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I wrote the first draft of “Red” back in 2008. At the time I was a band director in Green Forest, Arkansas. Somewhere along the way I found a frequency of red, or a wavelength, or something like that. I haven’t been able to track it down ever since to verify its legitimacy. Anyway, I used the numbers to create a quasi-atonal melodic fragment to represent the color red in the middle of the piece. It was a very angular and angry sounding series of notes that I felt fit red quite nicely.
Fast forward about a decade. I dusted off the draft of “Red” to finally finish it. Over the intervening 10 years my compositional voice changed significantly. I decided to scrap everything from the original draft, except for the motive based off of the frequency, or whatever it was. Over the next year I worked off and on to finish “Red” and “Primary Colors” as a whole. I guess the ideas had been simmering in my subconscious all that time because once I came up with an opening that I actually liked the music flew out of me. I loved it. There were a few spots I was concerned might sound “too red” or “too angry” but I left them and put the piece away for a few months to work on other things. When I revisited it it brought me to tears. There were a bunch of spots in the new “Red” that were the best music I had ever written. It had anger, rage, passion, heart, it was red.