Performance of my music

I’m happy to announce a performance of a recent piece of

mine. This is a piece for cello and piano, called A te; it’s an

unpredictable and (if I say so myself) rather sly set of variations on "A

class=SpellE>te o cara," a tenor aria

from Bellini’s opera "I Puritani." These

performances are happening on a series called Second Helpings, produced by the

St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble. Here’s the data:

April 1, 2 PM:

w:st="on">Chelsea Art Museum,

556 West 22nd Street,

in New York

April 2, 2 PM: Dia

class=GramE>:Beacon. This is a museum in Beacon, NY, where the

class=SpellE>Dia Foundation shows its art collection. For directions, go

to their website.

This performance is one of several ways in which I’m slowly

reemerging as a composer. I hope to announce a couple of more events soon

lang=X-NONE style='mso-ansi-language:X-NONE'>. This piece

lang=X-NONE style='mso-ansi-language:X-NONE'>— originally written for

cellist Adiel Shmit, to

whom I’m grateful —

plays games. As a musician who heard it said after its premiere a few months

ago, "You never know what’s coming next." The Bellini

tune comes at the end, and emerges like a light out of darkness, tying together

everything that came before. Suddenly you realize where the things you’ve been

hearing came from.

The variations run all over the stylistic map. The first one

takes off from Led Zeppelin’s "Whole Lotta

Love." Others are little tributes to bebop (with the cello and piano both

taking solos). Still others are quietly drunken little rhapsodies. There’s also

a nod to minimalism, and, in many places, more dissonance than I usually

class=GramE>write. I’m learning to bring all the non-classical music I

love into classical pieces (odd that it didn’t come naturally to me before,

given how strongly I’ve publicly said that such things should happen). This

piece maybe reflects the feeling I often have about music in our time, that the

variety of it is just staggering, but also (with no disrespect meant to any

musical style) a bit like litter — there’s so much of it around that, apart from following your

nose and just listening to whatever you love, it’s hard to know what to do to

it all.

Because the theme comes at the end, I had two problems in

writing the piece. The first was how to start (since usually a set of

variations starts stalwartly with the theme). I decided to use the orchestral

introduction to the aria, just as you hear it in the opera. So the piece

becomes a Bellini sandwich

style='mso-ansi-language:X-NONE'>— Bellini at

the beginning and end, me in the middle.

The other problem was how to get to the end

lang=X-NONE style='mso-ansi-language:X-NONE'>— how to brake all the

crazy momentum, how to make a transition from short, gnomic, wildly varied

variations into the peaceful D major of the theme. My answer was to break the

variations into fragments, as if the music slowly collapsed into rubble. And

from that rubble the theme emerges.

That’s a lot of writing about a fairly short piece! Also on

the program is music, by a lovely quirk of fate, written by people I’ve known

for a long time, and really like: Chet Biscardi,

Martha Mooke, and

w:st="on">Joan Tower

(who’s the artistic director of the series).

If any readers come to these performances, please come up

and say hello!

Feel free to peruse the

href="http://www.gregsandow.com/music/a_te.pdf">score

of A

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> te, and

href="http://www.gregsandow.com/music/a_te_demo.m3u">listen

to a synthesizer version of the music.