Music Monday, 1/24/2022

Writing and music by: Peter Price

Recently as part of the process of cleaning up and maintaining my archive I have been revisiting material from my first real period of professional activity as a composer which I date from 1986 - 1992. In 1986 I was 20 years old and a recent arrival to Philadelphia. I had come here in the fall of 1985 to study composition with Andrew Rudin. I picked him because of his history of writing electronic music. I had the idea that I could write electronic music for modern dance and began to seek out opportunities. By the fall of 1986 I had made connections to a few choreographers and my first scores for dance date from that time. 

Listening to one’s ‘Juvenilia’ as a composer is always a challenge but if done with the right sense of self-compassion can be very useful in pointing to the artistic concerns that have remained consistent over long arcs of one's work. Sharing this work with an audience is even more of a challenge as they are not likely to give consideration to the context of one’s youth or inexperience. But so be it.

The example chosen today is from what I believe was the first multi-movement scores for dance I ever wrote. What interests me about this now (36 years after it was written!), is how I am attempting to maintain a balance between novelty and redundancy, repetition and difference, and both support the dance and leave enough space in the sonic texture for the dance to have its own identity. This remains one of the prime issues in writing for dance and is something I address in hopefully a lot more ways now than were available to me as a younger artist. 

Like a lot of composers of my generation it turns out, I was writing in the real world in a very different style than I was being trained in at conservatory. My big influences at that time like Steve Reich and Phil Glass, much less a Robert Ashley or Meredith Monk, were barely tolerated at the fringes of the classical music world, and other influences that loomed large for me at that time, from West African drumming and Tibetan chant to Brian Eno and all sorts of musics pigeon-holed as ‘New Age’ by an slow-moving music industry, were dismissed as irrelevant to serious compositional work.  

All these influences can be heard in this short 2nd movement of a six-movement score. I was attempting to find a melodic language that felt natural to me - one that highlighted syncopation and polyrhythm and felt good sitting in a harmonically static space. Listening to it today its optimism seems naive, but its heart was in the right place and it served the dance. 

Thanks for listening!