A Conductor’s and Performer’s Guide to Steven Bryant’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone - Chester Jenkins

114 BRYANT: Yeah JENKINS: So how did you come to use or decide to use the Creston motive for this? BRYANT: I don't remember precisely. Having been a saxophone player, an alto player, I played it at some point in college…probably not very well. You know, that opening bar was still embedded in my memory, I can’t quite remember the moment exactly. It wasn’t calculated, I didn’t cast around for saxophone war horse pieces, I will steal this moment. JENKINS: (laughs) BRYANT: The motive itself is the sort of motive I like to use any way so it would very much already fit with my predilections, so it was an obvious fit with the 3rds and half steps, it automatically has this built in chromaticism. JENKINS: Yes BRYANT: So I knew I could string that together into sequences and flow it through tonalities, those sort of motives I gravitate toward anyway, so that is probably why that one…and it tied into my own history as a saxophonist and it would be a nice little inside joke or connection for every single saxophonist out there. JENKINS: (laughs) BRYANT: I can’t remember beyond that, I don’t remember the moment. I wrote a lot of music for this piece, it was hard. (laughs) I think there was a lot of other music before that, before I zeroed in on that. But I don’t recall clearly. JENKINS: You weren’t sitting around with the Glazunov trying to mine that? (laughs) BRYANT: No! JENKINS: (laughs) So obviously when you are manipulating through, maybe you already touched on this, obviously you decide to flat the 5 th pitch and it gives you some different material and then later in the 3 rd movement you decided to raise it a half step. (BRYANT and JENKINS both looking up score) JENKINS: Its right after the alto entrance (sings music) it drops, it’d be like the 5 th bar of 3rd movement. The octave displacement throws it, the G, F, D, Eb, Ab instead of the F#. BRYANT: Yeah, Yeah that’s just you know, change the pitch by a whole step that’s all the intuitive sort of thing I do. Where you start kind of transforming, stretching the motive, but you still recognize it as the motive. I love to do that. I don’t remember doing that. JENKINS: I understand it may not have been necessarily a thought out, “Oh I got to mine this one later on.” I just thought it was so cool how you used this motive so inclusively throughout this entire work. It reminds me of a quote Russ Mikkelson says in my