Mvt 1: Nightwaking-Distant Past Mvt 2: Simple Song/Hymn
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Crossroads Songs (1999)
Duration: 11'
For some time I've been writing music that has been influenced by my involvement with Irish traditional music; I've also written works that came out of my years playing in a gamelan, and my exposure to Albanian folk music. In the past these various musical influences have always remained quite separate--one per work--and I approached each tradition as a translator might, trying to communicate in the language of Western concert music some aspect of the experience of listening to the original.
This piece, though, has multiple ethnic and regional influences, and they are all mixed together. I had the image of my own listening experience as a town at a crossroads, where people from all over meet, and their cultures mingle and merge. Albanian instrumental music, rennaissance monody, Irish music, the occasional Oriental detail, and hymnody all get combined and juxtaposed, blurred together in this piece.
In the first movement, Nightwaking/Distant Past, I was thinking of those moments in which one awakes in a panic, reliving some desperate moment in a dream, only to have the fear and urgency gradually fade back into sleep, or perhaps into the quiet sadness that remains in the separation that time creates between our current selves and our individual and collective pasts. Simple Song/Hymn, the second movement, is just that, a simple song (actually an Albanian dance-trope on a Irish-style lullaby that I wrote for and dedicated to my daughter Elena) followed by an even simpler hymn, which to me is less about any religious symbolism than it is a return to essentials--an outgrowth of my own realization of the joy and deep gratitude to be found in the simple basics of life since the birth of my child.
This piece was written for Paul Bro, Jimmy Finnie, and Martha Krasnican.
Duration: 11'
For some time I've been writing music that has been influenced by my involvement with Irish traditional music; I've also written works that came out of my years playing in a gamelan, and my exposure to Albanian folk music. In the past these various musical influences have always remained quite separate--one per work--and I approached each tradition as a translator might, trying to communicate in the language of Western concert music some aspect of the experience of listening to the original.
This piece, though, has multiple ethnic and regional influences, and they are all mixed together. I had the image of my own listening experience as a town at a crossroads, where people from all over meet, and their cultures mingle and merge. Albanian instrumental music, rennaissance monody, Irish music, the occasional Oriental detail, and hymnody all get combined and juxtaposed, blurred together in this piece.
In the first movement, Nightwaking/Distant Past, I was thinking of those moments in which one awakes in a panic, reliving some desperate moment in a dream, only to have the fear and urgency gradually fade back into sleep, or perhaps into the quiet sadness that remains in the separation that time creates between our current selves and our individual and collective pasts. Simple Song/Hymn, the second movement, is just that, a simple song (actually an Albanian dance-trope on a Irish-style lullaby that I wrote for and dedicated to my daughter Elena) followed by an even simpler hymn, which to me is less about any religious symbolism than it is a return to essentials--an outgrowth of my own realization of the joy and deep gratitude to be found in the simple basics of life since the birth of my child.
This piece was written for Paul Bro, Jimmy Finnie, and Martha Krasnican.