Down to You is Up

Description

Duration

11 min.

Instrumentation

solo piano

Movements

I. Good Times Just Seem to Pass Me By
II. So Cold / So Lonely
III. Everything Was Alright

Program Notes

When I was finishing up my Doctorate I fell in love—again—with the Velvet Underground. I longed, I suppose, for less complicated and depressing times, and remembered driving around Los Angeles with their first record, “Velvet Underground and Nico,” blasting and dreaming of moving to New York, and believing, then as now, that music could be dangerous. So when I came to write this three movement piano piece, I wanted to use the material from the Velvets and do my own violence to their work.

I chose different approaches for the three movements: for the first, I took the piano part from “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and a chunk of the melody and ran from there; for the second, I took their most famous song “Pale Blue Eyes” and used it as a kind of palimpsest, writing my piece as a kind of accompaniment and then removing the original material; and for the final movement, I rounded to a strict quotation from “Beginning to See the Light.”

This newer version corrects a few youthful indiscretions.