Circular Motion
My ex-husband’s passion, early in our relationship, was road biking. He was in love the delicate and expensive Moser bikes.
I joined him one day at bike store to shop for myself. He and the store owner talked earnestly about the components I needed for the bicycle; shifters, cranksets, derailleurs, and saddle, to name a few. I tried on clipless bike shoes, cycling shorts, jerseys and gloves. I was fitted for a helmet.
With each addition, the cost of the bike grew. Finally, my stomach churning, I gave him my credit card, “Just buy the thing, and don’t tell me the cost,” and left for a walk.
We picked up the bike together a few weeks later. The Moser was a beautiful dark blue etched with yellow, the gears gleamed and seat was a soft leather. I did not know how to ride a bike with clipless pedals, and the owner of the store offered to help me. I tramped up to my bike with new cycling shoes with cleats. Once clipped into the pedals, I pushed off for a short distance, and braked. I toppled over sideways not realizing I needed to unclip. Undaunted, I jumped up, my knee cut and bloody, and immediately tried again. The result was no better, and worse, the seat of the bike had been scratched. Maybe, I told the store owner, I would try this at home.
Days went by before I got up the courage to try again. I tried clipping in and out of the pedal holding on to the porch railing. And finally, much to my ex-husband’s disgust, I rode with one shoe clipped in and the other barefoot until I got the knack of rotating my heel to the side so that the toe of the shoe comes out of the clip.
In the beginning, we rode together, the thin wheels of the bike tires ticking. The roads around Marietta, PA were slender, but the berms were usually generous. The connection to the road surface, the flash of the grass rushing by, my labored breath became a singular experience, occupying my thoughts, entering my dreams. I absorbed the county roads as I flew through the cool air, past fields of grain.
My ex-husband and I were not well paired biking together. He loved steep mountains and terrifying fast descents. As we rode, he bantered, sometimes shouted at me to keep up with him. Oddly, his energy and competitiveness slowed me down. As if racing neck to neck made me sick and heavy. Almost obstinate, I got slower and slower.
Competition and rules make me mad, oppressed, weighted down; suffocated. Perhaps because they often gender identified and have, in the past, kept me out. And in terms of composing my music, following rules means creative death. The free flow, the guessing of the eye and ear with knowledge, is what interest me.
In the following years, I biked solo. The circular motion began sinking into my music. My interest in energy or forward movement had, up to this point, been linear. My rhythms interlaced in a driving beat, fumbling for a moment before moving on, tense and ready to leap. Now my ear was listening to a rotating flow, moving up and over, using the impact against the surface to arc again. The spinning wheels pulled in the surroundings and shot it out.
I pedaled on, through dark woods on glistening damp pavement, listening. I heard country, in long lines, silken threads. The small farm houses, dark red barns, white porches and fences in early light. I became my body, the inside my legs, in my joints, always the motion of my muscles. Turning and alive. A new approach to rhythms and the passage of energy in my music.
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Work of the Month
A BRIGHT FLASH OF WINGS
for string sextet
That moment when, out of the corner of our eye, we think we see something flash in the sky, and look up wondering.