Program Note

This is a set of four pieces: America-City Boogie, America-City Dreams, America-City FistFight and America-City Blues. The last is sub-titled Blues for Louise, and is dedicated to the dear memory of Louise Rogers.

AMERICA-CITY was completed in May, 1996, in Durham, New Hampshire.

The work over-all is subtitled UrMatrix-Ville. "UrMatrix" is a term which I may have invented (though I don’t remember this with certainty); in any case, it refers to the structure of the piece in-the-large, which is generated primarily by 3-by-4 matrices (full sets) containing some of the seven, all-combinatorial tetrachords (four-note groups) of the 12-pitchclass system, by my calculation.

Unlike most of my previous work, these pieces are not built on a rhythmic, "time-point-class" system, which would map onto the pitch-system. The shape of the music is "by the seat of the pants", or what Berg, in another context, might have called "frei". The result is thus perhaps more straightforward, more accessible than heretofore, both in its background- and foreground-rhythmic structures. The listener will of course be the judge of that; at any rate, it constitutes something of a new direction (or perhaps a pause(?)) in my work.

The pitch-organization, on the other hand, is not "free", unless one assume that thirty-odd years of study in the twelve tone system, primarily by means of abstract algebra, may have allowed it to become so. That, at all events, has been my intention; in other words, to answer some of the daunting questions that have arisen in the course of composition, not for the uses of theory, but for composition. Of course the solution of one set of problems (or paradoxes) inevitably presents an array of new ones; but we do what we can.

By the way, the term America-City is, I think, also of my own invention; it goes back a long way, to a time when the country appeared to me to be one, massive "city" of sorts. This took place during a long stay (ten years) in various parts of Europe, at some remove from the homeland. At such times, one may see things in a different light from before. I offer a reflection of that view from yet a further remove.

Robert Taylor

Program Note

There are mensural, and not-so-mensural canons in this piece;   hence the title. As in the case of AMERICA-CITY, "UrMatrices" are prominent, but with the difference that they are often asymmetrical. The piece is relentlessly  canonic— double, triple and quadruple canons are everywhere to be found—but since there is not one, continuous canon from start to finish, the word "Sequences" seemed most descriptive to me.

Canons appear sequentially in mirror, retrograde, upside-down-and-backward incarnations, as well as simultaneously in every combination I could think of. A suggestive analogy to this work might be a hall of mirrors, in which a set of images is projected rapidly in a myriad of forms, with the observer moving through the whole at wildly varying speeds.

Program Note

Although it does not use matrices, as in AMERICA-CITY, this is a twelve-tone piece in every sense. Particular stress is laid on the use of "weighted aggregates" (this is no place to go into that; it's just for theory-freaks) and the use of "mirrored" pitch-sets over long time-spans. I would have to write a book to clarify this, so I'll just leave it at that; it's not of general interest anyway. There is a good deal of "overlapping" and "state-changing" of timbres (colors) in the "instruments", and they are used, often, in extreme registers and unusual combinations—but then panic is an extreme business, I should think.

I suppose everybody has experienced "panick" in some degree or another. (Don't ask about the archaic spelling; it just came out that way. I must have been in an Elizabethan frame of mind at the time…). The most striking example of this that I have seen was in Florence, just after the waters of the Great Flood of 1966 had settled, leaving a coating of river-silt perhaps one meter deep across the entire city and beyond. The stuff was like glue, mixed with fuel oil from exploded furnace-tanks, and near to impossible to navigate in any way whatsoever.

For some reason, a woman of perhaps forty years of age tried to cross Piazza Santa Croce, where I was staying at the time (I was standing on a 5^th floor balcony). I tried to warn her not to attempt the crossing, but she was of stout heart—at first—and continued on her way. After about a half-dozen steps, she stopped dead in her tracks, and could not move or speak. She was close enough that I could see her eyes, which put me in mind of a scene I had accidentally witnessed years before where cattle were being herded into a slaughter-house. I will never forget the look of sheer, blank panic in her eyes as she stood there. A group of us ventured out, freed her and carried her home, still unable to talk.

This piece, then, attempts to reflect in a small way what such an experience might be like.