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Program Notes

The word “countermeasure” has a military connotation, but in the context of my Countermeasure, I felt that the prefix “counter,” meaning “against,” illuminated the musical kind of written “measure” in a special way. To me, it suggested music that, quite literally, “ran counter” to steady meters, down beats, and even to time itself. Thus I imagined sounds that would avoid bar lines and “bounce” around the written meter, creating an opposition between notation and its realization. Before I had written the first note, my title had already influenced the kind of music I would write.

While I consider Countermeasure a musical relative to my previous orchestra pieces, it is my first work for a chamber-sized group, and the limitations (and strengths) of this ensemble influenced the music I wrote. In working with fewer instrumental parts, I became forced to combine sounds in ways that I would not have otherwise considered. Although I missed the triple woodwinds and large string section of the symphony orchestra, the efforts of cutting back resulted in more colorful, economic music than I had expected. I have learned much from achieving this “lean” sound, and have since found it in the music of others.

Harmonically, Countermeasure was inspired by the bi-tonal sounds of Darius Milhaud, which support the mixture of French and Latin sounds in his Saudades do Brasil for solo piano and La Creation du Monde for orchestra. Thematically, though, my piece found its voice in dance music: Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances, originally for piano (four hands), and later transcribed for orchestra, contains a dance movement in C major which caught my ears in concert and my eyes in the library.

In the score, Dvořák’s music is written in three, yet in our ears it sounds in two. This device, the hemiola, appears as an extension of “musical grammar” in the Renaissance, often used to draw attention to points of cadence. To my ears, the Dvořák example was so fascinating because of its use of hemiola for several minutes at a time. Beyond its overarching sense of three against two, the hemiola in Dvořák’s music evokes a special kind of tension – and with it, humor. In my music, the repetition of thematic ideas, insertion of unexpected silence, and spotlighting unusual percussion instruments keeps a smile on this piece as it unfolds, appropriately, counter-measure.

 

Performances

UNT Repertoire Orchestra, April 24, 2007; Mark Scott, conductor