ENS.2016.4 | 37′
Poems by Michael Robbins
Version A: Soprano, Flute, Clarinet, Piano, Violin Cello
Version B: Soprano or Tenor, Piano, String Quartet
A commercial recording of Version A is forthcoming! Watch this space.
1. To the Drone Vaguely Realizing Eastward
2. Use Your Illusion
3. The Second Sex
4. Overnight
5. Within a Budding Grove
6. In the Air Tonight
7. Big Country
8. Lose Myself
My third setting of poems by Michael Robbins, Use Your Illusion attempts to find a musical analogue for Robbins’s brilliantly funny, savage, often religiously-informed, pop-culture-saturated imagery. As in 2014’s Plastic Robbins Band, I use enriched textures such as glissandos, quarter tones, and a variety of extended techniques to destabilize fundamentally tonal, even poppy musical material. References to other composers and songwriters from Arnold Schoenberg to Michael Nyman, Weezer to Taylor Swift, mirror Robbins’s use of mangled quotations, and the music is often fragmented, as if falling to pieces as it’s being performed.
Just as Robbins’s work often cloaks itself in strict poetic forms, so too does my piece follow systematic formal constraints. Harmonically, Use Your Illusion consists of every possible two-part combination of major and minor triads arranged into an overarching progression. These harmonies are activated by five contrasting textures, each comprising five tiny rhythmic cells. However, although complex precompositional processes were used to determine the order and disposition of all harmonic, rhythmic, and textural elements, these calculations were no more than tools toward the realization of a fundamentally musical concept. The actual act of composition using these elements was entirely free; only the material’s order and disposition was predetermined.
Originally composed in 2016 as a companion piece to Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and utilizing the same ensemble, Use Your Illusion was reconceived in 2024 for piano quintet, and lasts from 35-40 minutes.