Settings From Pierrot Lunaire

Settings from Pierrot Lunaire is the result of a commission from Leonard Stein and the Schoenberg Institute, which hosted the premiere of the first three settings of the work. Since many of my compositional roots are in Impressionism, it was naturalthat I gravitate towards those poems in Pierrot Lunaire that emphasize colors and imagery. Not the Beaudelarian imagery of the spleen, grotesquerie...death and vice that Giraud drew from Les fleurs do mal, but rather that drawn from the visible,external world embellished by the imagination. Pitchwise, Feerie is primarily based on the mode I have used in various guises in most of my music since 1980 - a seven-tone scale, sometimes referred to as the overtone scale, with a raised 4th and alowered 7th (this changes, of course, when the tonal center is moved). In a modest homage to Schoenberg, the mode was extended by the addition of five pitches to make a twelve-tone row. Mein Bruder, veiled and subdued as it is (perhaps with a bit ofgrotesquerie) works well between the more vibrant and colorful Feerie and Halequinade. To emphasize those qualities, the vocal part in Mein Bruder emplys much more Sprechstimme and more of the lower register of the voice than do the others.Pitchwise, Mein Bruder is based essentially on the interval of a second (major, minor, and very rarely, augmented) paired to represent the brother and expressed in cells of two, three, and four notes. Each of those intervals of a second isrepresented in the opening chord. In Harlequinade, there are three types of pitch determination that slip through one another - as Pierrot slips glidingly through the milling throng, a twelve-tone row, an octatonic scale and a mode. The cello openswith the seven-tone mode playing the role of a circus sideshow drummer. When I was fifteen, living in San Diego, I went to a circus where upon entering the grounds, I was hypnotized by the distand sound of what I later learned was the archetypalcircus drum pattern being played to attract people to the sideshow. The figure is played alternating between the head and hell of a bass drum. One will find it in Stravinskys Petrouchka, wherein the alternation is between the bass drums head and apair of mounted cymbals. How fascinating it was to come across Selbstmord. To one rather literally minded, Pierrots suicide indicates his death. But to another mind, the poem represents another marvelous thrust in the transcendental realm of theimagination. From Girauds disorganized collection of poems, Schoenberg, as expounded by Susan Youens, carved...the tripartite cri de couer of a modern artists rootless rebellion and frenzied dereglement des sens, the surreal psycic dissolutionthat follows, and finally, the journey home... As in Feerie and Harlequinade, there is an interplay of mode and scale extended to form a twelve- tone row. The Prelude and Interlude I, II and III may be performed separately under the title PierrotMute Accidentals apply only to specific pitch level, not to octave relations, and hold throughout the measure. Published by New Music West, P.O. Box 7434, Van Nuys, CA 91409