Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (2007)

an Arab-Italian-American improvisational odyssey
for Viola, Oud, and Percussion
9 min. (at least)

May 17, 2008, San Francisco Conservatory Salon

Deanna Said, viola
Michael T. Roberts, oud
Iskandar, percussion

Notes

Written for the 2007 Viola Project, this was a collaboration with violist Susan Talamini, who brought her extensive background in Arabic music ornamentation and improvisation. (Susan has since left SFCM for a career in medicine; my thanks to Deanna for taking on the challenge!) The piece also gave me an excellent excuse to spend valuable grad school time learning how to play my new oud.

The influences for the piece come primarily from two sources: traditional Arabic music and the Italian Baroque. The Arabic influence is perhaps the most salient, with the piece's emphasis on melody and rhythm over harmony, and distinctly Arabic modal inflections. However, the structure of the piece comes straight from the Vivaldi playbook, in particular the ritornello form of the Baroque concerto. The ritornello is essentially equivalent to a refrain, and is comprised of short melodic fragments which are altered and juxtaposed in different ways each time to create variety with each recurrence. In Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the first ritornello starts when all three instruments play together for the first time, and returns twice more at different pitch levels. Also in keeping with the Baroque concerto, the ritornelli are separated by episodes of new, contrasting material.

The piece hence takes on something of a modular quality, and in fact my original intent was to create a kind of musical choose-your-own-adventure: the musicians could move freely between different sections, sculpting their own musical narrative and customizing it with plenty of improvisation, but always coming home to some variation of the ritornello. The above recording is one realization of this, but in the future I hope to expand the piece to allow for many more possibilities.

Of course, there's one more essential influence: after many weeks of writing in an Arab-Italian headspace, I couldn't resist the urge to bring the piece home to the good ol' USA. Hence the ending, and the title.