SUNDAY, MARCH 4, 1973 (2018)
mixed percussion, electronics
mixed percussion, electronics
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PROGRAM NOTES
Digging through old boxes one day, my grandmother found a cassette tape dated “March 4, 1973.” Knowing my interest in family history, she gifted me this once-trendy-now-ancient audio device and explained that in the days of long-distance calls, it used to be cheaper to communicate with her in-laws (my great-grandparents) by sending an hourlong recorded “voice letter” on tape than to pay to call from Wisconsin to Colorado. Only having met my great-grandfather a handful of times and never having met my great-grandmother, I was amazed and touched to hear their real, live voices coming through the speakers once I played the cassette.
Years later, during my sophomore year at Vanderbilt University, my friend percussion major Josh Weinfeld and I were paired up in a composition department initiative called “Percussipalooza,” in which composition majors wrote a piece for percussion majors. I remembered the cassette tape my grandma gifted me, and after hours of editing and excerpting, I fashioned the imported audio files into a five-minute conversation between my great-grandparents. The music I subsequently composed, more than underscoring the tape, directly corresponds to the structure of the conversation and the voices speaking (Great-Grandpa’s theme quotes his favorite piece of classical music, and Great-Grandma’s theme harmonizes her laugh). The interplay between the two moves between serious and comical, until confusion sets in as the voices begin interrupting each other. Out of the chaos, Great-Grandma rings clear: “One of these days we’ll come back to sensible styles again.” After the dust settles, a hymn-like restatement of Great-Grandma’s theme leads into a reminiscing reprise of Great-Grandpa’s theme as he reminds us that it is only “goodbye for now.”
—Jacob Beranek
Digging through old boxes one day, my grandmother found a cassette tape dated “March 4, 1973.” Knowing my interest in family history, she gifted me this once-trendy-now-ancient audio device and explained that in the days of long-distance calls, it used to be cheaper to communicate with her in-laws (my great-grandparents) by sending an hourlong recorded “voice letter” on tape than to pay to call from Wisconsin to Colorado. Only having met my great-grandfather a handful of times and never having met my great-grandmother, I was amazed and touched to hear their real, live voices coming through the speakers once I played the cassette.
Years later, during my sophomore year at Vanderbilt University, my friend percussion major Josh Weinfeld and I were paired up in a composition department initiative called “Percussipalooza,” in which composition majors wrote a piece for percussion majors. I remembered the cassette tape my grandma gifted me, and after hours of editing and excerpting, I fashioned the imported audio files into a five-minute conversation between my great-grandparents. The music I subsequently composed, more than underscoring the tape, directly corresponds to the structure of the conversation and the voices speaking (Great-Grandpa’s theme quotes his favorite piece of classical music, and Great-Grandma’s theme harmonizes her laugh). The interplay between the two moves between serious and comical, until confusion sets in as the voices begin interrupting each other. Out of the chaos, Great-Grandma rings clear: “One of these days we’ll come back to sensible styles again.” After the dust settles, a hymn-like restatement of Great-Grandma’s theme leads into a reminiscing reprise of Great-Grandpa’s theme as he reminds us that it is only “goodbye for now.”
—Jacob Beranek