Credit for the idea of a Halo bal­let goes to Gre­gory Oh, who com­mis­sioned the piece and arranged for me to work with chore­o­g­ra­pher Julia Aplin. To com­ple­ment the unusual dance envi­ron­ment of the piece, I chose an unusual musi­cal envi­ron­ment that is equally a hybrid of instru­men­tal tra­di­tions, both clas­si­cal and rock. The mate­r­ial of the piece devel­ops a sin­gle har­monic and melodic pro­gres­sion, which moves from extremely slow and legato to extremely fast and fre­netic. Through this diverse vocab­u­lary, I hope to give the chore­o­g­ra­pher a range of expres­sions to work with, allow­ing her to demon­strate the full poten­tial of the robotic Halo char­ac­ters to func­tion as dancers.

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