Program note:
Marge Laszlo was one of Roller Derby’s great players. The game was born on the West Coast and grew up with the early days of television. During its heyday in the 1960s a dozen teams bused all over the country. It was one of the first sports that women as well as men could make a living playing, and it provided a home and a livelihood for any number of outsiders.
Roller Derby looked anarchic. Players smashed into each other, collided into huge heaps of bodies, threw each other over the ropes into the audience, screamed at each other constantly, pulled hair, and whenever possible beat up the umpires. The highlight move was the Whip, where five or six players would link wrists to propel the player at the end into the opposing team like a projectile. Bodies would fly everywhere.
But behind all the chaos and apparent violence was actually a big extended family of players who lived and traveled together and worked out every pile-up, Whip, hair-pull, and fight sequence ahead of time. Despite the drama, athleticism, and the passionate loyalty of fans to individual teams and players, it came down to a companionable bunch of people gliding round and round the same oval track. My piece goes around its track four times.
Marge Laszlo herself is alive and well, but the game, alas, is no more. It started to lose TV viewers in the early 70s and was done in by the energy crisis when the teams couldn’t afford gas for the buses taking them from city to city. But Roller Derby lives on happily in my memory, and I’d like to think that the end of my piece is Marge’s farewell lap on her last game. Skate on, Marge!
In Memoriam Marge Lazlo was written for The Avian Orchestra, Peter Flint, director, and receives its premiere on these concerts.
About the composer:
Conrad Cummings has composed operas (productions include a three-week off-Broadway run of Photo-Op with Ridge Theater at La MaMa ETC in New York and Tonkin with Opera Delaware) music for orchestra (including New Jersey, Indianapolis, and Louisville Symphonies and the Brooklyn Philharmonic) and amplified chamber ensemble (at the Knitting Factory and P.S. 122). He trained at Yale, Stony Brook, and Columbia, did post-doc work at IRCAM in Paris, taught at Oberlin Conservatory for ten years where he directed the music and media program, moved to New York to run a kids’ interactive media company, and is now on the faculty at Juilliard. Recordings are available on CRI’s Emergency Music label; honors include MacDowell, Djerassi and Tanglewood fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Opera America, and The Rockefeller Foundation.
