Hollywood Counterpoint for clarinet and bassoon (2014).

Hollywood Counterpoint was inspired by motion pictures and my experience of living in Los Angeles in the early nineteen-eighties. The first movement, Immoral Beloved, is a reaction to a number of overly sentimental movies about the love lives of great composers. I wondered—what would it be like if composers’ love affairs went really, really, badly? They might end up like the characters in the opera, Carmen. Immoral Beloved combines a famous theme by Beethoven with a lesser known melody from Bizet's Carmen. Wilshire Boulevard is perhaps the main street in Los Angeles. When I lived in Los Angeles, one of the city's major department stores, the May Company, was located on Wilshire and during the holidays the street was lined with giant candy canes (and palm trees). To me, the real miracle on Wilshire Boulevard was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the venue for the famous Monday Evening Concerts, the city's premier new music series. A number of prominent composers, including Stravinsky and Schoenberg had works premiered at these concerts. It is a kind of miracle that Los Angeles became a center for contemporary high culture. Miracle on Wilshire Boulevard combines the familiar sound of Christmas music with techniques borrowed from Stravinsksy. The Kentuckian is inspired by films that romanticize frontier life in America. Being a native of Kentucky, movies about Kentuckians have a particular appeal for me. Many of the films have music based on folktunes or songs by early American composers like Stephen Foster. While Foster's music seemed perfectly suited for this project, I just couldn't find a Foster song that suited me. I looked for music by other Kentucky composers and found a song by Anthony Philip Heinrich that better suited my needs. Heinrich was a composer, pianist and violinist who moved to Kentucky in the early nineteenth century. He gave some of the first performances of classical masterpieces on the frontier (he is credited with giving the first performance of a Beethoven symphony in America). While Foster was a city dweller, Heinrich was a true pioneer. He was the kind of person that might appear as a character in one of these films.

Hollywood Counterpoint, Immoral Beloved, Michael Dean, clarinet, Scott Pool, bassoon (excerpt).