Composer Blogs@Sequenza21.com

Rusty Banks is a composer/guitarist/teacher originally from Jasper, AL, now living in Pennsylvania.

His compositions benefit from themes relating to regions or environments. For example, his composition commissioned by the Alabama Music Teacher Association's 2004 convention featured audio samples from the Cahaba River, Alabama's last free-flowing river. Another work, "Long Pine Creek: New Year's Day," uses sounds from Long Pine Creek in Nebraska. His compositions range from traditional concert music to sonic installations where boom boxes are scattered throughout a room. His music is described as thoroughly modern, yet accessible, a description he shudders at, but reluctantly accepts. His compositions may be heard on Living Artist Recordings, as well as his web site, rustybanks.org.

Friday, January 09, 2009
All the One-Eyed Boys in Town

I just completed “All the One-Eyed Boys in Town.” I was asked by Mark Sheridan-Rabideau to write a work for the Continental Trombone Quartet with John Kenny as a soloist. The work makes use of Wyoming poet, Harvey Hix. I’m not that fond of works with narration, and I didn’t want to add a vocalist, so I had John (who is also a Shakespearian actor) record his readings of fragments of the poems and email them to me. These will be used in boomboxes that the players synchronize with. In the second movement the players play the same part, synchronized with their own boombox, each started about a half note apart.