for guitar and orchestra
Vestiges of Kubla was part of my Doctoral Dissertation, along with another detailed analysis of a modern classical work. For the composition, I was required to use a full orchestra as a minimum force, and the duration would have to be at least 20 minutes long. Having a passion for guitar, I decided to write a guitar concerto (orchestra with featured guitar) for this task and set it in the standard three movements of classical concerto.
The title came from a story that my guitar teacher in my undergraduate program told me about his father who played football back in the day. His father was known for being a very vigilant and unconventional player who would break the rules often (i.e. biting the players after being tackled, illegal hits, etc.) – so much so that he was nicknamed “Kubla” (after Kubla Khan from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem) as he was a tyrant on the playing field. I thought this idea would make a great starting point for such a large and powerful work, and at the same time pay tribute to my guitar teacher’s late father.
The first movement, In Xanadu, makes a connection between the above story and the famous poem, Kubla Khan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The first line of the poem reads, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree…” and inspired the first movement title. This movement is mostly based on an irregular 7/8 metered rhythm, along with the harmony of an E major chord with an added sharp fourth giving the sound a Lydian quality. The movement is in the traditional sonata allegro form where two thematic ideas govern the music’s structure. A cadenza (featured solo) for the guitar also interrupts the movement before returning to the recapitulation (return) of the main thematic idea.
I. In Xanadu
While I was approaching writing the second movement of this work, my hometown, New Orleans, Louisiana, had just been devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 while I was living in Houston, Texas. The event and the aftermath of that event troubled me greatly – and there was even a part of me that felt guilty for being in Texas while my hometown was suffering a devastating loss. To deal with my feelings and reactions to this event I found it fitting that I put my thoughts into a musical context. In the weeks following the events of Hurricane Katrina, I came across an article where the author, who was a journalist, was allowed back into the evacuated city to report of the situation. Among his descriptions of the city in his article, he mentioned two things: 1) There were no children in the city – even with some people allowed back in to collect their belongings, and 2) it was “dead quiet” except for hearing sounds of clinking metal from fragments of houses as they moved around in the flood waters. This made me really feel what it was like if I was there, and I wanted to incorporate this idea into the second movement as a response to this terrible event – doing so by using tubular bells to represent this sound. The movement is also very much inspired by one of the my favorite works of all time, the Concierto de Aranjuez (another guitar concerto) by Joaquin Rodrigo in his second movement, using the same small instrumentation and overall structure of that piece as a tribute to his work. It also contains another cadenza featuring the guitar before the movement’s intense climax. Hymn for the Childless City is a very reflective piece that attempts to capture the poignant reaction to my hometown, and I feel it’s one of the most powerful pieces of music that I’ve ever composed.
II. Hymn for The Childless City
The final movement, Bliss Apparatus, is simply a very fast musical journey that almost sets the orchestra on “auto-pilot” as it actively progresses and concludes the overall work. The irregular rhythmic meter, and Lydian harmonies, are similar to the first movement – except this time it is taking the metric form of three bars of 6/8 compound meter, followed by a bar of 3/4 simple meter – giving the feeling of being somewhat rhythmically unpredictable throughout. It’s probably my most favorite movement of the entire work.
III. Bliss Apparatus
Below is the audio of all nine movements combined together as it is intended by the composer, and as it would be presented in a concert setting.