The Garden of Forking Paths No. 2 for flute and piccolo trumpet was composed in 1970. I was then 23 and teaching Music Education in junior high, trying to be a composer, and dreaming of going to graduate school when the Vietnam War was over. That year I got an apartment with my friend Jan Gippo, then a flute student at the New England Conservatory. Together we were young and ambitious in various vague ways, and of course quite green musically and otherwise.
Then as now, Gippo was a fountain of ideas and energy, bustling around doing things and asking you to do things. In that decade I wrote four pieces for him: Garden 2; then in 1971 a wind ensemble piece called MountainMusic (it finally received its premiere in 2011); the 1977 Passage for piccolo, strings, and percussion (which Gippo premiered with the St. Louis Symphony); and Fleurs for five flutes, from 1978, which he premiered with the St. Louis Flute Club.
I wrote four numbered pieces called The Garden of Forking Paths. The first, for solo trumpet, I terminated before it got out of the house. The idea for all the pieces came from a fantasy story by Jorge Luis Borges. In it a writer creates an apparently incomprehensible novel of that name in which, as it turns out, every moment of the story, as of life, lies at a forking path that can go in many directions. In Borge’s imaginary, impossible novel, they do.
My pieces inspired by the story were various experiments with suddenly diverging material. The Garden of Forking Paths No. 2 is dedicated to Jan Gippo and to the splendid trumpet player Jim Thomson. The two premiered the piece at New England Conservatory in 1971.
– Jan Swafford
