I originally composed Four Seasonal Songs for Lily Afshar in 1990, which she performed in 1991. I subsequently rewrote it in 1996, and Ms. Afshar subsequently performed the revision in 2000.
Four Seasonal Songs follows the time-honored tradition
of four movements, each representing a season of the year. Beyond
this, it also reflects ideas from my composition for two pianos,
New World Landscapes, which I composed the previous year.
Both Four Seasonal Songs and New World Landscapes outline a Viconian cycle, after ideas communicated to me through readings in James Joyce's daunting monument, Finnigans Wake.
According to Joseph Campbell and Henry Robinson, "This reference
is to a conception of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher
Giambattista Vico, whose La Scienza Nuova provides the
philosophic loom on which Joyce weaves his historical allegory.
Essentially, Vico's notion is that history passes through four
phases: theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic."
However, my musical ideas derive more from Joyce's linguistic
pyrotechnics for illustrating Vico's ideas than the literal ideas
themselves. Of particular interest to me is the Vico-Joycian
recorso, in which the end dovetails with the beginning
to create an eternal cycle. In Four Seasonal Songs the
mood of the first movement returns at the end of the last. |