Grossman Ensemble premieres Jack Hughes's "Dream Labyrinths"
Program notes:
One of the goals of this piece is to bring various musical dualities into conversation with one another. Tonality and atonality exist side by side, pitch is often melded together with noise into a single sonority, sharply formed musical objects are contrasted with nebulous and hazy sounds, and an almost obsessive sense of forward motion and development alternates with a more meandering and capricious flow of ideas. I wanted to create a music that sounded simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar in a way that mimicked the flow of a dream. While dreaming we obtain an incredible openness, implicitly accepting every image or event without judgment. It is only upon waking that we realize the strangeness of our dreamworld, which has already become a quickly-fading memory. My compositional process was guided not by a desire for narrative coherence or a structural rigor but by a complete acquiescence to the sense of flow: the forward motion that guides us through the labyrinth like a thread.
Jack Hughes' piece Dream Labyrinths was premiered by the Grossman Ensemble on March 15, 2019.