Billionaires' Holiday (sc/parts) - 3BSN (PDF)

Billionaires' Holiday - PDF
for three bassoons

by John Steinmetz (b.1951) - American composer, bassoonist, writer, satirist, speaker

This is the PDF download.

As almost everyone knows, people choose the bassoon for its vast financial rewards. Bassoonists want to be billionaires. And who wouldn't? It's not just that billionaires have more money than anybody could ever use (according to Oxfam, the richest 1% of the world's people now own more wealth than 95% of humans, and whenever one of us in the bottom 90% earns a dollar, a billionaire earns $1.7 million), but billionaires also control much of global politics, and their companies control much of what we need: food, shopping, information, transportation, entertainment, technology, communications, social media, health care, and on and on. Billionaires have a lot to celebrate.

In keeping with its subject, this piece has almost no original content. Except for a few notes that I actually wrote, the music is harveted, exracted, and stolen from the work of other composers—that's what billionaires do, after all. The purloined melodies depict billionaires' vacations, aspirations, accumulations, affectations, depredations, and space explorations. Scraps of familiar music and glimpses of songs like "Money Makes the World Go Around," "We're in the Money," and "A Pirate's Life for Me," illuminate how much a person can accomplish through hard work, selfishness, and greed.

A recurring gag is fake coins spilling out of a bassoon's bell. Each player has a surgical glove attached to the bell with a rubber band. The glove is tucked inside and contains fake coins. When a player plays low Bb, the glove inflates, and the coins scatter. Then the player, still fingering low Bb, sucks the glove back into the bell and refills it with fake coins. The players pull this trick one at a time, and end the piece by doing it together.