Loose Associations

Instrumentation: cello octet, also for cello quartet and playback

Duration: 23

Written in: 2020

Category: Chamber, Playback

In music, there is a long tradition of creating content through references to the visual arts or earlier compositions. In Loose Associations, an additional layer of referencing is created by adding my perspective to works by other composers and associating them with the visual arts. To give a few examples: In the first movement, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude, Descending a Staircase No. 2 is reinterpreted as a dancing Hungarian figure by coupling it with Béla Bartók’s Hungarian Dance. The near-quotation of Bartók’s folk dance in D major quickly transitions into an original composition with dense clusters and a delay effect to depict Duchamp’s representation of a nude in time lapse motion. In the second movement, the delay effect is taken to another extreme with a melodic C minor cell from Terry Riley’s Persian Surgery Dervishes is overlapped on itself seven times. The harmony of the cell is continuously altered microtonally to represent the color changes in the numerous squares and rectangles of Paul Klee’s Polyphony. The movement ends by turning to the many miniature dots of Klee’s painting with staccato, repetitive block gestures.