Much of my recent work deals with the issue of reap­pro­pri­a­tion. Where do we get our ideas? What do we owe, if any­thing, to our sources of inspi­ra­tion? His­tor­i­cally, com­posers have stolen ideas from each other reg­u­larly, rework­ing these into their music and tak­ing all the credit (and the money, if they could). The inven­tion of copy­right was the first attempt at giv­ing credit to the orig­i­na­tors of ideas, but this has evolved over time into a corporate-controlled sys­tem of prop­erty that pro­motes the fic­tion that new ideas some­how spon­ta­neously appear out of nothingness.

Com­posers have always taken each oth­ers’ ideas, and if they didn’t, there would be no com­pos­ing. But now the big music com­pa­nies would want us to believe that this is some­how wrong. It is, cer­tainly, wrong to profit from the work of oth­ers with­out mak­ing any con­tri­bu­tion one­self, but there are many uses of exist­ing music that do make new, mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tions. For this rea­son, I’ve taken an inter­est in quo­ta­tion, col­lage, and related tech­niques. It’s a way to pay homage to the music that has influ­enced me while at the same time expos­ing the false idea that cre­ativ­ity comes out of noth­ing­ness. So here I am, cards on the table, show­ing every­one the music I was think­ing of when work­ing on this piece—by quot­ing that music.

Thus the title Elegy of Oth­ers. I wanted to write a piece that was reflec­tive and som­bre, and I wanted to make it a col­lage of the work of oth­ers. This was a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge, because I have found col­lage bet­ter suited to fast, upbeat music than it is to the slow and som­bre; quo­ta­tions tend to lose their char­ac­ter when the tempo is slow, and phrases made up of long quotes do not cohere very well. For this rea­son, I had to approach this piece dif­fer­ently than in my pre­vi­ous work, trans­form­ing the mate­r­ial in more extreme ways for the sake of musi­cal expres­sion. In Elegy of Oth­ers, there­fore, the quo­ta­tions are not always imme­di­ately rec­og­niz­able, though they do come to the sur­face peri­od­i­cally. Nev­er­the­less, almost every note in Elegy of Oth­ers is quoted, with few excep­tions. The pieces quoted are, in order of appearance:

1. The Four Sea­sons, “Drunk­ards Asleep”, Anto­nio Vivaldi, 1723
2. “The Girl from Ipanema”, Anto­nio Car­los Jobim, 1962
3. “Every­body Hurts”, R.E.M., 1992
4. “Dazed and Con­fused”, Led Zep­pelin, 1968
5. Die schöne Mül­lerin, “Des Müllers Blu­men”, Franz Schu­bert, 1823

Kiss Around the World was com­mis­sioned by New Works Cal­gary and the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts for Ensem­ble Res­o­nance. It is the sec­ond Around the World piece that I have writ­ten, tak­ing a sin­gle word—in this case kiss—and pre­sent­ing it in a wide vari­ety of languages.

The idea of kiss­ing takes on very dif­fer­ent con­no­ta­tions in dif­fer­ent lan­guages, and I wanted to find a con­no­ta­tion that was as uni­ver­sal as pos­si­ble. There­fore, in Kiss Around the World I decided to focus on the idea of the nur­tur­ing kiss, the kiss a par­ent would give a child. This was the most uni­ver­sal use of kiss­ing I came across. Roman­tic kiss­ing, which is what I ini­tially thought would make the best focus, is not uni­ver­sal. It did not exist in much of Asia before the arrival of the Euro­peans; Kore­ans and Japan­ese actu­ally use a mod­i­fied form of the Eng­lish word for roman­tic kissing.

Musi­cally, Kiss Around the World is made up of a series of short sound units, usu­ally one per word, that are arranged and devel­oped into a lyri­cal, flow­ing tex­ture. Being a com­poser obsessed with frag­men­ta­tion and con­trast, this was a novel and stim­u­lat­ing chal­lenge for me that grew out of the theme of the piece and the musi­cal mate­ri­als at hand. The result is a sooth­ing, gen­tle piece that has cer­tain aspects of a lul­laby, all the while employ­ing the collage/mosaic tech­niques that are the hall­marks of my style. There is even a lit­tle col­lage sur­prise at the end of the piece…

Recy­cled 80s Live is a col­lage of small frag­ments of ‘80s pop songs, recom­posed and recon­tex­tu­al­ized into a new, larger work. I chose this approach because artists have always bor­rowed mate­r­ial from one another, but copy­right is increas­ingly being abused to pre­vent bor­row­ing. This sit­u­a­tion is a threat to cul­ture and cre­ativ­ity in gen­eral and it deserves to receive atten­tion. Addi­tional infor­ma­tion, sound clips, a promo video, and other details are avail­able on the project web­site.