Five Inanities
Recordings
Score
9/12/2004 for brass 5tet or similar
Composer’s note
The Inanities mostly all work in the same way. We hear a merry, corny tune, which is repeated many times more perhaps than we want to hear it, but it sounds perfectly fine. Suddenly the music does a freeze frame on a particularly dodgy cadence – wait a minute! The harmony was wrong all along?!
I find myself having an ambivalent response to common notions of ‘tonality’ and ‘harmony’. I suspect that these constructs do not embody some eternal truth about ‘consonance’ and ‘dissonance’ and the harmonic series and all that guff, but rather a set of social conventions designed to perpetuate a privileged construction of ‘music’.
The work has a past and a future. The composer has a past and a future. I have abandoned the idea that each work must be a completely fresh invention, and feel free to make connections between one performance and the next. All of my recent work has included one or other of the five inanities, very often simultaneously with other material.
Notes
This collection of pieces has never been, and may never be performed by a brass quintet, although that is the ur-instrumentation. However, one or another of these pieces has appeared in almost all of my recent works;
- Being Born – Jagdmazurka
- Diverses Mélodies – Drinking Song
- Schaduwee – Teufelwalzer, Stupid Tune
- Tribulation – Teufelwalzer
- SCAM – Jagdmazurka, Stupid Tune, Teufelwalzer, dubbeltrubble
Duration 4 days 33 minutes
