Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg in Santa Cruz
MEDIATIONS, TENORS (2008)
For marimba with metal objects (Ian Antonio) and vibraphone with wooden objects (Russell Greenberg).
Camera direction, editing, and post-production by Ashley Aron Craig.
Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg at the April in Santa Cruz Festival of New Music, 2009 [ca. 11’15”]
Click to view the score for MEDIATIONS, TENORS.
Mediations, Tenors is one of a pair of studies for marimba and vibraphone, that explores the narrow and unfamiliar region of ambiguity between melody (often defined in terms of singularities, openings and closings, the work of a “voice”) and texture (which is timeless, a snapshot; it has no conclusion, and no beginning). The two aren’t opposites, but in ‘the West’ at least (after modernity, in pop and art music) the categories are segregated and independent. Texture is most important when melody is truncated, undeveloped; memorable tunes are not supposed to rely on “texture” for their meaning or identity. Which made me wonder how, or where, the two might overlap.
Rhonda Taylor in Santa Cruz
ANONYME (2008)
For alto saxophone.
[ca. 8’00”]
Click to view the score for ANONYME.
Anonyme is an in-progress collection of works that sketch some basic categories of feeling and narrative that might one day become a comic opera; in particular, an opera in which unknown or unrecognized (or non-existent) “myths” interact episodically to create an open-ended whole. A myth might be defined as a story that transforms a narrative of events into a more broadly shared ideology, or even a kind of symbolic language, through which we can express something other than the story itself. “More broadly shared” is probably an essential feature of the definition, so “Lesser Myths” is probably an oxymoron. (Likewise, a story of Anonyme relates to the paradox of a Neptune worshipper whose sacrifices exceed all expectations, but who takes a special kind of power over the God by remaining anonymous. The essense of worship is to make oneself known, and Neptune can’t handle worship that no one will take credit for. So he turns her into a sea anenome, providing a sort of punk etymology for the idea of “anonymity.”)
It makes some kind of sense, in times of crisis, to imagine what small stories might have been flattened or subsumed by the greater myths…I take an interest in stories like this not so much to pretend that something meaningful got lost, but rather because something forgotten might be more interesting as it grows more distant.
Christopher Williams with Harvey Sollberger, Susan Ung, Bob Zelickman, and friends in San Diego
DETALÉR (2001)
Conducted by Harvey Sollberger
For contrabass solo (Christopher Williams) with bass clarinet (Rob Zelickman), trumpet (Jeff Nevin), harmonium, percussion and voice (Aiyun Huang), piano (Yvonne Lee), viola (Susan Ung), and cello (Goeff Gartner).
[ca. 6’30”]
Click to view the score for DETALÉR.
“Detalér” might have been a baroque dance form, which involved members of an absolutist monarchy at some point jumping back from a partner or from the center of a rectangle. But it wasn’t—-it’s just a French word, meaning something like pulling away or retreating or gathering. The fictional English word “detend” might be a good translation, if it weren’t fictional. What’s true in all of this is that both the composer and the bassist who commissioned this work have minor training in ballet, and that fact seemed important while the piece was being written.
On another level, the retreat that I am trying to describe is a retreat from cultural representations that are obsessed, overwhelmed with association and direction. For example, a retreat from the deceptively tight links between original and copy, or between question and answer on TV and Internet news sources. Or between melody and accompaniment, subject and imitation. This is not to say that I wanted the piece to “fall apart”; on the contrary, I was interested in compelling strong relations among musical objects and texts that might not normally lie on clear boundaries with one another, or that might seem specifically incompatible.
For example, utterances like “tour” and “mat” have almost no meaning without the context of a sentence. Putting unrelated mundane things next to each other (“tour, you call it, mat”) is one way of expanding categories and blotting out their category-ness. On the other hand, words like “True”, “False” , and “Saint Anne”, can inspire meaning-making in almost any situation. My challenge was to give them a context. (At a quiet moment, the percussionist Aiyun Huang sings “is it laying out my things?”) A context in which the tyrannical ubiquity of “association” can make a hasty and peaceful exit. Leaving, in its contrasemiotic wake, a path toward unusual structural unities and unplanned narrative momentums.
A path toward those things, perhaps, but not quite reaching them. In a world where large opaque institutions are perpetually retransmiting an inflexible language of what ends up seeming like “common sense” — in trillions of supercoordinated broadband digital coughs – I had fun writing this piece. I hope you have fun listening.
Detalér won First Prize for Chamber Music in the London-based International Bass Festival competition (2001).
Jorja Fleezanis, Laura Park, Tom Turner, Andre Emelianoff, and Ken Woods in Round Top, TX
PARI PASSU (1999)
Conducted by Harvey Sollberger
[ca. 13’30”]
Pari Passu is a Latin phrase meaning, roughly, “take it as it comes.” More particularly, “to each its due, with nothing privileged.” This sense of the title should suggest something about the relations among voices and ideas in the work, which are composed to avoid feelings of centrality or periphery, to subvert any tendencies toward a feeling of priority for one or another.
Click to view the score for PARI PASSU.
Charon Rosner and La Banda Bastarda in San Diego
ARIONANUM (1999)
[Stay tuned! A recording is forthcoming.]
Click to view the score for ARIONANUM.
For contrabass, violin, spinnet or fortepiano, and harpsichord.