Songs of Steel and Tartan, Op. 118 (2020)

Program Notes:

This is the third in a series of Christmas gifts for my dear friend Noah Lauziere. I had known for a year or two that I wanted to use this sorely neglected instrumentation, but the form remained amorphous. Over the past year, we've been talking a lot about popular/modern song form, something that my conservatory education never really touched on and I had little familiarity with. This piece is an attempt to blend my primarily research-based cyclic-module conception of popular song form with elements of my own personal musical style. The songs do not and are not intended to have lyrics, but the affect of each draws from moments when I visited Noah in Pittsburgh in February 2020.

I. A nighttime trip to Target

This song takes inspiration from two sources, both of which have been the subject of discussion with Noah:

- The rhythmic displacement at the beginning of Charlie Puth's "BOY"

- An experiment where we took the descending M2 cycle in The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" (F-/C-/Eb/Bb) and extended it all the way around the circle of fifths, instantiated here as a neo-Riemannian descending M3 cycle

II. Taking a shortcut back to campus

Once again, the rhythm in the intro is intentionally ambiguous. Harmonically, the base chord progression is fairly clear, but there is significant use of extensions.

III. Going to the gym

The popular song form begins to deform - each module just has an intro, verse, and bridge (circumnavigating the circle of fifths) - the chorus is omitted.

IV. Eating dinner at Chipotle

The verse/chorus structure of popular song form is blended with the variation form and harmonic structure of La Folia.