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After Midnight, for piano, 1985
Close
Duration: ca. 11:00 min.
After
Midnight - for Piano (1985)
The music of Thelonious Sphere Monk
(1917-1982) has been an inspiration to me since the early 1960s, when I started
listening to Monk's recorded performances. Monk's mature artistic output began
in the mid-1940s (coinciding with the birth of modern jazz) and lasted for only
slightly longer than two decades. Today, a quarter of a century after the apex
of Monk's artistic achievement, the stimulating freshness and vigor of his music
seem undiminished.
Most of Thelonious Monk's compositions
are not well known outside jazz circles, and such unique gems as Epistrophy,
Four in One, and Pannonica pose technical and conceptual problems
for even the most sophisticated jazz performers. But there is one Monk composition
that is better understood and more widely performed than any of his other works:
'Round Midnight. This classic Monk composition, with its evocative blues-influenced
harmony and its hauntingly beautiful melody, is the foundation for my one-movement
work for solo piano, After Midnight.
After Midnight is a tonal
but highly chromatic composition in what might be called a neo-romantic style;
its hybrid structure exhibits aspects of both sonata form and theme and variations.
Considered as a theme and variations, After Midnight consists of five
continuous variations followed by the theme (which is a slightly altered version
of Monk's 'Round Midnight).
In After Midnight, as in
many other of my compositions, I have attempted to create the illusion of improvisation;
that is, I am trying to achieve something like the spontaneity and rhythmic
flexibility of an improvised jazz performance without actually calling for improvisation
by the performer. In one sense, of course, every performance of written-out
music (except for some taped electronic music and computer-realized music!)
involves some degree of "improvisation" of tempo, dynamics, articulation,
etc., but in After Midnight all of the pitches and most of the rhythms
and other musical information are precisely notated. After Midnight might
be thought of as a condensed and finely controlled frozen improvisation created
by the composer and executed by the performer.
After Midnight is subtitled
"In Homage: Thelonious Monk" and is dedicated to Deborah Moriarty
for whom it was written in 1985. (February, 1986)
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