The creation of Music for the End of Tim” spans 27 years.  A small bit of the material at the end of a “Woman Clothed With the Sun” was written in 1979 as part of a work entitled Archangels.  I wrote it for a group in New York City called Calliope: A Renaissance Band.  Alan Dean played trumpet in it, and Larry Benz trombone, along with Lucy Bardo on viol, and Ben Harms percussion.  I assumed they had long since disbanded, but I see they are still playing after 33 years!  (It appears they have a new trombonist named Steven Lundahl.)  I loved the group, but I never told them I wrote a piece for them, and I never sent it to them.  The work is probably around here somewhere stuck in box of old papers – though still in pencil. 

Eight years later, in 1987, the Munich Philharmonic Soloists were scheduled to present a concert in Sapporo, Japan, as part of a sister city celebration.  The organizer was Heinrich Klug, a cellist in the Philharmonic, who was one of the few people in the orchestra who dared be friends with Abbie.  (She was under attack by sexists in the orchestra.  They were very powerful, so her colleagues were afraid to associate with her.)  The Munich Phil Soloists were doing Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale and so Heinrich commissioned two works to fit that instrumentation.  They gave the strings and wood winds to one composer, and I got what was left: trumpet, trombone, percussion, and contrabass, so I first wrote Music for the End of Time for those instruments. (Note the similarity to the instrumentation of “Archangels.”)  It was in three movements and lasted about 20 minutes.  The movements were “A Door Was Opened in Heaven,” “As It Were A Trumpet Talking,” and “The Four Horsemen.” 

The acoustic version of Music for the End of Time had a difficult history because of Abbie’s situation in the orchestra.  After I completed M.E.T, the percussionist in the Munich Phil who was to perform it, Arnold Riedhammer,  telephoned Heinrich Klug and left a long message on his answering machine saying it was unplayable.  He told Heinrich to cancel the performance.  Fortunately, there was an American woman in Munich named Robyn Schulkowsky who was a fabulous percussionist.  I asked her to play it.  She performed MET in a house concert Heinrich hosted shortly afterwards and the work was a sensation.  Heinrich had two teenage children.  After the house concert, they took everyone into his office and played Arnold Riedhammer's phone message saying the work was unplayable.  Everyone had a good laugh.  Robyn made the trip to Japan for the premiere where it received a tremendous ovation.  The middle movement, “As It Were of A Trumpet Talking,” is based on Japanese shakuhachi music.  The Japanese noticed and were very pleased that their own music influenced the piece.

The next performance was scheduled in late 1987 as part of a festival of church music in Munich .  The church officials (basically an older nun) decided the piece was inappropriate and forbade its performance in the church.  The organizer, Robert Helmschrott, tried speaking to her but made no headway.  I don’t know what she told him, but he said it was the first time he had ever experienced anti-foreignerism in the church.  Robert thus put the piece last on the concert and had everyone go to a community center next to the church where the musicians played it.  Again, it was very well received.  

Due to the success of M.E.T., some of our supporters in the Munich Ministry of Culture wanted to give me the "Munich Prize" which is granted to a composer each year.  The idea was stopped by a local composition professor on the commission who said he didn't know who I was.  He did, of course, but by that time, we were strongly opposed by powerful members of the classical music community in Munich -- including several of the established composers who had close relationships with the Munich Phil.  (On the other hand, a year earlier, we were given a special prize by the theater commission (which did not include musicians) for our Beckett productions. 

In about 1988 or 89, M.E.T. was then programmed as part of a recital series performed by Munich Philharmonic musicians, but due to Abbie’s status in the orchestra, the performance was abruptly cancelled.  There was nothing Abbie could do, because she faced so much opposition from sexists in the orchestra, including the GMD, Sergiu Celibidache.  The acoustic version of MET was never performed again for the next 20 years, until one of Abbie’s former trombone students arranged for it to be played in Basel, Switzerland in 2007.  Once again, it received a tremendous ovation.  It hasn’t been played since then, so it has had four performances (counting the house concert) in the 25 years since its creation.

In the late 80s, I began working with electronics, especially since I saw it as a way around the ostracism we faced in Germany.  My sampler only had half a megabyte of memory, which was normal at the time, so I could only use a few sounds at a time.  I wrote a sketch of “The White Beast” by overlaying sounds on an 8-track tape recorder.  In 1994, I had a sampler with 16 megs of memory and completed the “The White Beast.”  We premiered it at the 1995 International Trombone Festival in Las Vegas where it was well received. 

In 1997-98, I re-composed the three movements from the acoustic version of M.E.T. for electronics and added them to the “White Beast.”  I also added two more movements, “The Sea of Glass,” and “A Woman Clothed With the Sun.”  “Woman” was completed just before we were to take the work on tour.  I had to get up very early for a couple weeks to complete it.  To avoid waking Abbie I used headphones, but on the last day, before finalizing everything, I needed to hear it on our surround-sound PA system.  Even though our system shakes our whole house, I blasted Abbie out of bed at four in the morning.  It was an unusual way for her to first hear “A Woman Clothed With the Sun.”  She loves the movement, and said waking up to it as a wonderful experience.

In 1999, we recorded the complete 52 minutes of M.E.T. in our own studio.  (The video was not yet created.)  I sent the CD and score to 10 publishers.  It was rejected by 9, and the one that accepted (Marc Reift) wanted me to surrender all rights to the work for $400.  I decided to just keep it for myself.  That way we wouldn’t have to pay him to play our own piece.  We toured in the USA with it in 1998, 2002, 2006 (and later with the video version in 2009.  We will tour with it again in 2013.) 

In 2006 or so (I can’t quite remember when,) I was able to improve the recording’s mix, because the hard disk recording software I used, Samplitude, had been greatly improved.

In August of 2007 (27 years after Archangels), I created the video for M.E.T. using Adobe Premiere version 6.5. Most of the source material was still images by Norbert Bach created in Photoshop.  I also used quite few images created by a Taos mystic named Herman Rednick, who combined Buddhist and Christian thought in his paintings.  In 2009, we toured with M.E.T. with the video.

Though Abbie and I have faced a lot of opposition and ostracism in the music world due to our advocacy for women in music, it is exactly our vision of the rise of the feminine spirit, as represented in "A Woman Clothed With the Sun" that sustains and inspires us to continue creating new works.