Title: Suite for Euphonium, Tuba and Piano: Dancing with Myself
Commission/Dedication: Written for JLL and other friends, commissioned through Cimarron Music Press by Bryan Doughty, Lew Buckley, and a consortium of musicians.
Composer: Barbara York
Publisher: Cimarron Music Press
Year: 2008
Program notes from the composer:
This is my “take” on a more traditional dance movement suite, but with a slightly more contemporary and even psychological twist. The movements are all in dance meters and rhythms, but the piece itself is very much interconnected in thematic material and almost cinematic in quality. In that sense, the movements make sense individually but will often have a slightly unfinished quality to them unless they also proceed to the next one. You will notice that the first and third movements begin with the same thematic material, but wind up in different places through their development. I have also chosen to end the piece with the slowest and most introspective of the movements. To my own mind, the Suite is rather moody and even “quirky” at times without, hopefully, going over the top in that respect. For me it is a bit of the “Bohemian Barbara”, coming out of the bars and cafes of my youth into the misty, late-night streets of cosmopolitan Montreal. As the subtitle “Dancing with Myself” suggests, I am also reflecting on the fact that all of our relationships/dances with others are all also in many ways, simply relationships with ourselves (or aspects of ourselves), mirrored back to us in our own perception.
The dedication “to JLL and other friends” is in gratitude to certain people with whom I have had relationships mostly in correspondence, yet who have provided me with insights into myself – even sometimes ones that were both revealing and occasionally somewhat uncomfortable for me. As always, the dance goes on.
Author assessment and pedagogical considerations:
York’s “Suite for Euphonium, Tuba and Piano” is one of the four commissions spearheaded by Cimarron Music Press, Bryan Doughty, Lew Buckley, and a consortium of musicians. In preparation for performance, the tuba and euphonium players should prepare to do ample metronome work and plan to meet and work together before meeting the pianist.
The whole premise and idea of the piece, Dancing with Myself, is self-explanatory when you look at the musical score. The accompaniment lays the groundwork and background for the solo instruments to have a conversation with one another.
This is certainly an advanced level piece and would be appropriate for a graduate recital, or a mature undergraduate recital. This piece lends an opportunity to collaborate in an enjoyable way.
Notes from Interview with Barbara:
I didn’t write this into the program notes much, but this is a very personal
piece for me. I love it a lot. This is about me and my friends going out on the town and bar- hopping in Montreal when I went to McGill. A little group of us getting ready to go out. That’s the first sort of jazzy thing, that is like traveling music. We go to this bar and we still haven’t had a lot to drink yet. So we’re hoping that we are pretty attractive, you know? So we get into the tago. Then we travel some more. Then we get into the polka because by then we haven’t found anybody at the first bar, so we’re going on to the second bar. And we have this traveling music again, but we go somewhere else. Then we get into the polka, which is rather clownish because by then we’re just getting a little silly. Nobody hooks up with anybody in this evening -- the last movement is me walking home in the fog in Montreal at two oclock in the morning where I find myself dancing with myself. I love this piece, I mean I really do.
You know, I grew up in the 60’s. You have to remember that, you know. I went to high school and university in the 60’s, in Montreal. So by the time I was in university, my dad and my mother had moved herself back to Winnipeg because she didn’t like Montreal. She didn’t want to stay there, she wanted to go home where her family and friends were. So I came back to McGil that year in residence, as an out of town student. I lived right down town. All my friends were out of town students and I lived in the residence building that is now the music building at McGill. It was Brown Victory College. Great big old victorian residence and we were right down town close to the clubs, and the coffee houses, and the bars. Montreal is just a really cool city. It’s very attractive and very cosmopolitan in feeling. There’s definitely a very French atmosphere to it. There definitely was then too, because at that point the separatism in Quebec was starting to raise its head. People wanted to represent themselves by having their own language and not having to Anglicize themselves all the time. Then of course, what was going on in the United States at the time was the hole hippie thing, and feminism, and dope. Then the Vietnam war and all this other stuff was going on. It was a very interesting time to be going through high school and university, it was. Especially university because I guess I was pretty much protected when I was in high school, still living at home with mommy and daddy. Living downtown in Montreal was pretty interesting, pretty cool. I really think the last movement of this suite as being French film music. Very much French film music.
The other part, the other layer for me was the dancing with myself. I had actually corresponded with a guy online who was an export gnosticism and I was interested in gnosticism. So I wrote him a couple of emails and then I realized that he didn’t want to have a discussion with me. He wanted to instruct me. I was trying to talk to him, but he wasn’t talking back. I was just really talking to myself, which was interesting. Then later on I found out that he had written some very anti-simetic things too which really turned me off to him. There was no two-way communication going on. He wasn’t have any kind of discussion. When I did the story about going home at night by myself dancing because I wasn’t dancing with myself, I also thought about...See I have too many layers going on in my head...But I also thought about the fact that when you’re young, you’re so concerned with finding who you are and your own self image. Figuring out who you are. That everybody is someway in your movie. And so you’re always just dancing with yourself, or talking to yourself. Because you’re not really paying attention to other people to find out who they are in a lot of ways. You’re finding out how they fit in into what you think you want and need. It takes a while for people to mature out of that. In that sense, in college there’s a lot of dancing with yourself. Because you’re not paying attention to other people. You’re not ready to pay attention to other people exclusively. You’re always trying to figure out whether they fit you, or fit what you want, or need, or would like to see. Are they in your movie? Do they fit in your movie? Or should you reject them because they don’t fit in your movie. The imaginary movie that you have of yourself. So there was that going on too. I was thinking about college and how different we are many years later.
And then eventually you wind up dancing with yourself all over again, because you realize you always were in the first place! There’s a lot of Zen in that. By the end, you’re always dancing with yourself in some way. It’s a little irony, that’s all. A little humor, a little irony. My humor is either absurdist or zen like usually. I never know which is going to come up. I never know which is going to raise its little head. The absurdist or the Zen like.
Recordings:
I. Bohemian Evening
II. Tango
III. The Night Goes On
IV. Polka
V. Past Midnight
