Nocturne & Wake-Up Call
for solo flute
Duration: 6 minutes
Premiere: May 9, 2008 (Tim Munro, eighth blackbird)
See news about the Nocturne here.
Program Note:
Ever since I was young, I have often found myself awake at odd hours of the night. Rather than idling away this time, I find the calm of night conducive to my work. Perhaps it is not surprising, however, that I sometimes find it difficult to wake up in the morning and begin my day—an unfortunate side effect of this routine. I suppose this is where I find a certain sympathy for the miserable insomniacs of this world. When I had the idea to write a nocturne, I decided that I needed to write a piece not only about night, and the experience of sleep, but about waking up, too.
This augmented nocturne comes in two parts, the second alarmingly different from the first. The Nocturne “proper” reveals a moonlit sleeper, whose dreamy exhalations waft among exotic fragments of reverie and the cool tones of midnight. Several personae inhabit this music, offering tokens of wisdom (or is it deception?) to the dreamer. Some terse and cryptic, others florid and longwinded, the echoing declamations of these dreamed sages (or frauds) illuminate the sleeper’s unconscious. As dawn approaches, harsh angles of daylight slice into this night music, twice disrupting the sleeper’s intoxicated rest. He resists these premature glares of morning—for the time being. Suddenly, he receives a Wake-Up Call: daytime always has a rude way of announcing itself. Wrestled from his slumber, the waking man must confront the inhospitable mania of his diurnal duties, breathlessly racing about, attending to colleagues, always late. Today, he will be lucky if he finds a moment’s respite.
Nocturne and Wake-Up Call was premiered by eighth blackbird flutist Tim Munro on May 9, 2008, in a performance by the CONTEMPO: the Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago. Subsequent performances included the 2011 Thailand International Composition Festival in Chiang Mai, the 2012 newEar Contemporary Music Week in Kansas City, and the University of Chicago’s Fulton Recital Hall in 2012.
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