Wax Lyrical

Nicholas Batina

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Quintet

2023

Alto Saxophone

Bass Clarinet

Piano

Violin

Program Notes: Wax Lyrical is the final installment in a series of "wax-titled" works: Wax Poetic, Wax Eloquent, Wax Lyrical, and Wax Wroth. Wax Lyrical functions as my musical manifesto, a stylistic culmination and exercise in humility over the course of an hour. The piece ends with a special campfire story, titled "a Donkey Story", with text sourced from Dry Creek Wrangler School's Dewayne Noel, telling a story of his own called "The Donkey....It's Just His Nature". I have always lived a life with feet in two separate worlds... being the only composer I'VE ever met who grew up shoveling horse manure, bailing hay, building barns and running train-tracks. Through connections at NYU, I found quiet, distant kinship with a composer from a previous generation who HAD lived that life to some extent, and they took a very lucky chance on me. This piece--the manifesto-- is, most importantly, a gift to all my mentors, and a loud thank you that I could wax lyrical about for the rest of my life: for calling at 9:00pm with happy news, for guiding a young composer with similar taste and fury and circularity, for insisting upon my true capability on the violin when I couldn't yet see it, for insisting upon my professionalism when I didn't yet have it, for showing me the beauty of Bach and thus the larger musical world, for taking years to guide me over zoom lessons, for taking the mantle to address accessibility to the arts for my friends and family, and for showing a middle school student a world in modern music, in Henry Cowell, I never knew existed.
Recording Notes: Recorded at New York University for Nicholas A. Batina's Masters Composition Recital
Record Label: n/a
Performer Credits: Sommer Altier (violin), Sasha Bereovsky (piano), Kyle Landry (alto saxophone), Thomas Giles (alto saxophone), Julius Akira-Mauldin
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