| Details: | Visiting Composers Series: Sebastian Currier
Dan Welcher, artistic director, New Music Ensemble
SHOT IN THE DARK by Travis Jeffords (2009)
Program Note by the composer
Simply put, I wrote Shot In The Dark because I was sick of love songs. I was tired of heart-wrenching, over-romanticized prose, and tired of the cool cultivation of emotional tension being expertly built up and stretched out, built up and stretched out, built up and stretched out. It was all too perfect, too ideal.
I wanted something current, something unapologetically flawed and dirty. I wanted to transcribe late night drunk dials, and set their rants to music. I wanted something real.
In the back of the Austin Chronicle, after the music listings and just past the XXX services pages are the personal ads, which includes a section called Shot In The Dark. It’s a small, half page of missed connections: people who forgot to exchange numbers or were too shy to introduce themselves in the first place. This is their last ditch effort to reconnect with the one that got away. It turns out there are a lot of really weird people in this town, but I found it incredibly refreshing to read something so straightforward, unmitigated, and honest. These were the contemporary, gritty and real stories I was after. I cut out the best of the best, and, using only the words of the anonymous Austinites who wrote them, set their text to music. This is that music.
If everything goes according to plan, Travis Jeffords will be graduating from UT with an M.M. in Composition in the next couple of weeks. He’s then going to move to Bloomington, Indiana with his wife and get a day job.
STATIC by Sebastian Currier (2005)
It could be some sort of Rorschach’s test: what do you think of when you read the word “static?” Is it of something unchanging and in a state of equilibrium? Or is it of the erratic white noise that interferes with a radio signal? Both these divergent meanings relate to certain aspects of my piece, which, with it’s six movements of varying tempo and character, still retains vestiges of a sonata cycle (Remote, Ethereal, Bipolar, Resonant, Charged, Floating). The slow, distant, wave-like chords that open the piece suggest an interior landscape that is inert and unchanging. This gesture becomes a motive throughout the piece, heard or felt in almost every movement. As early as the second movement traces of the other “static” emerge. This musical interference takes several forms, but one of the most characteristic is where string trills are played in harmonics, paired with changes in bow pressure and placement, which causes various harmonics to stand out in a constantly changing and random fashion. In the fourth movement (Resonant) the irregular, unpatterned ornamental gestures in the piano create a static of sorts against the long lines in the strings. In the third movement (Bipolar) the juxtaposition is most pronounced. The movement consists of a long held static chord which is abruptly interrupted by a rough, chaotic and intense passage (radio static with a vengeance!) which almost as abruptly ends, leaving the static chord once again in the wake of its turbulence. The fifth movement (Charged) defines the arc of the piece as a whole, dividing it into before and after. ?Although the material is drawn from earlier movements, this movement stands out from the others both because of its sustained intensity (the other movements in general tend towards quietude) and because of its substitution of flute and clarinet with piccolo and bass clarinet. In the last movement (Floating) material from other movements return- not so much with a feeling of formal closure or recapitulation, but as disembodied fragments of memory that float by, emerging out of an ethereal static, which gains ever increasing prominence as the movement progresses. Static was written for Music from Copland House, which was made possible by a commission from Meet the Composer. It was premiered at Miller Theater in New York in February, 2005.
VOCALISSIMUS by Sebastian Currier (1991)
Vocalissimus (1991) reverses the standard procedure followed when constructing song cycles. Instead of employing several verses by one author, this entry for soprano and small mixed chamber ensemble takes a single poem, “To the Roaring Wind” by Wallace Stevens, and sets it eighteen different ways. That the writer of this text also penned the classic “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is no accident; here, Currier turns the tables on Stevens—spying on the spy, pointing the microscope in reverse. Furthermore, one sees text setting for the subjective business it is. Despite what some listeners and composers may think, there’s no one right way to present verse in musical context; each of the eighteen settings of this poem prove perfectly viable and effective. Currier has characterized all this as “music in the third person,” peering beyond the composer’s usual self-referential vantage point to another dimension entirely.
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