Junk Shot
- decessional
- on my shoe
- fleur de plume
Junk Shot was approached from 2 different directions. On the one hand, terminology was appropriated from the Gulf oil spill which was the hot story in June 2010. A "junk shot" was the first major effort to stop the spill by jamming a bunch of seemingly random trash down the pipe. On the other hand was the Alexander Calder sculpture, Three Up Three Down, which can be an informal expression the keys the keys of A major and E-flat major. The interaction of those two keys was used to generate some of the harmonic material for the piece.
I. Decessional is a descending cortège in the form of a collection of brief gestures (the "junk") placed on a latticework of A/E-flat.
II. On My Shoe represents the whole oil spill thing as a gob of funky goo stuck to the national shoe.
III. Fleur de Plume is a sonar ping revealing a bloom of a plume from the bed of the sea.
––John Elmquist
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AbstractEXTRACTION
- Elemental, structural
- Expressive
- Motoric
- Immutable, eternal
Calder’s sculptures are remarkable for a number of reasons, but perhaps most strikingly for their unerring realism. What makes Calder’s eye for realism especially uncanny is that the vast majority of his works are done in a rigorously abstract style, where shapes and colors intermingle in decidedly “unnatural” ways.
What works about this approach, I think, is that the artist no longer runs the risk of incompletion or imperfection. When a physical form has already been created through natural processes, replicating it with stones and steel doesn’t inherently add anything. What the artist can accomplish, however, is the illumination of unseen—but perhaps “felt”—elements of an object or person.
My piece, a set of four miniatures with a brief introduction, seeks a balance of “natural” and “unnatural” elements. I was inspired chiefly by a quote I found from a treatise Calder wrote in 1932. He says that art, at its best, consists of “Not extractions, but abstractions.” I’ve always been a more “extractive” composer: many of my pieces are built on representations of artifacts and emotions, and I achieve them through traditional devices of harmony, counterpoint, etc. For AbstractEXTRACTION, I’ve tried to strike a balance between my “extractive” style and the “abstractive” style of Calder and the Modernists (which have always been close to my heart, if not my aesthetic).
––Patrick Greene
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Images from a Journey
- Through a Prism
- Moonlight Passacaglia
- Night's Embrace
- Gypsy Ballroom
Images from a Journey for Flute, Clarinet, Cello and Piano by Piotr Szewczyk is set in four short movements that capture four contrasting characters and scenes.
The first movement, Through a Prism, has a striking rhythmic drive with motivic material rapidly scattered through the extreme registers of each instrument, like light dispersing through a prism. The four-bar theme in the middle, surrounded by a steady groove, enters in a fugato manner through all instruments and is again transformed through the various registers and colors.
The second movement, Midnight Passacaglia, is a slowly unfolding meditation on the beauty and intricacy of the night and how it affects our perception of the world. It is inspired by the phenomenon of our eyes adjusting to darkness and the world revealing itself to our eyes as we begin to notice details in very different ways than in daylight.
The third movement, Night's Embrace, is inspired by our innate fear of complete darkness and how our remaining senses attempt to create an understanding of our surroundings. The darkness and unsettling feelings are expressed by the bass clarinet and alto flute in their lowest registers, supported by dark, ominous sonorities in piano.
The fourth movement, Gypsy Ballroom, is a wild, unabashed dance inspired by what I imagined would be a group of fun-loving gypsies unleashing their energy, creativity and spontaneity on an elegant ballroom dance and ripping the politeness to shreds.
––Piotr Szewczyk
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