PostThrenody (2003) for large orchestra with soprano soloist
Listen:
PostThrenody exerpts

About:
When I was a child, the only classical music I had been exposed to were the three CDs my family owned: Lizst’s “Greatest Hits,” Rubenstein’s favorite Chopin, and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. After my grandma died, I found the Tchaikovsky recording and would listen to it ritualistically, always sobbing at the reappearance of the lyrical theme after the shocking timpani strike in the first movement.
The next contact I had with music was as a teenager with the grunge bands Nirvana and Alice in Chains; I took up the guitar, then bass, then drums. It is in that tradition I first wrote music. A few years later our family bought a piano; I curiously felt about on it and started writing music there too.
After a while, I starting hearing lost music in my head. I figured it out on the piano (sketchily), but I could not remember what it was, or find a recording. I had it in my head that it was the Lizst, but after years of looking, it turned out, of course, to be Tchaikovsky. The story, at once humorous and sad, is not unlike Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony itself. Freud drew a connection between the circus-like outbursts in Mahler’s music to a story of Mahler’s childhood: seeing his father beating his mother, he ran out to the street just as an organ grinder was passing by. One could speculate that the frequent occurrence of waltzes in my music, often out of the blue, might be linked with the 5/4 waltz in the Sixth Symphony that comes just after that powerful first movement. Regardless, it is certainly true that Tchaikovsky’s Sixth had a seminal impact on my perception of the western musical tradition, and bled into my overall aesthetic.

A “threnody” is a song for the dead; PostThrenody names a piece written after experiencing a song for the dead, as the Tchaikovsky became for me (and Tchaikovsky himself). It deals with the fragmentation of the original experience, related to the loss of memory. The essence is somehow retained (for me), although there are no direct quotations from the Tchaikovsky. Paul Celan’s text, “Weiss und Leicht,” which is sung in PostThrenody, deals with the themes of memory, fragmentation, and trauma.
The importance of a waltz nowadays, I suppose – at least of mine – is that it accepts tradition as essentially arbitrary, while choosing to utilize that tradition anyway: tradition itself has more value than whatever is contained in it. An independent understanding does not generally redefine our desires, as much as we may wish it to. This is reflective of the simple fact that we have not evolved to appreciate science’s (even social sciences’) “reality”. We have, however, evolved to appreciate other things, and these things are reflected in our traditions, such as the waltz. That is why I have chosen to retain ties with the tradition of Tchaikovsky, and to work out what it means to me.