from Black Angels

Black Angels composed by George Crumb Violin - Sara Cubarsi, Violeta Cubarsi Viola - Madeline Falcone Cello Derek Stein Sound Projection - David Aguila Program Notes Thirteen Images From the Dark Land I. Departure 1. Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects 2. Sounds of Bones and Flutes 3. Lost Bells 4. Devil-music 5. Danse Macabre II. Absence 6. Pavana Lachrymae 7. Threnody II: Black Angels! 8. Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura 9. Lost Bells (Echo) III. Return 10. God-music 11. Ancient Voices 12. Ancient Voices (Echo) 13. Threnody III: Night of the Electric Insects Black Angels was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world. The work portrays a voyage of the soul. The three stages of this voyage are Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation) and Return (redemption).” “The numerological symbolism of Black Angels, while perhaps not immediately perceptible to the ear, is nonetheless quite faithfully reflected in the musical structure. These ‘magical’ relationships are variously expressed: e.g., in terms of length, groupings of single tones, durations, patterns of repetition, etc. ... There are several allusions to tonal music: a quotation from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet; an original Sarabanda; the sustained B-major tonality of God-Music; and several references to the Latin sequence Dies Irae (Day of Wrath). The work abounds in conventional musical symbolisms such as the Diabolus in Musica (the interval of the tritone) and the Trillo Di Diavolo (the Devil’s Trill, after Tartini). -George Crumb-

Dissectionary Moments I composed by David Aguila Violins - Sara Cubarsi, Violeta Cubarsi Viola - Madeline Falcone Cello - Derek Stein Sound Projection - David Aguila Program Notes Dissectionary Moments I, is influenced by the miniscule repetitions which interject human life. Individually, as we pass through time we form cyclical patterns, the recurrences of the past returning to the present which extract the mind to relive a moment in an unexpected context spanning through time. These brief experiences of visual deception and déjà vu, occur on an elongated scale reappearing with sometimes little to no contextual framework. Can this seemingly random recurrence be just random, or are our places in space and time malleable? The first of this series of works, Dissectionary Moments I is the contextual placeholder of time for our future selves giving the opportunity for visual deceptions and déjà vu, the transformation of what will be present to past time to recontextualize suggesting back to this moment in time. -David Aguila-