2013 Thomas Nee Commission completed, sent to printers

I've been fairly quiet on the blog for the last several months, primarily due to qualification exams research, and the composition of the 2013 Thomas Nee Commission for the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus.  The work is called Ikarus-Azur, a hybrid of German and French words (I dropped the article on L'Azur), taken from the titles of two of the poems set in the piece.

Ikarus-Azur will be premiered on December 7th and 8th in Mandeville Auditorium, at UCSD.

Here is some front-matter to the score:

Program Notes:

Ikarus-Azur is a musical response to humankind's ambivalent relationship to both nature and technology. We value technology for its ability to lift us out of adverse natural situations and environments, yet we rely on those natural environments for their ecological productivity and beauty, things which can be degraded by technology. Our Promethean flames, our Icarian wings, the fruits of our technological labors have become as powerful as any natural phenomena. Truly, the sublime, that pleasurable sense of terror when faced by forces more powerful than any single human, is now the purview of both nature - and technology. What are we to do? Shall we reject the offspring of our minds, our concepts corporealized as metal and electricity, in favor of nature's harsh dominion? Or will we trample and decimate our habitats as fuel and raw materials for the inexorable march of reason and technology? Ikarus-Azur dwells upon this dialectic by synthesizing celebrated poetry by Stéphane Mallarmé, Gottfried Benn, Henry David Thoreau and Aeschylus into an emotionally charged narrative. Ultimately, we have no answers, only questions - for we are haunted by the azure.

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank David Chase, Steven Schick, and La Jolla Symphony & Chorus for their work preparing Ikarus-Azur, and Roger Reynolds for his mentorship during the composition of the work.  I would also like to thank Larson Powell and Camden House, who granted me permission to utilize Powell's original translations of the Mallarmé and Benn poems.  These translations served as the bases for my extensive alterations to the texts. His excellent book The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008) first drew my attention to Mallarmé's L'Azur and Benn's Ikarus.

Text and Sources - Fragments from:

L'Azur (1864) by Stéphane Mallarmé
     Ikarus (1915) by Gottfried Benn
  Smoke (1843) by Henry David Thoreau
  Prometheus Bound (1843) by Aeschylus (trans. Thoreau)

The eternal azure
overwhelms
my mind,
draw the poppy to my brow.
Light winged flame,
floating.
Icarian bird,
drifting.
Melting feather,
in upward flight, burning.
Still floating,
Through mountain scree,
dusty carrion,
serrated rocks,
Across the shore's sterile sands.
Waters, shattering,
crashing, shining,
on the reef's
shadowed forms below.
Great arched one,
I sense it watching,
the passing sun.

Rise up fog, arise,
let cool ashes fall
by day.
Rise up fog, arise,
with long trails of mist,
darken the light.
Rise up fog, cover over me,
rise up fog and silence the sky.

Rise up walls,
build shelter over me,
rise up walls and silence the sky.
Gather mud and reeds,
to blot out the burning sun.
Gather brick and stone,
to block the blue holes
that birds create.
Extinguish in the horror,
of black trails of soot,
the silent lark, messenger of dawn,
below the dancing sun,
circling above,
the plunge of the double suns'
ceaseless falling.

Departed dream of night,
of shadowed omen.
Departed dream of midnight vision.
My incense, by night star veiling,
go upward from this hearth,
fly skyward from the earth,
and ask the gods
to pardon this flame,
this teacher of all art to mortals.

Alas! The azure triumphs.
I hear the bells ringing,
I hear the azure singing.
The living metal erupts
as blue angelus bells.
Roaring forth from night,
sun, ignite the morning sky.
Ancient, it rolls across the mist,
traversing my agony
like a sure sword.
What fluttering do I hear?
What echo from god,
              from mortals,
or from those mixed,
what echo has flown
              this far to me?
For the air rustles
with the soft stirring of wings.
I pay, fixed in strong chains
under the stark, unforgiving sky.