Refuge program note

When I started to work on this piece, the only thing I knew was that I really didn't want to write a fugue (that was settled right from the start: no fugue). The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble had asked me to write a companion piece to Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, and although I was very excited to begin work on this project, I also felt a bit hesitant to follow in Beethoven's footsteps. (Not to mention the footsteps of some other fugue-makers, such as Bach, or Bartók.) So, I started to follow my nose down a slightly different path. While Refuge does imitate some of the quirkier aspects of the Grosse Fuge (I'm especially fascinated by the first measures of that piece: the dramatic changes of mood and tempo, the subtle connections between contrasting ideas), my piece isn't built up contrapuntally. In fact, large parts of the piece don't have much traditional counterpoint at all. Instead, there's often a sort of blurred, out-of-focus unison line that's been twisted and tweaked. The four instruments are sometimes playing the same tune, but are ornamenting it differently, or are playing it in slightly different note values. This results in a rough sort of do-it-yourself canon—anything but strict—where the lines are sometimes piled up very closely, and at other times are separated from each other quite dramatically. Refuge is dedicated to the wonderful musicians of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble.

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