Piano/Composition - Steve Long
Travis Bliss - Tenor Sax
Nick Neuburg - Percussion
Violin - Concetta Abbate, Sara Solomon, Aimee Niemann
Viola - Nick Pauly, Charlotte Munn-Wood
Cello - Julie Kim
Bass - Anna Abondolo
Introit: FACTA
*(s)kai-
Kanon
DoGmA.AmGoD
Lugal-Za-Ghe-Zi
Screens
Growing up in a south Brooklyn neighborhood has given me endless colorful anecdotes that seem more fit for film than real life. You can imagine whatever stories you like. And when I remember my childhood in an overly sentimental way, given that I was only born in 1985, it seems quaint. I remember my grandmother as the neighborhood seamstress, my grandfather a handyman, aunts working diner counters, father in construction, stay at home mom, the list goes on. Something about how everyone occupied their space in society left an impression on me. I can't imagine that music in 2023 will ever be as practical as hemming a pair of pants but I wish it was. Maybe, with the music industry dead, and funding for the arts at an all time low, music and its ephemeral nature can stand as an anti-capitalist tool. It is my urge to find a place for my work that drives me to dig around in music's past, whether that's 50 or 500 years ago. I've come to the conclusion that musical techniques (compositional, formal, improvisational, etc) are not inert formulas to get from point A to B and fill up space. These techniques are the tools of a musical speculative science. Tools that help decode the present situation. So, for example, when Bach employs canonic procedures in his music it is not for the sake of complexity, or virtuosity, but an attempt to give up control, to negate the self in order to get out of the way and listen. Recently I can't help but find these almost Cagean impulses scattered throughout history. And, paradoxically, with the help of this Cagean lens, I worry less about my place in the world and more about my anonymous contribution to a larger whole.
Introit: FACTA is a very obscured contrafact written over Ugly Beauty by Thelonious Monk. The title is a play on words and was originally titled FACTA NON VERBA: actions not words. The composition *(s)kai- started out as a song for solo voice with poetry by Kalli Mathios. Though the words of the poem will not be heard by the audience, their presence is encoded into the music, and allows the musicians to engage with the un-notatable nuances of speech. Kanon, another piece originally furnished with a text, is a slow improvised development in search of the main melody. DoGmA.AmGoD is a newer piece that uses a standard 32 bar form. Though the bar lines in the piece are sacrosanct, there is no rhythmic notation whatsoever. What you hear is a rhythmic interpretation arrived at over time, a very personal aural tradition untethered from the page. The penultimate piece on the program, Lugal-Za-Ghe-Zi, derives its name from the last Sumerian king. But personally I can't help but hear it as an off the cuff slur between two Italian Americans. This brings us to the final piece on the program, and the culmination of the evening. Screens is the first section of a multi-movement piano concerto-like composition for improvising piano trio (piano, sax, drums) and string septet. Having only finished the score this morning, I find myself a bit too close to the piece to say anything useful. In essence, this work is a search, in real time, for a common ground between the cool remove of the string parts, conceived with the aid of probability and random number generators, and the distinctly personalized material of the trio. This piece is dedicated to the memory of my cousin Ro.
