October in the Chair
Based on Neil Gaiman’s short story October in the Chair, this work parallels the whimsical
yet dark undertones of what is essentially a Graveyard story. This particular tale personifies
each month of the year into a group of twelve people who are having their monthly meeting
around a campfire. The current month is Octobers to lead. After settling in and asking if
anyone has a story to tell (which no one does, that hasn’t been told before or is substantial
enough to tell fully), October begins to tell his. I won’t recall it all for you here, but a very
brief and cruel summary would be that a young boy, named “The Runt”, runs away from his
family who treats him poorly. He meets a ghost in a graveyard and decides that he’d prefer
to die and stay with the ghost (who played with him kindly all afternoon) than return to his
family. Sad? Yes. However the way it is told and the setting portrayed by the months has
an unmistakable playfulness full of animated conversation and characters. This composition
focuses mostly on those characters, leaving a centered ‘serious’ section of the music for the
dark reality of “The Runt’s” situation. It doesn’t last long though as the momentum picks up
again into the final moments of the piece. Another interesting consequence of this work
was my recent aural saturation of lullabies and music set heavily in major tonalities, due to
the birth of my son and my daily efforts to get him to sleep with calming ‘classic’ baby
music. Unaware of how much I’d absorbed of those pretty little tunes, the writing of this
work once again revealed my susceptibility to what I listen to!
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