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- Yehudi Wyner
New Fantasies (1991)
- Associated Music Publishers Inc (World)
Programme Note
Composer Note:
The New Fantasies (1991) are shards from the kiln, so to speak. While at the American Academy in Rome as Composer-in-Residence for the spring, 1991, I was completing a piece for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and another for DaCapo, the New York based chamber ensemble. The inexorable deadlines seemed to be approaching with increasing speed and I needed to work with total concentration. Outside diversions were few, but inner digressions proliferated. Some grew directly out of the main work I was doing, a close examination of a chord progression, a series, a sonority. Other materials were altogether unrelated, unwelcome intruders on what I thought needed to be an exclusively focussed context. If the unbidden visitors chose to stay, indeed obsessed me with their annoying insistence, I had no choice but to acknowledge them, taste and better judgment notwithstanding, and to listen to what they had to say. At a certain stage in our work the suspension of judgment may be the most important strategy we can embrace in order to liberate the unsuspected layers of our creative thought.
Dalla Cappella al Casino (from the Chapel to the Casino). My studio at the Academy was the former chapel of the Villa Aurelia, a palazzo of the 17th century. On the same site, or very nearby, had stood the playhouse (casino) of the Orsini family. The title, affixed after the writing, alluded to the fact that I was giving a gift from the studio to my friends in the Villa (or the Casino).
Straccia Vecchia. An old rag. Also one of the common cries at the great flea market in Rome, the Portia Portese. The shoddy material that comprises this piece fell off some fabric I was fashioning for Trapunto Junction, the Boston Symphony commission. Robert Levin, who loves sleazy modulations, seemed to be in mind as I stitched and darned and so I dedicated the piece to him. The following three pieces all derive form from cells developed in Trapunto Junction. Delirium Breve is self explanatory. From the Flow sounds like a poetic and respectable title. It is not. Addio, addio Roma is heartfelt and suggests regret. Leaving Rome was not easy. The actual words are sung by a heartbroken empress "regina disprezzata”, as she faces exile from her beloved city in L'lncoronazione di Poppea by Claudio Monteverdi.
-- Yehudi Wyner