Bang on a Can

James Sellars Don't Stop is a circular piece - it goes through all twelve keys and all sorts of genres, from twelve century counterpoint to ragtime. There are repeat marks at the end but they shouldn't be taken literally. The initial ideas were the piano lick that opens the piece, a clarinet solo that happens pretty early on, and one other little lick. I was improvising at the piano, and they all came at once. I jotted them down in my sketch book and I put at the top of it, possibly for Bang On A Can All-Stars, and I put the sketch book back on the shelf. The musical material comes first, and then the question arises, how are you going to keep this going, so you build some kind of connection, and that's when I come up with the conceptual ideas. I'm very pragmatic, I don't have much of ideology, and maybe that's not a good thing - I like all kinds of things, I don't get in arguments about which kind of music is best. --James Sellars