From the Faraway Nearby (2004)
American
In From The Faraway Nearby I am fascinated with the juxtaposition of opposites, and in particular, with the ephemeral and the concrete, and the relationships between the two.
The generative pitch material for From The Faraway Nearby is inspired by specific paintings of Georgia O’Keefe. Each of the movements is, in fact, analogous with certain O’Keefe paintings , Mvt. I YellowSpacePink Mvt. II. RedDazzleBlack, Mvt. III. ElectricLight, and Mvt. IV. OrangeRedStreak. The pitch material, essentially a series of trichords and tetrachords expressed structurally through octachordal mixture, appears throughout the work in various transformed versions, most overtly motivic and scalar, more remotely in a harmonic context. For me, it is the latter’s qualities that are oneiric and remote, a rendering of the ephemeral. O’Keefe’s exploration of a mysterious unity perceived by the senses rather than by thought seems to a central to her own work.
For the listener, then, perhaps music, in its intractable complexity and in its sensory connotation, is the experience of life and the ephemeral. The relationship, for me, between my composition and the paintings is primarily associative.