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Nightlife
2000
alto saxophone
piano
cello
duration 10'
commissioned by The Arlington Arts Lottery
first performance:
Kenneth Radnofsky, Margaret Steen Guldborg, Yoshiko Kline
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church, Arlington / April 2, 2000
SCORE
PROGRAM NOTE
In 1996 I wrote a piece for the Boston-based new music ensemble Collage New Music based on photographs by Weegee, whose rich images of New York street crime and high and low life epitomize a gritty film-noir impression of city life in the 1940s. That work was for a sextet that included a saxophone. Ken Radnofsky, the saxophonist in that performance, asked me if I'd arrange Weegee for a trio of saxophone, cello, and piano. It soon became clear that Weegee wasn't going to work well as a transcription, and so I wrote this piece instead. Unlike Weegee, which dwells on some of the grislier news photographs, Nightlife looks at 1940’s New York social life. Nine photographs are arranged in a sequence that progresses from early night time through to early morning. These continuous sections are linked by either a punchy little syncopated shape (the first thing heard in the work, which finally becomes Morning Bagels, Second Avenue) or a procession of gently chiming chords (which eventually underpin the gnat-like cello music inTenement Sleeping). The sound of Nightlife is, to an extent, rooted in the popular music of the day; there are echoes of trad jazz (At a Jazz Concert, 1948), klezmer (Invitation to the Dance, Yiddish Theater Rehearsal), and early ska (Calypso), as well as music dripping with sentiment, and music that is stark and featureless; an aural counterpart, I hope, to the many various moods found in Weegee's photographs.