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beat series part two
original manuscript
beat series
"With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road."
In his article, "Scratching the Beat Surface", Beat poet Michael McClure describes the time of Kerouac's adventures as "...locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle," in "the gray, chill, militaristic silence,...the intellective void...the spiritual drabness".
This is the post-Second World War America through which Kerouac, accompanied by his friend and living embodiment of the Beat Ideal, Neal Cassady, take the many journeys that become the material for On the Road.
Kerouac's persona in the book, Sal Paradise, narrates the story in a breathless stream-of-consciousness, in which people and places rush by, characters and situations hastily sketched in the rare quiet moments before the continuing journey.
Dean Moriarty (Cassady's persona in the novel) is the instigator and the inspiration for the journey that Sal will make, both physical and spiritual, the journey that he records in the pages of On The Road.
- Jack Kerouac, from On The Road (1957)
In 2003 I was commissioned by Birmingham Jazz to write a large-scale work of my own choice. The resulting work, Howl – a musical setting of the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, was premiered in January 2004 in front of a near-capacity audience at Birmingham’s CBSO Centre. The success of this work and its cross-genre appeal gave me the idea to tour the work around the UK in 2005 and 2006 to mark the 50th Anniversary of its first public reading by the author himself (1955) and the work's subsequent first publication (1956).
A little further research then brought to my attention three other 50th anniversaries that likewise should not be ignored. These are the 50th Annversary of First Publication, respectively, for: On The Road by Jack Kerouac (2007), Bomb by Gregory Corso (2008) and Naked Lunch by William Burroughs (2009). I then resolved to compose contrasting works to commemorate each of these milestones.
BEAT SERIES was born.