Better Living through Repetition [2003]
For clarinet and string quartet
Duration: ca. 13'
For clarinet and string quartet
Duration: ca. 13'
Listen:
First performance: August, 2003 by the New Fromm Players at the Tanglewood Music Center
In the two years preceding this piece's composition, I had attended what was, for me, a depressing number of funerals. Not a great many, necessarily, but enough to keep a sensation of loss and gathering consistently in the back of my mind for a while. Each funeral evoked a common pair of contradictory feelings, namely grief balanced with the comfort of a reunion.
When I wrote this piece, I had the recurring image of a wake or post-funeral reception in my head. I wanted to create the texture of different conversations and moods happening among family and friends around the same subject: introspection, sadness, nostalgia, all the way to giddiness and hysteria. The repetitions that occupy every corner of this piece have as much to do with ritual, memory and habit as anything else, and they take musical form in a few different ways. The first half of the piece is marked by constant metric modulation - a pulse that is always changing speeds. This is followed by a still section that hardly moves at all. The third section is led by a melody in the clarinet played over and over with minute rhythmic variations. In both the first and the third sections, these repetitive textures give way to something more driving, aggressive and off kilter.
The score is dedicated to the memory of John McCaffrey.
In the two years preceding this piece's composition, I had attended what was, for me, a depressing number of funerals. Not a great many, necessarily, but enough to keep a sensation of loss and gathering consistently in the back of my mind for a while. Each funeral evoked a common pair of contradictory feelings, namely grief balanced with the comfort of a reunion.
When I wrote this piece, I had the recurring image of a wake or post-funeral reception in my head. I wanted to create the texture of different conversations and moods happening among family and friends around the same subject: introspection, sadness, nostalgia, all the way to giddiness and hysteria. The repetitions that occupy every corner of this piece have as much to do with ritual, memory and habit as anything else, and they take musical form in a few different ways. The first half of the piece is marked by constant metric modulation - a pulse that is always changing speeds. This is followed by a still section that hardly moves at all. The third section is led by a melody in the clarinet played over and over with minute rhythmic variations. In both the first and the third sections, these repetitive textures give way to something more driving, aggressive and off kilter.
The score is dedicated to the memory of John McCaffrey.