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Trio
2018
Unpitched Percussion
- Program Notes
- Bill Burroughs is a perennial hero for Bohemian artist types, budding poets, authors, and musicians. My introduction to Burroughs came via one of my personal heroes: chef, author, travel host, cinematographer, philanthropist, and activist Anthony Bourdain, who drew parallels between Burroughs’ pre-Naked Lunch Tangier life to his own struggles with drug addiction. Inspired by Bourdain’s connection to the man’s writing, I delved into first Naked Lunch and then everything else Burroughs-related that I could find. To me, Burroughs speaks not to any personal struggle with addiction or post-traumatic stress, but to a fascination with his non-linear structures, poetic cadence, and ability to create deeply visceral word-images of sights, smells, sounds, and hallucinations. Pistol Poem no. 3 is one of a number of poems by Burroughs that applies a transformative process to a line of text. In this case, the order of words in the phrase “Power is often very quiet” are shifted to encompass every potential permutation of the phrase: “Power Is Often Very Quiet Power Is Often Quiet Very Power Is Very Often Quiet … … Quiet Very Often Is Power” As the poem progresses the phrase becomes less sensical, drifting into a meaningless collage of words from which individual pockets of sanity arise. My setting relies on Burroughs’ transformational process and numerical sequencing as opposed to a setting of the actual words. Like in the poem, the repeating rhythmic patterns dissolve and recombine, allowing the listener to drift through different states of perception.
- Record Label
- N/A
- Performer Credits
- Matthew Geiger, Logan Ball, Jason DeCristofaro
- Publisher
- Neal Endicott Music