Works » By Title » M » My Pleasure (8:30 / 1985)

Thus far, “My Pleasure” is my most successful and popular piece, and I think I love it the most too. Author Melody Sumner wrote and published a book called “The Time is Now” under her own Burning Books imprint. I went wild over one of the stories called “My Pleasure” which is a very sensual account of an exotic woman's day. She begins early with food, then sex, then drugs, then dreams. Then Sumner decided to commission composers such as Robert Ashley, Laetitia de Compiègne, Maggi Payne and myself to set the stories in “The Time is Now” to music. I chose to do “Answer” and “My Pleasure”. It was as if the story had been written for me, of course it is a fiction, but my life at the time was very wild. Melody Sumner says that she was vaguely thinking about me when she wrote it and to this day when it is performed, if people do not read the program notes they think it is a true story about me. The music just seemed to write itself and come from nowhere. It was used as part of a fifteen hour radio series called “Ultrasounds” in 1985, and was part of the demo of that series that was produced by Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York, and aired by satellite. It is the first time of many that I used so much vocal harmony in a chamber work. BG