Souvenirs

Souvenirs was commissioned by the piccolo committee of the National Flute Association. I collected the ideas for Souvenirs six movements over the course of the late90s and finally composed the work in earnest during the summer and fall of 2001. From the outset I understood that I wanted to write a work which continued in the path of my Mountain Songs for flute and guitar (1985) one which explored folk elements reformatted in one way or another. In the earlier work I explicitly took extant and sometimes well-known Appalachian tunes and processed them through reinvented harmonies, materials and architectures. Souvenirs comes from more disparate sources, including Mountain Songs itself (Cindy Redux being a piano version of Cindy). Three of the six songs are completely original, composed in a strophic and diatonic style, two are based on folk tunes, and one is an invented trope on a Lorca transcription of a Spanish folk song (The Four Mules) -- discovered, lost and re-remembered. The premiere of the original version of Souvenirs was given at the National Flute Convention in Washington DC in 2002, performed by Carol Bean, (piccolo) and ??? (piano). The idea of making a clarinet version had been with me from the start, as I wanted to make it a portable work, which could have a life with a number of different treble instruments. In the summer of 2005, when I was composer-in-residence with the Aspen Music Festival, I made this new clarinet version, which was given its first performance by Joaquin Valdepenas (clarinet) and Anton Nel (piano). Y2K has actually nothing to do with the Millennium. It is a song without words for a dear friend. I began sketching it a few years before, but couldnt find a context for it. When I finally understood how it fit in Souvenirs I was able to finish it. Spain comes from the Federico Garcia Lorca fragment based on a Spanish song Los Cuatro Muleros. I was given this by the guitarist Eliot Fisk; it sat in my studio for a while and then disappeared. I kept trying to remember it, but, as any composer does, I kept re-imagining it instead, until it morphed. The process of re-inventing allowed me to turn it into something different and strange and it became the longest of the six movements and the centerpiece of the work.