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Original Music 2011

Symptom Palace

Symptom Palace

4 minutes 37 seconds| Many name changes, including Wheels of Gouda and Overture in Lurches. I have softened on the second of these titles.

This work possesses the drive one expects to find in a lively overture, where themes are sparingly sampled from the source opera. This buckshot thrown at a barn-door is as close as I come to paying homage to Mozart and Rossetti.

Symptom Palace feels like the sort of thing I studied as a contemporary music composition major at The University of Memphis circa 1980.

Someone once said, in my presence, that contemporary classical music sounds better in chamber recital than you anticipate; and I agree. Acoustic classical instruments reveal percussive qualities at close range, which resonate well in recital halls. One can imagine them as tribal instruments sounding in a jungle clearing, where dissonances and odd colorings bellow through the trees. This may evoke Iron Age campfires that dwell in some kind of ancestral memory.

 

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