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March 2014, Green Music Center, Sonoma, CA
Argento Ensemble, Michel Galante conductor
After Nine is dedicated to my friend and composition teacher Chris Paul Harman, whose own music typically reworks pitch material abstracted somewhat indifferently from existing pieces and then violently reshaped to form a new piece, often with very little resemblance to the original. My piece more gently (that is, lovingly) takes pitches and certain melodic gestures from the first movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, in a kind of ‘misreading’ of Chris Harman’s methodology, and serves as both a tribute to my friend and former teacher and also a critique of the (Postmodern?) impulse to indiscriminately consume and thereby risk neutralizing the works of dead composers — to treat musical works as simply the material stuff of new pieces, which might be considered either violence inflected upon works within a living musical tradition (a type of musical murder) or else the exhuming and abuse of dead things (the mishandling of corpses) — I wonder which is worse?
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