From A Dream Liner Notes
My new record, From A Dream, will be released on Frameworks Recordings later this year and to keep physical media printing costs down, I’m publishing my liner notes here on this page.
From A Dream: New Music for Classical Guitar
Trevor Babb
Isa by Nicole Murphy
I.
II
Gadsby: A Fantasy without E by Trevor Babb
Lenten Music by Eugene Astapov
Phràza (Phrase)
Ouzòr (Pattern)
Cadenza
Achòrd (Chord)
Melòdia (Melody)
12 Variaciones y fuga sobre la folìa d’España by Juan Trigos
Tema
Var. I
Var. II
Var. III
Var. IV
Var. V
Var. VI
Var. VII
Var. VIII
Var. IX
Var. X
Var. XI
Var. XII
Fuga
D’un Rêve II by Nicolas Bolens
Ass Backwards Is Backwards Ass Backwards by Chris Cretella
Building a new repertoire for the classical guitar has always been a dream of mine ever since I began my studies at the Eastman School of Music. I always sought out repertoire that was different from the status quo and admired guitarists such as Andres Segovia, Julian Bream, and David Starobin among many others who dedicated their careers to expanding the instrument’s repertoire with work of high quality from contemporary musical voices. The repertoire on this recording represents many years of working with composers to make my own humble mark on the project of expanding classical guitar’s repertoire resulting in a body of work beyond my wildest dreams.
I first met Australian composer, Nicole Murphy, at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival New Music Workshop in 2014. Her composition that appears on this recording, Isa, was written for the festival as a piece for two guitars and I premiered it with my friend, Jordan Dodson, at the festival. Several years later, while I was putting together the repertoire for this project I lamented not having any repertoire by a female composer after having been rocked by the troubling wave of sexual harassment and assault allegations that precipitated the #MeToo movement. I thought back on Nicole’s piece that I performed at the festival and began to wonder if it might be possible to consolidate the two parts into a solo piece. After receiving Nicole’s blessing to explore this idea, I was able to produce a solo arrangement of Isa with the help of some crafty harmonics, use of the left hand thumb, and one instance of tapping a bass note with the right hand. The title refers to Mount Isa in Queensland, a small, arid, inland mining town with an austere landscape that the music aims to evoke.
My own composition, Gadsby, takes its title from a dreadful work of literature by Ernest Vincent Wright. Wright’s novel is an experimental 50,000 word lipogram that contains no use of the letter “E,” the most common character in the English language. As someone with a weakness for experimental literature, I was eager to read Gadsby upon hearing about it. While the formal constraints of the novel are impressively adhered to, I found the novel to be dull and boring as a work of literature. However, it did prompt me to ponder the question, “what might it look like to compose a solo guitar piece that never uses the pitch, E, the most prevalent pitch on the instrument?” The answer to that question was my piece, Gadsby, which uses several harmonies that suggest resolution to an E major chord but never resolve as expected. I can only hope that my musical composition without E is more compelling than Wright’s novel.
Canadian Composer, Eugene Astapov, and I were classmates at the Eastman School of Music and his work, Lenten Music, was my first collaboration with a composer on a new work for guitar. Eugene was commissioned to write a new work for a guitar classmate of mine and the work that he produced was immense, virtuosic, and unfortunately, deemed unplayable. While the original commissioning guitarist had moved on from Eastman, Eugene still had to produce a new work under obligations from the commission. Going back to the drawing board, he determined to write a piece that was uncharacteristically sparse, compact, and contemplative. The title, Lenten Music, acknowledges that this piece was something of a compositional fast for Eugene in his writing for an unfamiliar, challenging instrument. Lenten Music was originally premiered at the Eastman School of Music on the Warren and Patricia Benson Forum on Creativity in 2010 as a four movement work. I continued to perform the work over the years, and in light of this, Eugene added the cadenza movement, a reworking of the cadenza from his cello concerto, several years later to make the piece more substantial, virtuosic, and representative of his evolving compositional style.
Mexican composer, Juan Trigos, produced his 12 Variaciones y fuga sobre la folìa d’España in response to a consortium commission led by Dieter Hennings including myself, Jeremy Bass, Eric Singh, Eladio Scharron, and Ivan Trinidàd Sànchez. Dieter has commissioned Juan's Partita for solo guitar and performed several of his works for solo guitar, chamber works with guitar, and guitar concerti. I was a student at the Eastman School of Music when Dieter was finishing his doctoral work there, and was captivated watching Dieter perform many of these works wrote by Juan. When Dieter approached me to see if I would be interested in joining a consortium to commission a new work from Juan, I enthusiastically agreed. Dieter wanted to ask Juan to write a set of variations on the Spanish Folia chord progression modelled after Manuel Maria Ponce’s massive work written for Andres Segovia. The result is the titanic work heard on this recording. Each variation interacts with music as dance in some kind of way and the musical language draws heavily on both early music and folk music from Spain and Mexico. The culminating fugue uses the top voice of the original Folia chord progression as its subject contrasted against a heavily syncopated countersubject, juxtaposing an old world dance against syncopated new world rhythms.
The title of this recording is taken from the English translation of Swiss composer, Nicolas Bolens’s, D’un Rêve II. This piece, while not my earliest collaboration with a composer, is in fact the earliest piece on this recording. I was in Nicolas’ 20th Century Music Analysis class at the Haute École de Musique de Genève while studying there on a Fulbright Award. I began to explore whether any of the composition faculty at HEM had written anything for guitar and among others found this piece by Nicolas. I sent away for a copy of the score from a small Swiss publishing company and received it in the mail and began to work on it. After getting it in my fingers I asked Nicolas if he’d be willing to hear me play the piece. He was surprised to learn that I had been learning it and informed me that if I ever performed it it would be the world premiere despite it having been composed fifteen years earlier in 1997. Evidently, the work was never performed and the piece sat dormant until I looked it up. It is with great pleasure that I am able to present this long overdue recording of this composition.
American composer, guitarist, and improviser, Chris Cretella, and I became friends through getting to know each other at various shows of improvised music in and around New Haven. One night, at an electronic music show, Chris asked me if I ever was looking for new classical guitar repertoire. I believe my reply to his question was “Always.” Chris floated the idea of writing a piece for me and I said I’d love to see whatever he came up with. The result was the closing piece on this recording, Ass Backwards is Backwards Ass Backwards. The piece’s title is a quote from a conversation in Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. Chris’s piece is an episodic piece that reflects a written out representation of his improvisational style. Drawing upon slapstick cartoon music, Bossa Nova, and other popular styles, Cretella’s piece sounds like a musical penpal conversation between Elliott Carter and John Zorn mediated by a nylon string performance by Derek Bailey.
Trevor would like to thank: my wife Katherine, for her unwavering support; my son Sam, for bringing joy into my life and music making; David Veslocki, for welcoming me into the Frameworks Recordings community and providing a great platform for this release; Matthew Lefebvre, who captured this music in an amazing room and was incredibly flexible and patient with my schedule; Benjamin Schwartz, for his assistance with final edits; Alan Douches, who put the final layer of polish on the recording; Colin Meyer, for his amazing artwork and design; my mother, who taught me how to play music; my father, who taught me how to love music; Nicholas Goluses and Benjamin Verdery, who helped me become the performer I am; Baljinder Sekhon, Symeon Waseen, Hannah Lash, and Dusan Bogdanovic, who helped me become the composer I am; Nicole Murphy, who graciously permitted me to cram her guitar duet onto one guitar; Eugene Astapov, who asked me to premier Lenten Music when he needed a performer; Dieter Hennings-Yeoman, who asked me to join the consortium to commission the folia variations from Juan; Jeremy Bass, Eric Singh, Eladio Scharron, and Ivan Trinidad Sanchez, who contributed to the consortium; Juan Trigos, for his willingness to write a massive new work for solo guitar and his time coaching me to perform it; Nicolas Bolens, for his guidance and support in performing d’un Rêve II; the Fulbright Program, without which I would have never met Nicolas; Chris Cretella, for volunteering to write a piece for me; my students, who continue to challenge me to be a better musician; and all the others who have supported my pursuit of music that doesn’t fit into tidy commercial boxes: Thank You all!