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Approach
2007
flute
playback
duration 9'
first performance:
Sarah Brady
Houston Hall, The Boston Conservatory / March 19, 2007
SCORE
RECORDING—first performance
PROGRAM NOTE
This piece (originally subtitled Interruption #2 from Five Short Operas) was intended as the second entr'acte from an evening long cycle of chamber operas and music theater pieces to texts by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and John Barth. The sections, including the four 'interruptions', to be written for different instrumentation drawn from the full ensemble of flute quartet, saxophone quartet, string quartet, and electronics. All of these interruptions were to be noisy and messy with Approach using layered street noises pitted against a solo flute to create a turbulent swathe of sound. In the opera cycle this piece was to be placed between Beckett's Play and Barth's Glossolalia. However, as has become the sad norm for composers dealing with writers' estates, copyright permission was impossible to secure for most of the plays, and so the project abandoned, leaving this poor homeless, contextless, piece with no companions.