Downtown Neon Crown (2023) Bb clarinet + piano accompaniment · 5 minutes · advanced
Downtown Neon Crown was written for Megan Courson.
It's the early 2000s. You're sitting at an odd bar at the heart of downtown—unfortunately, this time, you could only grab a seat at the very corner, but you can still see the stage past a sea of undulating people.
You watch the stage. You're not quite sure if what they are doing is considered sideshow-attraction magic, performance art, or music, and that's okay. As you feel the music shake the table underneath you, the people near you catch your eye. You begin to notice than many of them are not quite human—an alien conglomeration of thoughts takes a seat next to you, holding a fizzy root beer—a purple human reads the electricity in the room with sets of magnetic implants—a koala with five eyes and four arms is fixing up a bendy straw and a cocktail umbrella for a cute photo.
This isn't your first time here, so you gesture to the nearby koala to come out and hang.
And so, this place will take anyone and everyone who walks in the door—no matter how strange you may look, you are welcome at The Neon Crown.
Downtown Neon Crown was written about The Neon Crown, an imaginary interspecies contemporary-circus-jazz-club-magic-parlor-classical-music-stage-hybrid that I wrote stories about in my youth. It was a reflection of the connections between all the different kinds of art that I loved.
As I progress further in my undergraduate degree, I'm starting to combine more and more of the different musical disciplines I'm involved with—from performance to composition to education to arts administration, I find so much value and fufillment combining all of these disciplines in my studies.
Musically, Downtown Neon Crown takes inspiration from my own experiences playing in a jazz big band while in high school, video game boss themes, impressionist piano music, and the contemporary percussion repertoire.