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Three Rivers was written
in 1995 for the Union College orchestra, to help commemorate the college's
bicentennial year. It was premiered the same year by the college orchestra
conducted by Hilary Tann.
The work is based entirely
on my guitar music from the 60's -- or rather on fragments I can still
remember (I had never written any of it down) -- composed into a single
movement of three distinct sections. The first section, named for the
Mohawk River, summons the sights and sounds of the upstate New York
of my childhood. The second section refers to guitarist John Fahey's
composition Sligo River Blues; it appeared on his first album
Blind Joe Death and was, perhaps, the piece that showed me most clearly
how music could be both simple and powerful at the same time. I have
adapted it here as a tribute to Mr. Fahey. The third, Meander, refers
not to the actual river in Turkey but to the one described by Ovid in
Book IX of The Metamorphoses: "the river that coils its way against
its source." If to drink from the river Lethe is to forget, then from
what river, I wondered, did one drink in order to remember? No such
river may exist; Ovid's Meander suggests the reluctance with which we
leave our sources behind as we head to destinations unknown. The language
of Three Rivers is "unadvanced": tunes appear and repeat themselves,
with a rhythmic gait and tonality more characteristic of a budding (or
lapsed) rock musician than a "serious" composer.
Despite the luxury of hindsight
and maturity, I have tried to preserve the sense of immediacy apparent
when this music flowed freely from heart to fingers, unimpeded by matters
of style, theory, or criticism.
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