This is a five movement piece for four performers that uses as it's instrumentation basketballs, referee whistles and the voices of the musicians. It was performed at the Walker Art Center on 10/4/90. The piece has a strong visual component, but unfortunately, no video document of the piece exists. It uses a specially devised graphic notation system and a number of rules-based game like procedures that allow the performers to make many of the decisions as to how the piece unfolds.
The performance at the Walker went very well. We had a full house, people got the humor of the piece, and there were no train wrecks. We actually had devised train wreck recovery mechanisms to use in case the performance crashed. We were at about a 50% ratio of making it through without a train wreck at the time of the performance, particularly because of the fifth movement, which involved a lot of carefully synchronized passing of the basketballs. I breathed a huge sigh of relief at the end of the performance once they'd made it through and was gratified at the very warm reception it received from the audience.
This piece marked the end of a certain type of composing for me. It was the last of my more conceptual pieces. Though I was very happy with the performance, I decided that I was ultimately not happy with how the piece sounded. And that maters. This marked the point in my compositional life when I abandoned highly conceptual compositional conceits in favor of just trying to create music that sounded good to me – PERIOD. It was a watershed moment, and to this day, I still have as a guiding principal the pursuit of the creation of music that sounds good to me. It has to sound good and feel good. That's what is more important to me than any other consideration when creating music now, and this was not the case when I created the Basketball Scenarios, (though I must confess, it was good fun).