Manipulação

Description

Duration

3 min.

Program Notes

Although Manipulação is scored for only one instrument and lasts barely over two minutes, it has taken me more than three years to actually compose it. And on some levels, I’ve been working on it even longer, perhaps since my childhood…

I’ve spent virtually my entire life in New York City, but I was born in Miami, Florida, and I returned there to live on and off for a two-year period when I was in elementary school. Apart from figuring out that I never wanted to live anywhere else besides New York City for the rest of my life, I picked up a few other lifelong personality flaws during that time.

It was the early 1970s, and my mother sent me to guitar classes at a strip mall about two miles away from the trailer park where we were living. The guitar is the only instrument I ever studied formally with a teacher, and to this day it is the only instrument I can play somewhat that I feel uncomfortable playing.

Before I was 10, I was barely aware of the world around me much less the musical world—until Nixon was forced to resign I thought the Watergate scandal referred to a broken pipe at a hotel—but music has a way of creeping in to the subconscious whether wittingly or unwittingly. For years afterwards, even long after realizing I was a composer (for better or worse), I was never able to write a piece that wasn’t infested with major seventh chords, much to the chagrin of anyone who held the European classical music traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries in high esteem. But, no matter what they said, I just couldn’t dislodge those wonderfully emotionally manipulative chords which were ubiquitous on 70s AM radio (Paul McCartney’s “My Love,” “Day By Day” from the cast album of the Broadway musical Godspell, “My Cherie Amour,” “You Are The Sunshine of My Life” or just about anything else ever done by Stevie Wonder, etc).

In fact, the negativity toward major sevenths made me uninterested in classical music until I heard Philip Glass repeat them relentlessly in North Star, which I was first exposed to on a PBS television documentary as a sophomore in high school and safely back in New York City. A few years later I was a Columbia undergrad (in the early ’80s) where liking Glass was not a way to curry favor with the guardians of dodecaphonic atonality. At the time it felt like an intractable divide, but nowadays many composers including myself treat minimalism and serialism as two branches from the same tree.

In fact, the negativity toward major sevenths made me uninterested in classical music until I heard Philip Glass repeat them relentlessly in North Star, which I was first exposed to on a PBS television documentary as a sophomore in high school and safely back in New York City. A few years later I was a Columbia undergrad (in the early ’80s) where liking Glass was not a way to curry favor with the guardians of dodecaphonic atonality. At the time it felt like an intractable divide, but nowadays many composers including myself treat minimalism and serialism as two branches from the same tree.

I’ve always wondered if major sevenths have been so reviled by classical music traditionalists because they’re not resolvable. The developmental nature of the standard repertoire is all about resolution. From a functional tonality standpoint, a major seventh chord (a major triad played simultaneously with its tonic’s leading tone) is dissonant and dissonances have to be resolved, yet major seventh chords sound just fine where they are. They actually sound like they shouldn’t go anywhere else, except to maybe another major seventh chord and resolving them any other way sounds awkward (which is probably why the inverted major seventh chord at the end of the development section of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica, one of the chord’s few manifestations in the “legit” canon, still sounds startling 200 years after he wrote it).

I’ve always wondered if major sevenths have been so reviled by classical music traditionalists because they’re not resolvable. The developmental nature of the standard repertoire is all about resolution. From a functional tonality standpoint, a major seventh chord (a major triad played simultaneously with its tonic’s leading tone) is dissonant and dissonances have to be resolved, yet major seventh chords sound just fine where they are. They actually sound like they shouldn’t go anywhere else, except to maybe another major seventh chord and resolving them any other way sounds awkward (which is probably why the inverted major seventh chord at the end of the development section of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica, one of the chord’s few manifestations in the “legit” canon, still sounds startling 200 years after he wrote it).

I’ve always wondered if major sevenths have been so reviled by classical music traditionalists because they’re not resolvable. The developmental nature of the standard repertoire is all about resolution. From a functional tonality standpoint, a major seventh chord (a major triad played simultaneously with its tonic’s leading tone) is dissonant and dissonances have to be resolved, yet major seventh chords sound just fine where they are. They actually sound like they shouldn’t go anywhere else, except to maybe another major seventh chord and resolving them any other way sounds awkward (which is probably why the inverted major seventh chord at the end of the development section of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica, one of the chord’s few manifestations in the “legit” canon, still sounds startling 200 years after he wrote it).