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Cutting Through the Music School on the Way to a Public Stoning

or "Humboldt After Dark"

Humboldt After Dark - Aidan Patrick Cook
00:00

for contemporary music sextet

            Around the time I conceived of this piece, I would often find myself fuguing through the halls of the building housing the CU college of music, simply being massaged by the otherwise impossible collection of sounds that define such a space. At a certain hour, one cannot escape the tangy paella of various ensembles rehearsing in parallel. I was most charmed by one moment in particular: the quartet or quintet of whatever type has just finished rehearsing a difficult passage, and now each player steps back to get that nasty run under their fingers. In the ensuing melee, I am overcome by an irresistible beauty. There exist those special musicians for whom it seems entirely outside the realm of possibility to make an undesirable sound on their instruments. Even in these most mundane moments, they demonstrate how deeply their commitment to beauty has been stitched into their very being.

            This piece was born as a response to such a moment, of which I experienced several iterations over some weeks while friends of mine were preparing Mendelssohn’s A minor string quartet. Thus, the piece is chopped up in an attempt to simulate the organic dissection of music experienced in a rehearsal. Across the hall, a pianist practices away at Beethoven’s 9th piano sonata. We struggle back and forth between the incapacitating wonder of this papier colle and our brain’s tendency to create and ascribe order to unordered events, no less wondrous.

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