ARMAND QUALLIOTINE: Your Phantom Shape

Armand Qualliotine

Your Phantom Shape

© 2001 Nepenthe Music (656613107225)

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Elise Yun, Piano (1st and 2nd works) ; Willian Buonocore, Guitar (3rd work) ; Jennifer Ashe, Soprano ; Sarah Bob, Piano (4th and 5th works)

notes

-Sonatina For Piano (2000) reaches back to classic forms: sonata, menuetto and rondo, for architectonic models while utilizing the well tempered chromatic totality of twelve which is used to organize the aggregates horizontally and vertically, thus continually creating relative stability and tension through the unfolding of its permutations, transpositions and repetitions just as traditional Western European music always has done.

-Four Winter Bagatelles (1999) were composed as a personal challenge to create music in my own style while restricting myself to the register of the common keyboard J. S. Bach would have used in the 18th century. The four movements are small impressionistic pieces inspired by the changing winter landscape I viewed from my studio window.

-Some Blues for Guitar (1997) was inspired by the traditional blues song "let your linen hang low" which I heard sung by a very corpulent and inebriated woman who played the production engineer in the underground punk rock film Drum struck. In September of 1997 this song Looping in my sonic memory, so to get it out, I wrote it down and this is a version that became movement III of some blues. Continued to assessing on this can soundly searching all the local video stores for the tape to determine if my sonic memory was correct. Movement V is inaccurate transcription of the song. For comparison, the text of the song is printed as I remembered it along with the actual lyric which is rendered in the film:

-My pitch memory was correct (both versions use the C-major blues scale), though my version is an octave lower and contains several more blues guitar affects, and the lyrics have a few different interesting running twists as well. So, this little bit of "musicological" investigation led me to compose the four other more extended movements. The score is dedicated to my friend Peyman Farzinpour.

-Tied To This World (1997) developed from a composition class I talked whose topic was the song cycle. Every lecture I brought in a newly composed piece and an example from the romantic literature. At the conclusion of the semester I selected the songs dramatically related and assembled them to form the collection. Each song reflects some stylistic trade, a part of the idiosyncratic vocabulary used by the following composers of the 19th and 20th centuries: Schubert, Wagner, Puccini, Brahms, Debussy, and Chopin.

-Your Phantom Shape (1997-99) is a companion cycle, "As Bell Tones Fade" and "On and On" for instance use the similar compositional technique of static suspension while leading the melody float over the pianos slowly repeating patterns. In this song cycle I use my own harmonic vocabulary; and in tribute to Shumann, the last song quotes much of the harmony of the first with most of the accompaniment and out of lower however, and viewed by an age traveler nearing the end of his journey...

Armand Qualliotine

Executive Producer: Armand Qualliotine
Engineers: Joel Gordon and Antonio Oliart
Assistant Engineer: Violeta Dontcheva
© 2001 Nepenthe Music Co.

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