On Obsession

I think of Samuel Barber as the last of the great Romantics in music. He lived well into the period where younger composers (starting with George Rochberg, and going from there) were already doing the post-modern version of Romanticism, and his own music was certainly colored by modern styles and techniques. But at his core, he was a Romantic, and the music always brings us to that Romantic place. One of the hallmarks of late Romanticism is an obsessive quality - not the modernist obsession with the Machine, but the Romantic obsession with human yearning and isolation. Barber fits neatly into that tradition (though he did dabble in explorations of the mechanical), and the Adagio is probably the most dramatic example of that obsessive quality.

What makes something obsessive, in music? It's not just repetition - it's the kind of repetition. In other words, the repetition of what? In this case, Barber repeats phrases that "cadence", or conclude, with the next repetition as the answer to the one that came before it. But the repetitions are all slightly different; they are refractions of the same idea. If they were all the same, the music would not have the obsessive quality that I hear in it, because it would not suggest the effort to "move on" that the changes imply. The material itself strongly suggests a pathos and a longing, or perhaps a resignation. It's always dangerous to assign specific moods to pieces, which is perhaps why I focused my response on this general idea of "obsession."

My own pieces in response to the Barber are obsessive in a more modern context. The musical landscape of the two pieces is comprised of a series of wandering musical objects and narratives; they seek their own resolutions. Ultimately, and unlike the Barber, it's an outside element - itself with an obsessive quality - that thrusts the broader narrative forward. Given that so much of my music deals with heavy repetition, it was interesting to work with repetition of a very specific kind. I'm not sure that I can capture the lost Romanticism of Barber and the composers who preceded him, but it is always fascinating to put on another composer's shoes, even in a specific and limited fashion such as this.