Dream Suite

for sextet in six, cyclic, attacca movements.

- Prelude
- Lied
- Toccata capricciosa
- Sarabande
- Episode
- Confession

Commissioned by the Barlow Endowment at Brigham Young University and with support from the Maison Dora Maar Residency.

​​I normally take composition seriously as a spiritual discipline striving for a kind of truth whose meaning is no less real and sustaining for its inherent ambiguity. In “Dream Suite”, however, I give myself permission to just have fun! and to do all sorts of things that I might otherwise feel were inappropriate These include a persistent use of musical quotations from a range of genres, styles, and periods; mashing up, for example, a sacred Bach cantata with the theme from the ‘80s TV show “Knight Rider”, or David Bowie’s “Kooks” with Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite”. Playful non sequiturs and incongruities are simply justified by the title since all kinds of weird things can happen in dreams. And yet...

As the piece neared its completion, I realized that I had fallen victim to the common psychological phenomenon Victor Frankl calls “paradoxical intention”. Because I was paying so much attention to not being serious, I ended up being more serious than I have ever been in anything I have written before. What was supposed to be a piece about sweet dreams ended up being more about the broken variety and in the grand romantic tradition became a Berlioz-like airing of grievances. Oops. I almost felt guilty for allowing this to happen. Thus in the final movement I try to repent of my self-absorption and confess my faith that this life is a brief dream and that the day will soon come when we will see that "all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well" - Julian of Norwich.

There are three types of melodic fragments that cycle throughout the work.

1. One is a sort of a musical signature that I use in this piece and others: Eb, A, Bb, E. In German the Eb is pronounced, “Es”, and the Bb is “B” (while B-natural is “H”). Thus those notes spell “SABE”.

2. “Dream Suite” is, obviously, an homage to Charles Ives and like Ives I have been in church nearly every Sunday of my life singing, performing, and absorbing the music. In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we set aside an hour each week to teach our children music, a wonderful tradition that I am quite proud of! As a child in my early “Singing Time” classes I first learned the hymn “Love at Home” which celebrates the (at least potential) joy of family life. Its simple and beautiful melody floats in and out of dissonant relationships throughout the piece.

3. The abstract expressionist composer Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite” pervades much of the piece. In particular I highlight a melodic fragment which is itself a quotation from a Zemlinsky opera. The text to which this music is set in the opera reads “Du bist mein Eigen, mein Eigen” (you are my own, my own).

A note about each movement

Prelude - This movement is played “sotto voce” throughout. It represents the amorphous realm of sleep and dreams. Tiny “impacts” are like pebbles dropped in a pond and give rise to quiet, tangled masses of quotations and variations on the SABE motive. The listener should not be able to identify the quotations in these gentle but energetic ripples until the last one when “Love at Home” emerges from the texture.

Lied - Here, after a shocking transition, the music suddenly settles in to Schubert’s “Auf dem Flusse” from the song-cycle “Winterreise”, which portrays the thoughts and feelings of a pathologically self-centered spurned would-be lover who wanders aimlessly nursing his emotional wounds and descending finally into nihilistic despair. As this movement winds down, we hear “Love at Home” superimposed on the “Du bist mein Eigen” fragment.

Toccata Capricciosa - Bach’s great cantata “Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal” (we must pass through much tribulation to enter the kingdom of God) — which is almost an organ concerto calling for a virtuosic keyboard performance — is mashed up with the theme music from “Knight Rider”. Why? Just because when I first heard the Bach cantata, I instantly heard a close connection to the ‘80s TV theme, and, hey! It’s a dream so I can do whatever I want! Later in the movement we are suddenly dropped into David Bowie’s “Kooks”, which is a song that he wrote for his newborn son and happens to be a favorite of my daughter’s. At the end of this movement we find ourselves suddenly confronted with a mangled quotation from a song called “Sweet Surrender” by the ’70s soft rock band, Bread. Lurking under this there is another quote from the “Lyric Suite” in which Berg — super creepily — portrays the son of the woman with whom he had had an affair, and to whom he secretly dedicated the work.

Sarabande - Mostly as an attempted antidote to all of the emotionally charged themes I’ve been wrestling with to this point, and in preparation for the climax to follow, I insert a deconstructed and – I hope dream-like – version of Bach’s Sarabande from the French Suite in G. I have always loved this piece and have turned to it from time to time for comfort.

Episode - The term, “episode” has a meaning in musical analysis but it also might refer to temporarily heightened psychological states. This movement is the most chaotic. It features, among many other things, two pieces about trees: Schubert’s “Der Lindenbaum”, again from “Winterreise”, and a piano piece of my own entitled “Ecstatic Aspen”. We also encounter Ives’ “Unanswered Question”, an extended passage from the truly hair-raising second movement of Schubert’s great Piano Sonata in A (D. 959), the famous F major 7 chord from Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, which was the most dissonant event in all of Western music history up to that point, and the vertigo inducing ending of Ligeti’s “Autumn in Warsaw”. This descends into an abject wallowing in noise and dissonance punctuated by an earsplitting wail in the piccolo.

Confession - After the catharsis (probably more like hysteria) of the “Episode” I attempt to make my confession of faith and hope with as much eloquence and pathos as I can muster. Variations on the SABE motive figure prominently and the music is purely original until the very end as the Ives’ “Unanswered Question” reappears (together with a modern pop music counterpart). This gives rise to one more confrontation between “Love at Home” and the “Du bist mein Eigen” fragment and the piece unwinds finally into an unapologetically unvarnished quotation from a gorgeous little song by Charles Ives entitled “Ilemenau”. This song sets the following poem by Geothe:

Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh',

In allen Wipfeln

Spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch;

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde

Ruhest du auch

Over all the treetops

is rest,

A gentle breeze

scarcely stirs their waving crest;

All the birds are silent

each in his quiet nest.

So my heart, waiting,

soon will rest.