insurance interludes (2019) for clarinet, cello, and piano
OR
alto saxophone, cello, and piano
OR
alto saxophone, cello, and piano
“If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?”
-Charles Ives “Real hell is there for me in the office; no other can hold any terror for me.” -Franz Kafka “Poetry and surety claims aren’t as unlikely a combination as they may seem.” -Wallace Stevens i. starving on dissonances (after ives) ii. metamorphosis (after kafka) iii. fictive things wink (after stevens) |
With performers Garret Klaus, Addie Hotchkiss, and Winston Choi after performance of insurance interludes at New Music on the Point
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insurance interludes is a set of musical portraits of three modernist artists who worked in insurance for the majority of their lives. I’ve been fascinated for a while by the biographical similarities between composer Charles Ives and poet Wallace Stevens: both men were innovative pioneers in their fields the early 20th century who filtered American Transcendentalism through a modernist lens, both lived in Connecticut, and both famously refused to quit their day jobs as insurance executives. In addition, both men had troubling aspects of their lives that complicate my love of their art. Ives was a noted misogynist and homophobe whose pejorative of choice was “sissy,” and, to me, Steven’s superbly imaginative poetry is somewhat undercut by his deeply conservative politics. While Franz Kafka was far less attached to his day job as an insurance lawyer, (he frequently remarked it was just a way to support his writing), it is not difficult to make connections between his career as a bureaucrat and the nightmarish depictions of bureaucracy in his fiction. For each of these three artists, a radical creative practice coexisted with or was perhaps even shaped by a career in insurance; insurance interludes is an attempt to reconcile these disparate, multifaceted aspects of their personalities.
Like the three artists that inspire them, these short pieces are very different, but there are subtle connections between them. The first movement attempts to capture Ives’s contradictions through jagged, angular rhythms; the second depicts one of Kafka’s surreal and bleak landscapes; and the third musically enacts Steven’s playful musings on the human imagination, in poems like “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman.”
insurance interludes for clarinet, cello, and piano was commissioned by the Texas New Music Ensemble as part of their 2019 Student Commissioning Competition. The version for alto saxophone, cello, and piano was written for New Music on the Point in Summer 2019.
Like the three artists that inspire them, these short pieces are very different, but there are subtle connections between them. The first movement attempts to capture Ives’s contradictions through jagged, angular rhythms; the second depicts one of Kafka’s surreal and bleak landscapes; and the third musically enacts Steven’s playful musings on the human imagination, in poems like “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman.”
insurance interludes for clarinet, cello, and piano was commissioned by the Texas New Music Ensemble as part of their 2019 Student Commissioning Competition. The version for alto saxophone, cello, and piano was written for New Music on the Point in Summer 2019.
selected performances:
Apr. 2019 - Shepherd School of Music Composer’s Forum, Rice University, Houston, TX (clarinet version)
Aug. 2019 - Texas New Music Ensemble, Annual Summer Concert, MATCH, Houston, TX (clarinet version)
Jun. 2019 - New Music on the Point, Leicester, VT (saxophone version)
selected honors:
NYC Contemporary Music Symposium at Columbia University, Finalist
Composer Concordance Competition, Runner-Up
Apr. 2019 - Shepherd School of Music Composer’s Forum, Rice University, Houston, TX (clarinet version)
Aug. 2019 - Texas New Music Ensemble, Annual Summer Concert, MATCH, Houston, TX (clarinet version)
Jun. 2019 - New Music on the Point, Leicester, VT (saxophone version)
selected honors:
NYC Contemporary Music Symposium at Columbia University, Finalist
Composer Concordance Competition, Runner-Up