Slow Homecoming

Slow Homecoming forms a kind of companion or sequel to my Short Symphony—both are relatively brief symphonic works made from small blocks of constantly reworked material, and both take their specific orchestration and approach from a work I admire—Copland’s Symphony No. 2 in the former, and Hans Werner Henze’s remarkable Symphony No. 5 in this piece.

Although I generally subscribe to Stravinsky’s famous dictum that music describes nothing but itself, unusually for me, Slow Homecoming has a dual conceptual basis. From a musical standpoint, it has long been my compositional practice to constantly rework and recombine very small musical ideas; what makes this piece different is that the tiny bits of material are largely drawn from interesting tidbits found in other composers’ works, making Slow Homecoming a kind of postmodern collage. Not only Henze and Copland, but motives and textures from Stravinsky, Andriessen, Donatoni, and others provides much of the underlying material, although nothing ever actually appears in quite its original form, and there is plenty of Shanfield thrown in there too: ideas are cut up, layered, shredded again, and overwritten until hopefully something genuinely new emerges, greater than the sum of its parts.

The work’s concept is not merely abstractly musical, however. Inspired by Nobelist Peter Handke’s remarkable eponymous work, Slow Homecoming like the novel consists of three parts, moving gradually from the existential, speechless exteriors of objects to the complex inner life of couples and their children. Opening in the wilderness of rural Alaska, Handke takes us to the suburbs, the city, the mountains of France—where man and art become one in the figure of Cezanne—before closing with a tender yet precise portrait of the joys—and difficulties—of raising a child.

I wanted to write a piece which reflected these concerns, contrasting the inscrutability of objects and the ways in which we too often perceive others as less than fully human with a more gentle and measured approach to the things and loved ones with which we surround ourselves, and I felt the harsh (or gentle) manipulation of preexisting material could reflect this desire from a technical standpoint.

But Slow Homecoming is not merely a composition depicting the novel, extraordinary as it is. This piece is equally so a piece about Peter Handke himself, a figure whose writing is as brilliant as his politics are abhorrent. One of the most relevant and important discussions in the world today concerns the relationship between artists and their art, and in particular, to what extent objectionable behavior by the artist ought impact our experience of the artwork itself.

While do of course I have strong opinions on the subject, this work does not attempt to provide an answer; instead, it asks: how can the author of such austerely glittering prose, unquestionably worthy of his Nobel Prize, whose depiction of the emotional lives of men, women, and children is so remarkably empathetic, can simultaneously author encomia to genocidal war criminals, even going so far as to apotheosize the monstrous Slobodan Milosevic at his funeral?

My piece, therefore, deals in extremes, beginning with material as austere and blocky as the objectified landscapes and persons evoked in Handke’s prose, before coming to rest in tenderly human inner movements of gentle repose.