Composition

Notes

My music since 1965 has been firmly re-connected with the broader heritage of Western art music, either by specific and direct quotation or “parody”, or – prevailingly - by more oblique allusions to characteristics of past styles. Despite considerable change in my music’s expression and its character during these past nearly sixty years, this sense of reminiscence and "remembrance of things past" has been a persistent thread.

For the past nearly seven decades I have lived and worked in California. Yet as I look at my music from the outside – as if I were a more distant observer – I am struck how it seems to reflect, first, my Viennese musical heritage, and then my training at Harvard in a neo-classical, Stravinsky-oriented tradition, as well as the subsequent impact of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern (“The Second Viennese School”) on the post-Second World War modernism which developed in Europe during the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century.

The title of this composition, Iterations, suggests how certain melodic and rhythmic gestures and procedures found in my music in recent years make their reappearance in Iterations. The outer two, more quickly paced movements surround a lyrical song-like slow movement in which the viola predominates.

Iterations was composed and is dedicated to my long-time friend and collaborator, the virtuosic Cynthia Fogg.