Composer and poet Fred Chance '83 recited his poem "Positive Thinking" on the Oberlin campus as a prelude to a performance of "Positive Thinking," a piece for alto flute, stereophonic tape, and slides written by Anne Deane '85 and based on Chance's poem. The occasion was a concert of the conservatory's TIMARA Program.

Deane created the work--which was commissioned by flutist Betsy Cuffel with support from the Santa Barbara Music Club, a Pillsbury Grant from the Santa Barbara Foundation, and the Leni Fe Bland Foundation--at the University of California at Santa Barbara Center for Computer Music Research and Composition, where she is a Ph.D. student in composition. The piece received its East Coast premiere in August at the National Flute Conference in Boston.

Deane dedicated it "to Mr. Chance in recognition of the many ways he has touched my life--for now and the rest of my days. "I'd known Fred for 10 years," says Deane, "and knew he and AIDS, but until I started working on the composition, I hadn't faced the fact that one of my closest friends could die in the next year or two."

Chance had been diagnosed with HIV in 1988; he died of complications from AIDS on December 5, less than a month after his Oberlin appearance. The poem is about his passing HIV to his lover:

I was thinking about you just the other day
and I was thinking about cells.
You know--tiny little cells

Well specifically, I was thinking about the cells
which started out inside my body
and ended up (one way or another)
inside your body.

And I think I want them back.
Yes, I want them all back.
Oh, how I wish that I could have
every last one of them
back.

Deane's work uses a computer to combine Chance's taped reading of the poem with the sound of the flute so that the flute seems to speak the words. In creating the piece Deane listened to Chance's reading nearly every day for a year.

"One day I was working in the studio, and without changing the pitch I slowed his voice and gave it a gravely quality. It sounded as if he were an old man. I burst into tears, knowing he'd never be an old man."

Deane says she doesn't pretend to understand how it feels to have AIDS but intends with her work to portray her grief about her friend's tragedy.--LKG