Scoring: bassoon, piano, harp, percussion (vibraphone,
glock., 8-12 "tuned" aluminum cans, small tri.,
drum set: kick drum, 2 tomtoms, 2 bongos, hi-hat, sus.cym.,
wblk., vibraslap, tambourine, guiro/washboard) violin, contrabass.
(Also harp plays large ratchet, vn & cb plays guiro/washboard,
pf plays metal music stand.)
Duration: 8 minutes
Premiere:
23
November 2002
Kulas Recital Hall, Oberlin OH
Katie Young - bassoon
Steve Brewer- conductor
Notes:
For the past few months, I believe that I have
been stuck in some kind of awful Hegelian dialectic, because
on one hand I have the weight of tradition (the entire corpus
of “western music”) to attend to and on the other
I have the pressure of being “original” and forward
thinking. I would hope it is not pretentious to say that
the synthesis of this dialectic would be something like
WIRED* for carmen.e, but one cannot be too sure if this
is the case. I think WIRED has more in common with Parliament
and Perotinus than it does with, lets say, Bach, Brahms
or Beethoven.
WIRED was originally conceived as a piece called
8 pieces for calvin coolidge which would end with the entire
ensemble singing a cover of the 1927 song, I’m looking
over a four leaf clover. The piece was to be based on the
sounds made by LP’s. This idea proved unsuccessful.
The piece went through many more versions and drafts until
I came across a mnemonophone (or poem) I had written a few
years ago called, WIRED *for carmen e. (read aloud ). Immediately,
I was struck by the corrupted and destitute landscape that
was described in the poem, and these images gave way to
the final hundred measures of the piece and along the way,
and gave me inspiration for the rest of the piece when I
needed it.
While I was working on the piece, I was struck
by the realization that most of my music is monophonic in
nature, i.e., single-line music with no polyphony (however,
polyphony could be (and in many cases is) created by hocketing
or delaying the monophony.) In WIRED, the monophonic line
creates the back bone of the piece, much like a strand of
DNA; this line is woven through the six instruments which
sometimes play this line in unison or octaves and in different
instrumental combinations creating a chameleon-like hyper-instrument.
Unlike the predecessors of WIRED (To Boston for sex and
Fuel), the monophony is not strictly doubled all the time.
Here, the monophony is slightly blurred at times, sometimes
shifting the correct note to the left or right only slightly
to achieve a quasi pre-verb or delay effect and thus create
what composer Morton Feldman calls, the “orchestral
pedal.” (One could imagine this effect represented
visually- this blurring effect is found in painting: such
as in the work of artist Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter.)
WIRED was composed for and dedicated to Katie
Young and written specifically for this occasion. My thanks
go out to Katie (for commissioning the piece and keeping
me focused with suggestions during the final days of the
composing process.) I also want to thank Steven Brewer and
the rest of the ensemble for their dedication and awesome
performance.
-v.c.
November 2003
|
