Program notes
On the 2nd of March, I'll be sharing a composers concert with both of my composition professors, McDonald of Tufts and Kelley of Duke. I'll be having three or four works performed, and today I wrote up the program notes. Program notes for classical music frequently tend toward the dreadfully dull, so I tried to mix it up a bit. Here are some excerpts I particularly like:
On Four Little Preludes for solo piano:
Despite the variety of mood, the four preludes do share some unifying characteristics, which would probably be of interest only to musicologists and theorists. Since they have not yet taken an interest in my work, I will not bore the rest of you with the details.
Four Little Preludes were first performed by the composer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in August of 2002, but this should be the first time they have been performed well.
On "One Line, Two Line (There)" and "Red Line, Orange Line (Back Again)," two of my Three Situational Studies for horn and piano:
As with much of my work, these titles are a game of "Spot the Literary Device."*
On The Origin of Species Three Counterpoint: Three Hofstadterian Studies:
This fact [you don't want to know, really] is the justification for my painful portmanteau of a title.
On "Violating the Central Dogma," from the above piece, in which I did just that, metaphorically:
I can only hope that the Genetics Gestapo doesn't find out about my subversive activities.
On Sonata for Bass Trombone and Piano:
When I first played through the sketches for this movement on the bass trombone, the high A’s were giving me considerable grief, so I wrote more of them.
* I had a big thing for alliteration a while back: the moods in Three Blues Moods for solo flute were entitled "Morningsong," "Moanin' Low," and "Mr. Monk," while an unfinished suite for unaccompanied bass trombone includes sketches for "B&B's Boogie Bounce," (B&B are Brendan Ward and Brian Jones, the other two bass trombonists at Duke during my undergraduate tenure) "Blue Basso," and "Bebop/Bop."** I suppose the suite itself could be called "Bagatelles for Bass Bone." The other one of the Three Situational Studies has a bilingual musical pun as its title -- how erudite! For my next trick, I'll find a musical equivalent to context-free languages, so I can write Rhythm and Grammar, sans Strong Bad.
** Furthermore, "Bebop/Bop" and "Blue Basso" are both allusions themselves: one being a notorious word puzzle which plagued CTY staff in 2000, the other a pun on a Latin jazz standard.***
*** Fortunately, I'm not alone in my titular fetishes. Professor McDonald just wrote a piece for one of his students called "Alex's Pentadactylic Pamphlet," and one of my fellow students heard the phrase "sentinel chickens" used on NPR (like a miner's canary, only for meningitis instead of gas) and proceeded to write a piece around the title.
In other news, I ran out before my roommate got home, so I left her a note instructing her not to wait up for dinner. I was going to say, "Tonight's rehearsal's run late. I already ate. Go ahead and have dinner without me," but my muse (obviously not Euterpe, at the time) noticed something and ran with it. My hastily scrawled note read, "Rehearsals run late. I already ate. Hope you're doing great. Sincerely...Nate." When I got home at 11:30, I found my note stuck to my bedroom door, with a fifth line: "You're a retrobate." Now, what the hell is a retrobate?
My final note is a wonderful mnemonic for playing 4-against-3 rhythms I learned at tonight's rehearsal: Pass the god damn butter!
-TT
On Four Little Preludes for solo piano:
Despite the variety of mood, the four preludes do share some unifying characteristics, which would probably be of interest only to musicologists and theorists. Since they have not yet taken an interest in my work, I will not bore the rest of you with the details.
Four Little Preludes were first performed by the composer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in August of 2002, but this should be the first time they have been performed well.
On "One Line, Two Line (There)" and "Red Line, Orange Line (Back Again)," two of my Three Situational Studies for horn and piano:
As with much of my work, these titles are a game of "Spot the Literary Device."*
On The Origin of Species Three Counterpoint: Three Hofstadterian Studies:
This fact [you don't want to know, really] is the justification for my painful portmanteau of a title.
On "Violating the Central Dogma," from the above piece, in which I did just that, metaphorically:
I can only hope that the Genetics Gestapo doesn't find out about my subversive activities.
On Sonata for Bass Trombone and Piano:
When I first played through the sketches for this movement on the bass trombone, the high A’s were giving me considerable grief, so I wrote more of them.
* I had a big thing for alliteration a while back: the moods in Three Blues Moods for solo flute were entitled "Morningsong," "Moanin' Low," and "Mr. Monk," while an unfinished suite for unaccompanied bass trombone includes sketches for "B&B's Boogie Bounce," (B&B are Brendan Ward and Brian Jones, the other two bass trombonists at Duke during my undergraduate tenure) "Blue Basso," and "Bebop/Bop."** I suppose the suite itself could be called "Bagatelles for Bass Bone." The other one of the Three Situational Studies has a bilingual musical pun as its title -- how erudite! For my next trick, I'll find a musical equivalent to context-free languages, so I can write Rhythm and Grammar, sans Strong Bad.
** Furthermore, "Bebop/Bop" and "Blue Basso" are both allusions themselves: one being a notorious word puzzle which plagued CTY staff in 2000, the other a pun on a Latin jazz standard.***
*** Fortunately, I'm not alone in my titular fetishes. Professor McDonald just wrote a piece for one of his students called "Alex's Pentadactylic Pamphlet," and one of my fellow students heard the phrase "sentinel chickens" used on NPR (like a miner's canary, only for meningitis instead of gas) and proceeded to write a piece around the title.
In other news, I ran out before my roommate got home, so I left her a note instructing her not to wait up for dinner. I was going to say, "Tonight's rehearsal's run late. I already ate. Go ahead and have dinner without me," but my muse (obviously not Euterpe, at the time) noticed something and ran with it. My hastily scrawled note read, "Rehearsals run late. I already ate. Hope you're doing great. Sincerely...Nate." When I got home at 11:30, I found my note stuck to my bedroom door, with a fifth line: "You're a retrobate." Now, what the hell is a retrobate?
My final note is a wonderful mnemonic for playing 4-against-3 rhythms I learned at tonight's rehearsal: Pass the god damn butter!
-TT