The first NHL hockey I saw was a playoff game between the New York Rangers and the Boston Bruins, on April 11, 1970, in Madison Square Garden. I saw all of hockey in that one game: Bobby Orr and lots of fights. When Yashoda looked into the mouth of Krishna, her son, she saw the entire universe. Hamlet “could be bounded in a nutshell, and count [himself] a king of infinite space.” Perhaps Hamlet was reflecting upon the fact that there are as many numbers between zero and one as are greater than one. (Proof: Any number x that you name between 1 and ∞ has a corresponding partner 1/x that is between zero and one—and vice versa.) Beethoven built his largest works from “germ-motives,” and an oak is in some sense present in that acorn. Yet even with all these big things—infinities, even—crammed in small things, there’s clearly a lot of stuff out there, with great loads of dark matter still unaccounted for. Can you really see the universe in a grain of sand—or is there no way that such compression could be lossless?

John Cage, quoting from Zen Buddhism: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers... blah blah blah.” It did not occur to me for many years that this un- solicited advice could be useful to me as a composer: If you want to write a long piece that will become more interesting as time goes on, write something that is quite boring at the very outset. And repeat. Which is part of what Hockey Season is all about, but more than to Cage, Hockey Season owes its existence to Morton Feldman and Anthony Braxton, whose musical works are more oddly human. From Feldman, I learned how one might extend materials without being especially developmental or dramatic: “Do it one way and then do it another” (advice he attributed to Jasper Johns). From performing Braxton’s music under his direction I learned how to “kick it around,” how to intersperse improvisations into written material, how not to be too controlling, how to accept and embrace ensembles of whoever is around with whatever instruments with whatever skills. A more meticulous or even more consistent reading of this music might be possible, but it was not what I wanted, nor, in any case, what circumstances allowed.
Hockey Season is now the third of my “Season” pieces to be recorded and released, following Baseball Season and Football Season. Baseball Season achieves its great length by repeating a four-beat phrase over and over, each time with a different mini-variation (mistake), while gradually morphing to a second four-beat phrase—and then back. Foot- ball Season, which is actually quite listenable, works a dozen or so short motifs (with and without short melodic extensions) into eight quilted sections, each using a gradually shifting subset of those motifs. Completed, and soon to be recorded are Rafting Season, Horse Thief Season, Kabaddi Season, Algebra Season, Obtuse Angle Season, and On His Shoulders Stands Nothing. Many other Seasons exist as sketches, each with its own idiosyncratic methods of inexact near-repetition.
We recorded Hockey Season over two days with two different ensembles, A and B. Each ensemble recorded one take each of all six sections of the piece. I had planned to select the better take of each section, but as I listened, it seemed that each take had something going for it, so the solution was to use all twelve tracks, alternating between the two ensembles rather than to invite comparisons. “Overtime” is the AM radio mix, a universe in an open mouth. Let me know what you think!

—Dan Plonsey