Is Money Money (Score and Parts)
Is Money Money (Score and Parts)
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soprano, clarinet, bass clarinet, viola, cello, contrabass; 2 ratchets; 9 call bells
text: Gertrude Stein
(commissioned by Sequitur)
duration: 8:00
(Call bells and ratchets may be rented from the composer or purchased.)
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The directive of this commission from Sequitur was to compose a piece for their specified instrumentation that would relate in some way to the subject of money. In my investigation of possible texts to set to music, I was ultimately attracted to the pithy and downhome realism, replete with nursery rhyme quotation, in Gertrude Stein’s amused remarks about money. The texts I selected to set are from “Money” and “All About Money,” first appearing in 1936 in The Saturday Evening Post. Apparently, Stein’s written observations on the subject were provoked by the fact that her most conventional book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, was the first to actually earn any money.
The nine call bells and two ratchets that the instrumentalists play are stylized sonic depictions of that now extinct instrument of commerce, the cash register.
The first performances of Is Money Money were given by Sequitur at Joe’s Pub in The Public Theater, New York City, on Feb. 3, 4, and 5, 2000, with the soprano Dora Ohrenstein. Permission to use the texts was kindly granted by the Estate of Gertrude Stein.
---Anne LeBaron
Selections from the texts by Gertrude Stein:
All the trouble really comes from this question is money money.
Everybody is always counting money.
The queen was in the parlor eating bread and honey the king was in his counting house counting out his money.
Counting is funny.
When you see a big store and see so many of each kind of anything that is in it, and on the counters it is hard to believe that one more or less makes any difference to any one. When you see a cashier in a bank with drawer filled with money, it is hard to realize that one more or less makes any difference. But it does, if you buy it, or if you take it away, or if you sell it, or if you make a mistake in giving it out. Of course it does.
Everybody now just has to make up their mind. Is money money or isn’t money money. Everybody who earns it and spends it every day in order to live knows that money is money, anybody who votes it to be gathered in as taxes knows money is not money. That is what makes everybody go crazy.