicated to the Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocolypse: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.
