All Good Is Luck is a piece inspired by something a guy named Kenny Quentin said to me out of the blue one night in December 2009 at the Blue Moon Saloon in Lafayette, Louisiana: “Not all luck is good, but all good is luck.”
I had just finished up a human-powered trip down the Mississippi River, and was very aware of my amazing luck in having done it without major mishaps. But even so, luck (good or bad) is one of those ideas I don’t really know what to do with.
It was pure random luck that I happened to meet Kenny that night, but I’ve been mulling it over ever since. I’m grateful to Kenny for his gnomic statement, and I’ve come to translate it for myself as: “Not everything that happens in the world is good, but everything we call “good” is something that happens in the world.”
A further bit of luck is that I was doing a stint teaching beginning electronic music at Middlebury College in January 2014, when a student named Ian Ackerman came up with a very cool lick that inspired this curious new piece for me. Thanks, Ian, for letting me steal your lick! And thanks, too, to Mary Rowell for working with me to develop the violin solo.
The original version of the piece is for violin and electric guitar. The current revised version is a two-violin version I adapted for Miolina, which requires live processing on both instruments, but guitar-hero-style processing on only one 😉 . I’ve set up an Ableton session with stock plugins to get you started, but you will certainly want to adjust from there.
You can visit December 23rd in my ongoing project, A Book of Days to hear a pre-release version of the recording Miolina will be putting out on their next album.
For performing materials, please click the buy button below. The suggested price is $30, but you can choose your own price based on your situation, with my thanks for supporting this low-key way of publishing:
DETAILS
- Instrumentation: guitar violin
- Ensemble Size: 2-6
- Duration: <5 minutes
- Electronics: Fixed Audio Live Processing
- Video: No
- Project(s): A Book of Days BRIM: The River Project
- Year: 2014