"Insult to Injury"
Instrumentation:
violin and piano
Movements:
I. (Tirade - Plateau - Retreat)
II. (Travesty - Cadenza - Epilogue)
Duration:
approximately 19'
Dates of Composition:
January 2002 - December 2003
Premier Performance:
February 1, 2004 - Brookline Public Library, Brookline, MA. Biliana Voutchkova - violin; Sarah Bob - piano
Score:
uncorrected perusal version available immediately, corrected edition available soon
Recording:
Live recording of 2/07/04 performance available on request
Notes:
"Insult to Injury" was written on a commission from Biliana Voutchkova, to be featured on the 2003-04 season of the Radius Ensemble.
Program note from Radius Ensemble performance (2/7/04):
...a US president declares his intention to drastically reduce pollution constraints already established by law, perversely calling it the "Clean Air Initiative..." ...a letter informs you that your gas provider and electricity provider have just been "acquired" by one big company (lets call it "Q-Star") and your next utility bill thanks you profusely for "choosing" Q-star.... ....the government's stated justification for going to war against another country changes from moment to moment, relying on the likelihood of a general cultural failure of long term memory....
To live in the US today is to submit perpetually to the humiliation of having one's intelligence insulted, and, in the worst cases, to forget that it is happening. "Insult to Injury," for violin and piano, takes its inspiration directly from the experience of humiliation, as well as a variety of ensuing reactive emotional states. As with other recent compositions of mine, this piece began life as "absolute music," but inevitably the music was infiltrated by some of my political sentiments, despite my best intentions to keep it "pure." I've started to believe that music can never fail to be political, even though any given listener's experience of the music may differ widely from what was intended by the composer. However, I have also always felt that when a composer seeks to control the listener too closely, he or she is indulging in a kind of totalitarian fantasy, as we hear in many Hollywood film scores. With that in mind, I often try to avoid getting too specific in declaring what my expressive intentions are. Suffice it to say that there is a fair amount of indignant sentiment which you may hear in this piece.
The music is in two movements, the first rather lengthy, the second quite concise. The opening is an abstract "tirade" against whatsoever you would like to imagine, caustic and morose, but it also has moments of humor. The tone is like that of a heated conversation, with occasionally vehement disagreements between the two instruments, punctuated by surprising unisons, where common ground is found. After quite a few minutes of this an impasse ("plateau") is reached, leading to a much more introverted, calm and reflective passage. The movement concludes with a "retreat" into a subdued stasis, the quietest possible ostinato in the piano supporting a long, slow melody in the violin, before a jarring reminder of the earlier argumentative music.
The second movement turns to vindictive humor as a more productive outlet: The violin's naive opening melody is almost literally attacked by the piano, and a comical chase ensues. At last, part way through the movement, the violinist has a solo cadenza full of reminiscences of earlier moods. A musical epilogue to the entire piece is constructed almost entirely of the obsessive repetition of cyclical patterns which overlap and coincide in unpredictable ways. Borrowing loosely but extensively from techniques found in Balinese gamelan music, this passage is a kind of musical "deus ex machina" which forcibly brings the entire composition to its conclusion.
"Insult to Injury" was written expressly for tonight's performers, Biliana and Sarah, who are among the most devoted advocates of new music I've ever been privileged enough to work with.
