Program note

This piece belongs to a series of works that are inspired by the concept of intertextuality in listening, reading, and viewing works of art.

The set of pieces overall is inspired, partly, by the work of the artist George Condo, whose practice of “abstract realism” borrows heavily from identifiable artists – mostly Picasso and Goya – as well as the cartoonish language of pop art to create “fake old masters.” Surrealistic distortions of recognizable historical artistic techniques, styles, and references.

The sense Condo often speaks of – of being pulled between an attraction to modernist, abstract expressionist work, and figurative work – reminds me of the polarities of sound and style that I’m drawn toward in music. This is my attempt at finding a synthesis between the high modernist austerity and timbral ingeniousness of “musique concrete instrumental,” the acoustic naturalism of spectral music, the abstract sonic mindfulness of the New York School, and the new / old languages of tonality that endure from Philipp de Vitry to the Post-minimalists.

The piece [like most] is weighed down with the echoes of the past and present. I have not tried to suppress them. I have tried to harmonize them in certain ways [at least in and for myself], but I recognize that in the end, they are perhaps unharmonizable.