The Opere della Musica Povera pieces were written between 1990 and 1999. Despite the range of instrumentation, all the compositions have similar formal plans and structural strategies. Each "Opera" is in a different "key" and has a title that evokes a sense of poverty: poverty of means, of spirit, of wit.

Program Notes

Tucket, Follow Your Leader, and Pigs & Fishes

Tucket, Follow Your Leader, and Pigs & Fishes are the first 3 "Operas" in a series of 12 Opere della Musica Povera - or "Works of a Poor Music". Tucket is an older English version of the Italian Toccata. Often associated with keyboard pieces of a technically virtuoso character, "Tuckets" were also sometimes written for other instrumental ensembles. Follow Your Leader is the ambiguous motto of Herman Melville's short story "Benito Cereno". Pigs & Fishes, cited in the 61st hexagram of the I Ching are considered animals of great intractability.

Tucket, Follow Your Leader, and Pigs & Fishes were commissioned by the Arts Council of New Haven and the National Endowment for the Arts.

New Haven and Woodstock

These psalm texts, adapted from sources in both the King James and Hebrew Bibles, are intended to be performed in the manner of the old tradition of Shape Note singing, where the music is first performed in fa sol la syllables, and then sung as text.

New Haven (psalm 82)

How long will you judge unjustly
And defend the persons of the wicked.
Defend the poor and fatherless
Do justice to the needy.
Deliver the poor and the needy
From the hands of the wicked.

They know not neither do they understand
They walk on in darkness.
All the foundations are out of course
And they walk on in darkness.

I have said you are gods
And all of you are children of the most high.
But you shall die like mortals
And fall like any prince.

Woodstock (psalm 131)

Lord, my heart is not haughty
Nor mine eyes lofty
Neither do I take up great matters
Or things too high for me.

Surely, I have behaved and calmed myself
As a child that is weaned of its' mother.

Lord, my heart is not haughty
My soul is as a weaned child.

Commissioned by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, John Cook, Director.

Angelus Novus

from "Theses on the Philosophy of History" by Walter Benjamin:

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Commissioned by and dedicated to: The Greater Bridgeport Symphony and Gustav Meier, Music Director.

 

The Bucket Rider and BE JUST!

The Bucket Rider and BE JUST! were both written in 1995 and are the seventh and eighth pieces from a group of 12 called Opere della Musica Povera, which means "works of a poor music." The Bucket Rider is the title of a Kafka story about a man who is so poor and wasted away he can ride on his empty bucket to the coal dealer to beg for coal. In Kafka's story, In the Penal Colony, an explorer goes to a prison camp that has an exquisite, aging apparatus that imprints on the flesh of a condemned man, by means of thousands of needles, whatever rule or commandment he has disobeyed. In this way, though the prisoner is ignorant of his sentence, he will learn it bodily. The officer in charge (who is also the judge) tells the explorer, "Guilt is never to be doubted," and places the prisoner into the machine. The explorer is unimpressed. Infuriated, the officer changes the original sentence from "HONOR THY SUPERIORS!" to "BE JUST!" and climbs into the apparatus himself. Kafka had a very complex sense of the political. He was also a pretty weird guy, and I wanted to get some of that weirdness into the music. I give myself permission to do anything in my work so long as I have a palpable structural integrity that grants the various musical utterances plausibility. That's been my goal, to get as free as I can about the means and genres in which I write, while holding them together with an internal coherence. The Opere della Musica Povera pieces reflect a politics of "Witness," a kind of personal report on my state and the nation's. There's a bit of the Three Penny Opera in them, "an opera written with the splendor that only a beggar could imagine," as Brecht said. That's part of it - to create something out of very little material and make it seem splendid: an invitation to the necessary pleasures of austerity.

Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard. World Premiere by the Bang On A Can All-Stars, May 1, 1995, Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center.

 

*** for clarinet, viola and piano

In the recent past when a composer wished to suggest a program or narrative for a composition but not reveal the contents of that program in the title, the symbol of three stars might be used instead. Perhaps the most famous example of that practice is found in Robert Schumann's Album for the Young. In his collection of colorful, often frankly programmatic pieces (Traumerei, the Happy Farmer, Sailor Song, etc.,) Schumann gives three works the enigmatic three stars in lieu of conventional titles. Most scholars believe those works were written for Clara. Robert, always fond of the world of the hermetic, reckoned that Clara alone could easily divine their meanings. The world would (or would not) simply have to guess.

Janacek, too, when trying to find an acceptable title for his second string quartet (he first wanted to call it Love Letters) threatened to give his work the three stars title, but finally settled on Intimate Pages. The last three of his compositions for the piano set On An Overgrown Path, however, utilize the three stars - thereby hiding their suggestive programs behind the stars' orthographic veil.

And so it is with me...

*** was premiered by musicians of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, David Shifrin, Clarinet, Paul Neubauer, viola, and Jon Klibbonoff, piano, on March 3, 1997 at Merkin Hall.

 

The Dream of the Lost Traveller

The Dream of the Lost Traveller is part of a series of compositions of various lengths and orchestrations called Opere della Musica Povera (Works of a Poor Music). Several titles I considered for the 'Opere' were taken from William Blake's book of emblematic texts and engravings For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise. After some reflection I decided that the book itself would better in a complete visual and musical setting. I put that idea aside for the future, saving only a transformation of a fragment of the final poem for my title:

To the Accuser Who is the God of This World

Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce
And dost not know the Garment from the Man
Every Harlot was a Virgin once
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan

Tho thou art Worshipd by the Names Divine
Of Jesus & Jehovah: thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline
The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill

The Dream of the Lost Traveller is, for me, the gate and the gateway to a larger, less formally stringent project. In this composition the musical materials retain the austere simplicity of the Povera works, but they now unfold as variations in a more indirect, expansive way.

The Dream of the Lost Traveller was commissioned by Sequitur, and is dedicated to Lisa Moore. The world premiere was performed by Lisa Moore on December 8, 1997 at Merkin Hall in New York City.

Pine Eyes

(Part I)

Pine Eyes is based on Carlo Collodi's much admired "The Adventures of Pinocchio". My adaptation, though of necessity much abridged, is as faithful as possible to the language and character of the original. The title Pine Eyes is a possible translation of the Italian, pino (pine) + occhio (eye). The mixture of narration, abstract music, and sound effects are intended to create a musical theater of the imagination.

There are four scenes in Part I

(my own titles)

1. Myths of Origin

2. Illusions of Paternity

3. Disorder and Early Sorrow

4. Uberm Sternenzelt Muss ein Lieber Vater Wohnen
(a loving father must live above the heavens)

Pine Eyes is the penultimate 'opera' or work in my extended composition 'Opere della Musica Povera' or 'Works of a Poor Music'. Begun in 1990, these twelve compositions (one in each key) explore themes of poverty, extremity and loss. The special character of Pinocchio's story - that of a poor wooden puppet who through a series of vivid adventures comes to learn and later embody the ambivalence of the human condition - makes this work the apotheosis of the Musica Povera.

Pine Eyes was commissioned by Zeitgeist and premiered January 16, 1999 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Bird as Prophet for violin and piano

 

Bird as Prophet is the last in a series of twelve pieces entitled Opere della Musica Povera (Works of a Poor Music). These compositions have occupied the composer since 1990.

The title Bird as Prophet refers to a piano miniature of the same name from the Waldszenen of Robert Schumann. Bird as Prophet's combination of simple programmatic suggestiveness and abstract patterning seeks to recapture the vivid, oracular, but finally enigmatic spirit of Schumann's (and Charlie Parker's) remarkable musical prophecies.

Commissioned by and dedicated to the Rosa/Laurent (violin/piano) Duo.

please click on score to enlarge