Content area
Full Text
Fourteen of Liaisons' composers discuss their process
On March 9, 2013, Anthony de Mare presented the second installment of his commissioning project, Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano, at Symphony Space in New York City. Fifteen works from the series were premiered at that concert. The following comes from interviews with 14 of those composers.
Despite having been the producer of a college production of Anyone Can Whistle, Eve Beglarian was not an ardent Sondheim devotee when de Mare asked her to participate in the Liaisons project, but she knew enough to deem his work "amazing and interesting," and she immediately agreed to contribute. She also took some pride in the fact that both she and Sondheim had studied with Milton Babbitt. Because of her experience with Anyone Can Whistle, Beglarian intended to re-imagine that musical's title song, and her piece was to have been premiered at the first Symphony Space concert in April 2012. But a death in her family forced her to delay all her projects, and by the time she was ready to get to work, William Bolcom had already asked to include the song in his piece. De Mare then mentioned that no one had yet to use anything from Passion as their source material and, though Beglarian hadn't seen the show, she had heard the score and was excited at the prospect of staking the first claim on a song from the musical.
She didn't get beyond the opening number, "Happiness." She was fascinated that the show opens with the arresting moment of two lovers in bed in "hot post-coital bliss," and yet they're not the two lovers that the title references - that what appears to be the embodiment of something that will go on and on, isn't actually that kind of love at all. Then Beglarian got a copy of the score and "that was where it got hard." Unlike most of the composers who participated in the project, Beglarian writes a lot of music that uses source material, which she juxtaposes and re-composes, creating something of a collage. She particularly likes to shape source material into something different - the opposite of the original. As she describes it, "Taking something 'crunchy' and simplifying it, or...