Kidney Heist
Description
Access a perusal excerpt here.
For piano, cello, and 2 "anxious whisperers"
This zany piece re-tells the fabulously unsubstantiated "kidney heist" urban legend, which I encountered in the book Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Random House, 2008).
Although the story of the "kidney heist" sounds serious and ominous, it's totally fabricated. So—this is not a cautionary tale about date rape or other legitimately worrying topics. This is an absurd reflection on the absurdity of urban legends: ideas that are so sticky that they self-propagate, no matter how nutty.
1) WHISPERERS. This piece is meant to be performed with a minimum of two "whisperers," which means people who are whispering into microphones. The audio signal can be enhanced (ad lib) with delay, echo, reverb and other effects so long as the words are intelligible. The mix should be adjusted so that the whispers feel like whispers (to the audience) relative to the acoustic performance by the piano and cello. The whisperers can be on- or off-stage and cued or not cued by an optional music director. More than two whisperers can join the fun to create a thicker texture, and additional whisperers simply perform an ad lib version of either notated Whisperer part. But intelligibility is what matters.
2) WORD RHYTHMS. Some whisper rhythms are notated. Even these can be delivered approximately, so long as the basic flow of the piece works. Text passages in boxes are meant to be delivered freely (with any amount of narrative and dramatic license) and at a normal conversational pace.
3) BRACKETED TEXT. In the text, some words appear in [square brackets]. These indicate details of the whispered story, like the gender of the characters involved and where events occurred. Whisperers, please customize the story you spread to your liking, and feel free to disagree with and contradict other whisperers. Not only can you customize the bracketed bits, but you can change any words to be more exactly how you would tell the story. Make it vernacular, personal, and ... sensational.
4) BONUS POINTS ... for having fun! For example, the players (or whisperers) could conceal a short length of surgical tubing until the very end of the piece, at which point they reveal the tubing coming from their lower backs because—well, you never know...