Composer Paul Gay would prefer that there be no applause Sunday evening, when the Brevard Symphony premiers his latest work at Community Church.
What might be more fitting is to raise a pencil in the air: Gay’s composition honors the five cartoonists with the satirical French weekly, Charlie Hebdo, killed among 17 victims in January’s terrorist attacks in France.
It was as news footage showed millions lifting pencils aloft to represent the right to free speech, gathering publicly to proclaim “Je suis Charlie” – I am Charlie – that Gay’s own sorrow led him to the grand piano in his south Vero living room.
“I improvised, played my mood and it became a piece,” he says.
Twenty minutes in, a melody emerged, and he realized he needed to write it down.
“I started scribbling, and by sometime in the second day I had the basis of it done, the skeleton,” he says.
“At first, it had no title, it was just a mood. Then I really knew what I was writing about,” he says. “I realized as I got closer to the end of the process that it was Charlie Hebdo. As the French said, ‘Je suis Charlie’: You’re going to have to kill me too.”
The composition is only six minutes long and he does foresee adding more as the news story plays out. “It’s all I had to say,” he says simply.
Much of Gay’s work is done in the middle of the night, he says, often staying up until 2 a.m. Musical notation comes to him as easily as writing.
“I did that for money as a kid, with a manuscript pen,” he says, pulling out a sheaf of music he copied long ago. “There was a composer living in Boston. A friend of mine was copying a symphony for him and he needed help.”
Later, after college, he would copy out the parts for the orchestra from the composer’s manuscript score. “I’d stay up all night,” he says. “I still do.”
Meanwhile, he was composing his own works, though his musical studies, starting at the New England Conservatory, included first opera, then trombone and conducting. In his 40-year musical career, he played with the Boston Symphony, Boston Pops, Boston Ballet and Boston Opera Company. He also conducted the New Hampshire Philharmonic and the New England Repertory Orchestra, as well as brass and wind ensembles at Boston University, where he earned a master’s degree.
“Je suis Charlie” is only his latest work: he has composed two ballets, a song cycle inspired by the poems of Robert Frost, and many other pieces.
Two days after his new work was on paper, he transposed the handwritten music into a computer-generated orchestral score. With the tap of the cursor and software called Sibelius, the mournful opening passage streams through his headphones. Implacable as a metronome, a vertical green line the length of the screen glides across the screen, intersecting the notes of the multiple parts. Strings, brass, percussion – each note of each instrument is played with computer-generated precision: pitch, volume and duration.
In several places, five linked notes – quintuplets – represent the five cartoonists shot by extremists for the magazine’s satirical depiction of the prophet Mohammed.
Played in cross-rhythm with the other instruments, the quintuplets will be particularly vexing to the audience, not unlike the cartoonists they symbolize, filling the length of four of the same note type in accelerating syncopation.
While they may cause the orchestra grief, Gay points out with a knowing wince, his computer program sorts the fractions out in a nanosecond, commanding the instruments – all played by humans and pre-recorded – to play at the precise instant.
The result plays through his headphones, switching from left to right to give the sense of the orchestra’s separate sections. Gay’s melodic woodwinds and pulsing strings play out against a poignant, dirge-like drum roll.
A moment later, the mood lightens to an almost jaunty air – satirists at work, perhaps. But all the while the percussion track menaces and suddenly, just as the green line traces the enigmatic words “rim shot,” a piercing explosion sounds, followed seconds later by another.
“Two absolute shocks for the audience,” Gay says. They represent the two attacks, at Hebdo’s offices and in a Jewish market where four more people were killed. The music’s tenuous calm erupts into chaos and shifts to a minor key.
The dust clears as a trace of “La Marseillaise” breaks through in muted brass, still in minor key. By the time the anthem is heard a second time, near the end, the key has changed to major. To Gay, that is a note of hopefulness, of perseverance prevailing over defeatism.
“You can take a passage of music and apply anything to it and see if it fits,” says Gay. “That steady pulse in the strings is always marching through: for me, that‘s the idea we can’t be defeated.”
Like many trying to make sense of the horror in Paris, Gay admits he wondered whether Hebdo had gone too far.
“My early reaction was that if you notice something offends someone, you generally don’t do it again,” he says. “But that’s what cartoonists do. Then I thought of Johnny Carson, David Letterman, ‘Saturday Night Live.’ That’s their game too.
”And if you think about it, that’s what keeps things flowing so that society doesn’t become so rigid and unforgiving and intolerant and judgmental – although I guess (the satirists) are judgmental, too.”
He remembered a favorite cartoon hanging on the wall of his dentist’s office, of Jesus, Mohammad, the Pope and a rabbi holding hands and dancing in a circle. Poking fun at religion is as important a right as mocking U.S. politics, he says.
“Ultimately, I feel that defending the right to free speech is essential. Once you pick away at that freedom, what comes next?” he asks.
Gay hopes “Je suis Charlie” will find audiences beyond Vero Beach. Sunday’s performance came about through his association with Indian River Symphonic Association. Gay, in his seventh year on the IRSA board, convinced the presenting group last year to bring two young Ukrainian musicians to Vero to perform a chamber concert at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, a first for IRSA. The duo played Gay’s violin sonata, among other pieces. He hoped the chamber concerts would become an annual tradition.
While that hasn’t come to pass, Gay did succeed in having another of his works performed here. Shortly after completing “Je suis Charlie,” Gay sent the score via email to Christopher Confessore, conductor of the Brevard Symphony Orchestra, which IRSA regularly brings to Vero.
Confessore, Gay says, is “the prime conductor working in Florida who promotes American composers.”
When Confessore rehearses the piece this week, he will be hearing it for the first time.
“As I’ve reviewed the score, I’m impressed by the power of Paul’s statement,” he said. “His musical response to this horrible tragedy is moving and will resonate with the audience. I’m eager to conduct it.”
“I’m asking not to have applause from the audience. It’s not about that,” he says. “The players have to take themselves out of it and just mesh with their part and not make a big deal. It’s about thinking about the situation as if you’re at a memorial service.”
The Brevard Symphony Orchestra plays Gay’s piece, as well as Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Bach, and Rossini, Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at Community Church. Tickets are $50.
