PROGRAM
NOTES
Disjecta
Trio for Violin, Horn,
and Piano
and Piano
2004
Notes by
Ken Ueno
Ken Ueno
Commissioned
bY the RADIUS
Ensemble.
Funded in part by
a grant From The
New England Foundation
for the Arts and Meet
the Composer, Inc.,
with additionaL support
from ASCAP, the Virgil
Thomson Fund, and with
additional support from
the siX NEW England
state arts agencies AND
ThE National Endowment
for the Arts.
bY the RADIUS
Ensemble.
Funded in part by
a grant From The
New England Foundation
for the Arts and Meet
the Composer, Inc.,
with additionaL support
from ASCAP, the Virgil
Thomson Fund, and with
additional support from
the siX NEW England
state arts agencies AND
ThE National Endowment
for the Arts.
The title of this piece is borrowed from a collection of critical essays and a dramatic fragment by Samuel Beckett. Unpublished or published obscurely, these works, which span Beckett’s career, were made available to the general public in this collected edition towards the end of his life. Most important to me, Beckett’s Disjecta contains his early essay/analysis of Finnegans Wake, “Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.” This essay has influenced me more than almost any critical work I have ever read. It has directly impacted my approach to form in music.
In writing Disjecta, I sought to reinvestigate diverse elements of my personal compositional vocabulary – in a way, reassess my “unpublished” ideas. Some of these elements are: dense echoes of industry, transparent stillness, natural overtones, hyper-chromaticism, and simple melodic contours. The poetic goal of my work has been to create music (quoting Beckett’s aforementioned essay on Joyce) that is “not about something; it is that something itself.”
In writing Disjecta, I sought to reinvestigate diverse elements of my personal compositional vocabulary – in a way, reassess my “unpublished” ideas. Some of these elements are: dense echoes of industry, transparent stillness, natural overtones, hyper-chromaticism, and simple melodic contours. The poetic goal of my work has been to create music (quoting Beckett’s aforementioned essay on Joyce) that is “not about something; it is that something itself.”