RIFF & TRANSFIGURATION

Oni Buchanan's "Riff & Transfiguration," featuring Lee Hyla's revelatory seven-movement work as its centerpiece, explores the mindset of transformation and how a cell of information -- a theme, a motive, a subject, a riff, a five-letter code -- journeys through permutations, revisions, refinements, corruptions, interruptions of itself, taking on layers of meaning all the while. This program examines the question of what exactly defines a self, and where the tenuous boundaries of self can be drawn, if they can be drawn at all -- for where or when is it that variations and refractions of the mutable self cross into the terrain of something unrecognizable? Bach's subject in the Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue originates in instability with its chromatic rise and amorphous outline, made all the more strange and alien by an incongruously light-hearted, skipping countersubject. Beethoven's masterful 32 Variations on an Original Theme in C Minor capture thirty-two fleeting and wildly ranging transmutations within the confines of a single tempo marking. Cindy Cox's blackbird has an identifiable song all its own, but varying with what seems like the blackbird's own improvisational curiosity, as it adds notes within its own call, then holds silence while its song fluctuates in the air with overtone and echo. Annie Gosfield's Five Characters are at once the five poor blokes who are destined to be the brunt of a joke, the five letters within the musical alphabet, the five pitches she chooses for her theme, and most importantly, the five coded symbols that arrange and re-arrange themselves cryptographically to communicate an urgent message in the midst of war, inspired by the clandestine activities of the Danish Resistance in World War II. The program comes to a conclusion with two Schubert impromptus whose themes wander and digress, journey to the ends of the earth and return home the same, but sublimely transformed.

Piano works to be performed on RIFF & TRANSFIGURATION program include:

Bach, Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue
Beethoven, 32 Variations on an Original Theme in C Minor, WoO 80
Lee Hyla, Riff & Transfiguration
Cindy Cox, The blackbird whistling/Or just after
Annie Gosfield, Five Characters Walk Into a Bar
Schubert, two impromptus: Op. 90, No. 1 (C minor) and Op. 142, No. 4 (F minor)

Program offered October and November, 2012.