Program Note for While Orpheus Dreamed (1998)
for orchestra/commissioned by Orchestra Sonoma
I confess that, as with nearly all my pieces, I composed
tonight's work without any title in mind. I do this because I prefer to
see what the experience of writing the piece reveals to me about the nature
of the music and thereby determine what title best suits it. During the
composition of "While Orpheus Dreamed" I had the very strong (and very
strange) impression that the music was somehow not "real" - that
music so simple and innocent and direct had no place in the complex and
often forbidding world of present-day art music; and in that sense the
music struck me as being somehow "make-believe." I had even considered
(and, thankfully, quickly rejected) such titles "Once Upon A Time." The
title, "While Orpheus Dreamed" came to me in exactly the way the music
came to me: spontaneously and, seemingly, from some source far outside
my conscious control. By invoking the name of the legendary musician Orpheus,
I am associating the music not with "fairy tales" (which are mere fantasy
and wishful thinking), but with something much more potent: myth. Myth,
to loosely paraphrase both Joseph Campbell and C.S. Lewis, "tells a story
that is more true than we know how to describe in our everyday understanding."
And so, I feel the music evokes (for me, at least) the kind of deep direct
truth about things that we experience in myth. In its stream-of-consciousness
flow and hazy, impressionistic tone colors, it also calls to mind dreaming
states; and I imagine that Orpheus - the great mythic musician of our classical
culture - might hear such beguiling music when he himself dreams.