flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, two percussions, piano and string quartet
“You mentioned that Amerika was built on music from West Side Story. Most of your pieces are based on material appropriated from other sources. Is there a sub-text to your choice of materials?
— More often than not, the impetus is, surprisingly, sentimental or nostalgic. For example, my work Midnight with the Stars and You is based on a popular song from the 1930’s which is used at the end of the film The Shining. This film that has been a favourite of mine since I was a child (laughter all around)… So for me, there was a humourous and perhaps slightly grotesque element to taking this material and treating it abstractly. I was taking it from one context, and placing it in another, or perhaps putting it into a situation with no context. As well, I like irony. When Amerika was commissioned by New Music Concerts, it was originally to be on a concert called “All Canadian, Eh”, so I decided to look for material that was decidedly non-Canadian. I had previously been thinking about using material from West Side Story as the basis for a piece anyway, as there was some technical impetus for using this material. Bernstein’s melodies transpose in ways that give them a free atonal structure, which with a few more simple steps could be quite easily serialized. Having done this, I found it interesting to maintain some of the gestures and feelings of the original music after restructuring the pitch material”.
(Excerpt from an interview with Paul Steenhuisen)
oeuvre@21497 generated in Montréal by litk 0.600 on Tuesday,
November 29, 2011. Development & maintenance: DIM.