No, I didn’t stutter. The whole premise behind Sympho’s FLECTION concerts on May 5 and 6 is that composing can be a collaborative enterprise. Just as Mozart worked closely with Da Ponte, his librettist, to come up with Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Le nozze di Figaro, why couldn’t three different living composers work together (with one dead one) to create a large-scale piece? The answer, of course, is that they can. And have.
When I approached Paul Fowler and Judd Greenstein last fall about collaborating on Sympho’s latest adventure, I think all three of us were a bit in the dark about what it would take to make this happen. But I choose my compatriots wisely…
The first thing we did was to lay out the ground rules. Each of us was to write two pieces, about 5 minutes each. Those pieces are required 1) to be inserted seamlessly into Barber’s Adagio for Strings at pre-selected “points of inflection” (see “So why the Adagio” entry below) and 2) to be extractable from the Adagio and performed one after the other as movements of a large-scale symphonic work.
Since FLECTION is a concert about the reactions people have had listening to Barber’s Adagio for Strings, the three of us agreed that each of our 5-minute pieces would embody a personal or universal reaction to the Adagio.
The next step was to determine exactly where the “points of inflection” would be – i.e., where we would insert our reactions into the Barber. We may have quibbled a tiny bit over the placement of one of those insertion points, but – surprisingly – the locations were intuitively obvious to each of us.
Once we knew the music before our piece and the music after our piece, there really was nothing left to do but…write our pieces. We kept up a fairly steady dialogue during the composition process (around three months total), comparing notes, techniques, and motivic material.
Unexpectedly, it became clear during the actual composition that our email and phone correspondence was almost besides the point. The very fact that our pieces grew out of the Adagio connected them with each other very organically. Each composer’s two pieces are motivically and stylistically related to each other, by virtue of the fact that each composer has his own style. The connection, though, between each composer’s pieces and the other composers’ pieces is harder to explain. Our pieces do not overtly share any melodic or harmonic material, but they are most definitely parts of the same whole. The connection just is. That, for me, was one of the most incredible parts of the whole project.
The hardest part, I had convinced myself, was going to be figuring out how to extract our short pieces from Barber’s Adagio and making them work, one after the other, as connected movements of a large-scale piece. My expectations were totally wrong, once again. We had an entirety of two email exchanges on the subject before it became apparent that the pieces fit together perfectly, in the order composed. In one place we had to take out a pitch from a string chord to make the ending of one movement mesh with the next beginning, but – other than that – it just worked. I can’t rationalize it, except to suggest that, since our pieces followed the same architectural arch as the Adagio, we ended up with a great dovetailing effect as we laid our pieces end to end.
I, for one, am greatly relieved – but not surprised – at the happy ending of the FLECTION saga. Judd, Paul, and I are all people who instinctively go for the unknown and the unknowable. It’s certainly one of the reasons I work with them as often as I do. After a few experiences of going out on an artistic limb (with a 1500-foot drop to the canyon floor) and having it work out better than you had thought possible, you just start to expect it. It’s a great place to be, and all three of us are looking forward to sharing the results with you at the FLECTION concerts on May 5 and 6.
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