A World of First Drafts

Five short essays on where we are currently at.

I recently picked up a copy of “An Evening With Windham Hill”, a collection of early 1980s live performances by some of Windham Hill’s popular-at-the-time acoustic guitar players. I primarily bought the LP for the recording of “Turning: Turning Back” by Alex deGrassi, as it was the only way to get this on vinyl; the 1992 retrospective that also contains the track was never (officially) released on anything but CD.

The album contains a more interesting track on it, that being the first (?) performance of a Michael Hedges composition. Introducing the performance Hedges says “This is a new piece for [that] started out for guitar and then, er, all of a sudden it needed piano and about a week ago it needed bass so… We need to play it tonight. It’s dedicated to Steve Reich, and it’s called Spare Change.”

The performance starts out very Hedges like, with his (now) distinct playing style and tapping on his instrument, but then after about forty seconds the piano comes in and Hedges influence seems to be diluted. He pulls it back but seems to be fighting with the piano, and when the bass solo arrives at three minutes Hedges is then completely lost to Manring. The three instruments then battle for the remaining two minutes of the composition leaving us at an ending that feels unresolved. So unresolved it takes the audience several seconds to realise the performance is over.

The composition and its performance was very much a first draft. Some interesting ideas in places, but ultimately lacking cohesion, unsatisfying, and even forgettable. Hedges’ voice (that of his guitar) is lost amongst the parts that aren’t his.

When Hedges released the final version two years later, on the album “Aerial Boundaries”, he knew the piece needed work so he made some major changes. The first was to drop the key two semitones lower. I guess he removed the capo from his guitar. The second change was more substantial: Hedges decided to replace the piano and bass parts with his own guitar, spending over one hundred hours recording sounds, looping them, playing them backwards, splicing tapes, pulling them apart and sticking them together, experimenting, all to get the textures that fit.

Over one hundred hours in the studio in 1983, and likely many hours after those first drafts in 1982, to create a five minute long piece of music. Hedges could have just released the original arrangement, but he knew it was mediocre so continued to refine it.

The version realised on “Aerial Boundaries”, and the liner notes explicitly use the verb realised rather than recorded, is probably the most striking work in Hedges’ entire discography.

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