music

PROGRAM NOTE
I typically write music with fairly involved programmatic intentions along with forms that echo or
amplify them. However, I also enjoy music that simply unfolds a process or a ‘conceit’. Fabrication 15: Amplification is a component part of a larger 32-movement cycle for various ensembles ranging from solos and duos to works for orchestra. These Fabrications explore more mechanical approaches to generating music. Each has a subtitle; a synonym of ‘fabrication’ which says something about the piece itself.

This work is concerned with hovering and with hesitation—sometimes loudly, sometimes very softly. At the heart of it is an orchestration and elongation (an 'amplification') of a short piano piece I wrote in 2006. That work, called Slow Peacherine Rag, was written after a summer afternoon's walk through the backstreets behind Harvard. From an open window I heard someone practicing a piano rag —fantastically slowly. The balmy day and the wonderfully static rag led me to search out Scott Joplin's Peacherine Rag and apply longeurs, stretched chords, and hesitations in order to simulate and exaggerate what I'd heard earlier in the day. 

In Fabrication 15: Amplification my reworking of this piano piece is preceded by a section made up of dislocated rotating chord patterns from the reworked Joplin rag that gradually coalesce into a continuous blur. Then, after the slow rag proper (heard first for piano with 'resonance' supplied by the ensemble, then, slightly faster, heard arranged for the full ensemble) comes a coda in which even slower statements of the opening isolated chords are placed against rapid, spinning solos and duets played extremely quietly.

see also Fabrications