Search - Andrew Waggoner, Petr Pololanik, Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic :: Waggoner: Legacy

The works on this disk all reflect, in one way or another, legacies both personal and public: legacies of social action, of friendship and of the formation?for better or worse?of a musical point of view. Legacy The piece titled Legacy was commissioned for the Cassatt Quartet by Planned Parenthood Center of Syracuse to celebrate the dedication of their new facility, completed in 1996. The first movement, ?Love-Chorus,? was commissioned later, in 1999, by the Summit Institute for the Corigliano Quartet. Legacy is intended both as an occasional work and as a rumination on the progress of women?s rights in our society; the ?legacy? of the title is that of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, and countless others who have fought to raise our collective consciousness. What interests me about these women is that they shared no common ideology, no easy agenda. They were each simply committed to the realization of basic equality for women in a wide variety of contexts. ?Love-Chorus? celebrates a kind of collective spirit of renewal through Hendrix-like explosions of sound; it prepares the second movement, ?Legacy,? which is carried along on a wave of propulsive rhythmic and harmonic motion. The voices are at times in unison, at other times in canon?sometimes working together, sometimes not. They press ahead, however, with tremendous urgency. As the struggle for reproductive freedoms has been through dark times in recent years, so too the music descends into the abyss and cries out de profundis. The inevitable motion of the opening, however, sweeps these lamentations away; this legacy lives in an eternally renewed, and renewable, present. The work is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to the Cassatt and Corigliano Quartets. Symphony No. 2
In the fall of 1995 I received a commission from the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic Orchestra of Zlin, Czech Republic, for a new orchestral work to be premiered in its upcoming season. I had been to Zlin once before for the recording of an earlier piece of mine called The Train and was excited at the prospect of working with the orchestra again. (Aside from their devotion to new orchestral music from literally around the world, they gave the Czech premiere of Karel Husa?s Music for Prague, 1968, at the 1990 Prague Spring. Who could possibly turn down the opportunity to make music with a group such as this?) I had had a symphony in mind for some time and decided that this was the chance I needed to see it through. While the piece had been taking shape in my unconscious from the fall of 1995 into the early part of 1996, its expressive core was formed in February of 1996 with the unthinkable and wrenching loss to cancer of Cassatt Quartet founding cellist Anna Cholakian. In this moment the symphony became for me a meeting ground between the mythic cast of this most public of genres and the very private, personal shadow of my own grief. The piece that resulted is, I think, imperfect, but captures with some clarity the difficult journey of that year. Quite unexpectedly, and for the first time in my life as a composer, the piece began to draw from everything around it. Thus the first movement takes up and refines elements from my first symphony (a work thankfully not included on this recording), while the third echoes an old Armenian song beloved of Anna and her father, ?Hokis Murmur (My Soul is Sad),? the Dresden Amen (associated in my mind more with the Reformation symphony of Mendelssohn than with Parsifal), my own second string quartet, and a setting of John Donne?s holy sonnet ?From the Round Earth?s Imagined Corners . . .? that I had composed earlier the same year. It is, perhaps, the multiplicity of these sources that accounts for the third movement?s strange tone and precarious sense of balance, and yet for me the whole thing has a weird integrity; this is actually some of my favorite of my own music.