“Duplicitous” is one of the first things I wrote in grad school, and it was originally for big band but I quickly adapted it for the Medium Ensemble once the group came into being. I had been doing a lot of listening to Bob Brookmeyer’s New Art Orchestra so it’s somewhere between an homage and outright thievery with a couple twists, so if you enjoy the chart I highly recommend records like “Get Well Soon” or “Waltzing with Zoe”. My favorite description of his music is when one of my friends in undergrad called it “like watching an aquarium from above”, because there are constantly new things to hear, and new aural angles, and all of it is familiar and unusual at the same time, so I tried to catch some of that.

The other basic premise of the chart is that there’s almost always at least two things going on. While the word “duplicitous” has negative connotations associated with deceitfulness, I always feel like it’s much more neutral; if there’s two things going on and everyone knows both exist, it’s not really a deception and might actually be more revealing than an attempt at plain transparent truth. Charles Mingus’ autobiography is a great example of this as there are generally at least three levels in everything he writes; what he literally says, what he’s obviously lying about, and a deeper truth the reader can choose to find by how he did both. Another example would be the Norse god of mischief Loki, whose myths generally use misdirection as a way to reveal some secondary truth. In both examples the act of having more than one angle draws the reader in and forces them to ask questions, creating something unsaid but no less real, and unique to each person’s experience. I can’t claim to have captured all that musically, but I do think the constant layering and counterpoint throughout create something greater than the sum of all the notes. Together with the various devices and ideas I took from Brookmeyer’s writing, I think the chart came out really well and it remains one of my favorite things I’ve written.