Update Title: 2004B97C-6231-44B6-B520-3295A70606FC

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BURLESQUE is an adaptation and reworking of an earlier composition for a similar ensemble begun almost thirty years ago, but subsequently withdrawn.  As the title implies, the work is a tongue-in-cheek parody of styles, genres and extant compositions from various periods in music history.  Although the overall tone is intended to be humorous, the piece has a decidedly serious side as well, occasionally turning wistful and nostalgic.  Even when the music from one era abruptly clashes with that from another, the styles or actual works referenced are treated with the utmost respect…and love.

In the early stages of its composition, BURLESQUE was viewed as a passamezzo (a slow, processional dance in duple meter) coupled with a saltarello (a lively, rollicking dance in 6/8 meter), forms that were quite popular in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  Ultimately, this basic design was expanded by the inclusion of a prologue and epilogue (both of which contain borrowings from pieces by Mozart and George Rochberg), an interlude appearing in the middle of the saltarello, and a varied reprise of the passamezzo.  The passamezzo and its reprise employ the simple harmonic pattern of the sixteenth-century passamezzo antico overlaid with a melody of the same period that seems to have been a favorite discant for this dance type.  The saltarello, for the most part, is a “re-composition” of passages from Liszt’s “Tarantella,” written in the same key and coincidentally exhibiting close harmonic and thematic ties with the passamezzo.  Even the pitch materials of the free, “atonal” sections within the prologue and epilogue are derived from permutations of a tonally ambiguous melodic fragment excerpted from the “Tarantella.”  The work, then, attempts at every compositional level to reconcile disparate musical forces, to forge the past and the present, the “tonal” and the “atonal,” the “borrowed’ and the “original” into a unified whole that is distinctly individual and personal.

Claude Baker

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