William Kentner Anderson November performances in Seoul & Salzburg
In Salzburg--
Mozarteum's Kleine Studio, November 14, 2021
William Anderson "Blue Laws"
settings of poems by Kevin Young
--scroll down for texts--
*grateful thanks* to the brilliant players in the Gunnar Berg Ensemble--
Sharon Harms, soprano
Eric Lamb, alto flute
Yvonne Zehner
This little cycle takes the VI7 -- II7 -- V7 -- I7 tail of the 12-bar blues, undergirding static minor pentatonic above. It's a bizarre convergence. This is instated plainly at the end of the first song, and sneakily in the next two songs.
I can get anywhere I want with blues. And the next piece, "Toward the Field of Sleep", ends with a bluesey Gillian Welch song. It's opening harmony displaces the ATH that ends the opening secion. Please check it out--
“Toward the Field of Sleep” for violin, cello, and piano
by William Anderson
ILSHIN Hall in Seoul, Korea, November 11. 2021
Presented by Ebb & Flow Arts (Maui) & Veritas Musicae (Seoul)
*grateful thanks* to these wonderful players --
YouKyung Kim, violin
SeokWoo Yoon, cello
Jihyun Yoo, piano
Note:
Interacting with Korean poets over the last five years through this Veritas/Ebb & Flow project is to participate in a cultural force that is clearly on the rise. (!!) My music has a dreamlike relationship to the poem, but much of the poem is there--certainly marching, sheep's flock of cloud, striking. Dissipation is in the all trichord hexachord, a dissolving in the everything of all the trichords compressed into a single harmony thing.
I will add clarinet in the next incarnation of this piece.
Towards the Field of Sleep
poem by CHOI JEONGRYE
https://www.poetrytranslation.org/poets/choi-jeongrye
sleep’s soldiers
clasping small spears and shields
advance and retire
(beneath my eyelids
the field of sleep densely spreads)
strike/struck strike/struck strike/struck
dissipating like dust
what’s going on?
where did you come from?
no clue
let’s become cloud holding hands
let’s disappear as one
like that like that like that
sleep’s flock of cloud
suddenly hrmph!
snorting
as the body jerks
the field of sleep breaks
the soldiers disappear
that spider’s thread of sleep is torn
towards the field of sleep again
nearing slipping
I call through
spider’s thread spider’s thread spider’s thread
to sleep’s soldiers
who will one day seize me for eternity
Blue Laws
poems by Kevin Young
1 — POISON OASIS { 1981 }
Such church hurts—
all haloes, crowns,
coins ancient,
flattened. Cross-
roads. Money changes
hands stained
like glass. Mirror,
mirage—the dog
a praying mantis at his
feet. Basquiat eyes
the needle, needs
a fix—if the camel fits—
heaven. Gimme
some smack
or I’ll smack
you back. Which side
should he pierce,
where to place
the dromedary
in his vein? Each opening
fills with wine
a wound. Hollowed
ground. Blood
of our blood—
Basquiat trades
Golgotha, skulls
& all, for an armful
of stigmata.
Runs a game,
plays snakes
& ladders, shooting
up. SAMO says: IF SOMEONE
SMITES YOU, TURN
THE OTHER FACE.
Even falling
has its grace—injection
& genuflection
both bring you
to your knees,
make you prey.
2 — Whistle
And then he can whistle
This son, moon
of mine
circling, the name
we gave to the far side
of the satellite,
this thunder
in the near distance
heralding summer,
grown thirsty,
plummeting down
suddenly, drenching
the dog & drought-fed
lawn. Nothing
for once is wrong—
cicadas quieted,
the rain’s metal smell,
a train on time
arriving
& that sound now his—
as if a kiss
might make music.
3 — An Hymn to the Morning
Faith for me is waking—
a stitch in my neck
or back,
Back Awake—
Tho it is still dark.
My job to walk
Through stark
Dawn and provide a Spark—
I feel like
words not
fully known yet
Like Electric—
The lanterns begin—
brighten—
and it is mine,
This time before Time,
The oil lamps’ companion.
of soot born,
of burn,
Child of sand and sun,--
Here, in this wooden house
I take the gift to us
from Prometheus—
For which he was Punish-
Ed, and made
a slave
starved and chained
Against the Rock face—
And the c old lamps I light.
the shadows hide
my silhouette,
The low fires
By which I write—
God
that my hand
Guides—
Hear my song!
Here it is morning.
Approaching,
Our Day shall not be long--
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey