I wonder too. Perhaps he was having a rough time with it. Here's reference to it
in the Frets
article:

"You said once that you tend to think of the guitar as an orchestra. Is that the
way you
approach writing and arranging?
I'm symphonically inclined. "Lost Lagoon Suite" [The Falconer's Arm, Vol. I] is
a
symphony in four movements. In fact, Im getting into writing some sonatas any
symphonies now. I sat down at the piano ad learned the whole trip of writing
music. I
learned rhythm and harmony, and now I'm learning orchestration, which is a real
bear.
Sitting at the piano and translating that into a full orchestra - God, that's
hard. The first
one's called "The House of Light" - it's a spiritual study.
Do you hope to have this performed by an orchestra?
Before I die [laughs]. In the meantime, I'm going to concentrate my efforts on
songwriting - I want to sing a while."

Perhaps not so funny in hindsight...

I wrote to Antoinette Marcus a while ago (she's the lady who plays violin on
Visions of the
Country) and in her reply she made a passing reference to Basho's close ties
with
composer Alan Hovhaness. This would seem plausible. Perhaps Basho was close to
him at
the time of his exploration of classical music. There's seems to be an overlap
of style at
least in their tentative (perhaps typically californian) slant towards new-agey
'spiritual'
works. Hovhaness even has a work called 'Lady of Light'. Incidentally, his works
for piano
sound quite similar to Basho's piano style, but with less sustain pedal.




--- In robbiebasho_forum@yahoogroups.com, Will Dawson <wjdawson@...> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 19 May 2007, Robbie Dawson wrote:
>
> > Wow,
> >
> > That's amazing, I had no idea those existed on the internet! The rip of
> > Rainbow Thunder is very high quality indeed, except i'm having the usual
> > difficulty getting the .ogg files to play in anything other than audacity,
> > useless plugins aside.
> >
> > The music is fascinating, amazing, brilliant, weird, as usual.
>
> Aye aye, it certainly is good stuff. You should be able to play oggs with
> any recent version of Winamp, 'out of the box'.
>
> > As for the BFBS recording, what a find! I'm going to be obsessing over
> > that for a while I reckon.
>
> Yeah, I've given it a lot of rotations since I came across it. I wonder
> if he ever finished writing his symphony..
>
> Will
>