Textes and Glosses

10 min

30 March 1999
Williams Hall
Boston, Massachusetts
Orlando Cela, flute; Stefan Wirth, piano

flute, piano

Textes and Glosses was composed in the final months of 1998 in Aspen, Colorado and Boston, Massachusetts. Formally, it is divided into a series of “Textes” and “Glosses,” an idea borrowed from French baroque harpsichord music. The text sections are dialogues between pure tones in the flute and piano. The gloss sections on the other hand, are more poetic, musing ramblings over the soft accompanying cushion. These commentaries are in a way variations, extensions and elaborations of the ideas from the text; the musical language is altered somewhat but the material is the same, as if looking at the same relationship from two contradictory viewpoints.

A generative harmonic progression of six chords, sometimes fixed registrally and at other times more free, continuously undergoes looping and modification to create all of the melodies and harmonies of the piece. The melodic material develops from a kind of troping of more freely derived material within arpeggiations of the generative harmonies.
– New York, November 2001