ADAM FERGLER This product contains borrowed ideas PIANO (2011)
for violin and/or piano
www.adamfergler.eu
Copyright Š 2011 Adam Fergler
Instrumentation & Stage Layout This product contains borrowed material includes parts for violin and piano. The piece may be played as a solo work using either part or as a duet by playing both simultaneously. In either case, the violin and piano parts should, by and large, be considered separate entities. The parts are unique musical outcomes arising from the same compositional idea. Similarities between the parts should be considered intertextual references rather than points of structural unity. In preparation for a duet performance it’s recommended that each performer practices their part individually to a solo performance standard. Subsequent duet rehearsal can then be dedicated to finding ways of successfully performing two solo pieces simultaneously. This should lead to a performance that better emphasises the discreteness of the two parts. Duet performances of This product contains borrowed material’s design lend themselves to several staging possibilities. The performers might occupy different areas of the performance space in order to create a sense of physical separation between the piece’s two distinct parts. Similarly, one part may be pre-recorded or streamed live from a different venue. Decisions of this nature are left at the discretion of the performer(s).
Duration 16 minutes 20 seconds
Notation & Coordination The performers each require a stopwatch. A short pause is provided at the beginning of the piece so the performers can synchronise their stopwatches and make themselves performance ready. This pause lasts ten seconds in the piano part and twenty seconds in the violin part. Although a stopwatch isn’t strictly necessary for a solo performance using one is highly recommended. This piece contains borrowed ideas is notated in ‘bars’, although the music should be thought of as a continuous stream rather than a traditionally metred piece. The ‘bars’ are large, lasting 10 seconds or more. The piano part contains time signatures and additional dashed barlines to help the player count repeated chords. Timings are given at each (solid) barline. The performers should begin each ‘bar’ at the indicated time. For the most part, this is the only time the performers coordinate. Although each bar is the same length in both parts and, in duet performance, both performers play at the same time, the parts are musically independent. There are, however, a few exceptional cases. Passages between double barlines are played in tempo by both performers. That is, the pulse and phrasing of the two parts align in these brief passages. These passages will reveal music ‘borrowed’ from the violin and piano repertoire (Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 1 and Brahms’s Six Pieces for Piano Op. 118). In solo performances this revelation will not occur. Performers playing the piece solo shouldn’t make any effort ‘tease out’ these quotations. The piano’s chordal passages should be treated as a very gradual change in colour across the piece and not as having a harmonic function.
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Programme Note The composer Igor Stravinsky allegedly said “good composers don’t borrow, they steal” (which is possibly a reattribution of TS Eliot’s “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” from The Sacred Wood). I’ve long been interested in the act of musical ‘borrowing’. From simple influence and re-use of technique to the process of quotation (or outright thievery), the whole phenomenon grants insight into the motivations of composers and listeners, as well as our (individual and collective) relationship with history – particularly with regard to canonisation. I wondered: is it possible to create music that quotes itself? This idea turned out to be more complicated than first envisaged. A quotation isn’t simply a re-statement of material, but a motivated re-use of something that has a very separate and possibly very different function in another context. This distinction is particularly stark and raises a critical question when dealing with quotation in a self-contained work – how to separate quotation and simple repetition? I decided to write two complementary but discrete versions of the same piece, one for violin and one for piano. The two parts quote from each other. Crucially, the material they share is treated very differently by each instrument in accordance with the two parts’ unique sets of functions and processes. When performed as a duet, the violin and piano versions of This product contains borrowed ideas play around with differences and tensions between repetition, development, and quotation, making them a dynamic aspect of the performance. Hopefully it also helps intensify the independence of the two parts and the ways in which they operate. In keeping with the compositional impetus, some of the material used has been ‘liberated’ (to use American military terminology) from existing music. This product contains borrowed ideas was written for and is dedicated to my good friends and talented colleagues Mimi Kim and Ben McGowan.
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