Echo Park
Paul Epstein
About this work:
Although the CD and DVD represent real advances (soon to be superseded by other real advances), to this aging boomer, the 33 1/3 LP will remain the emblematic vessel of recorded music. Its intrinsic form – the satisfying bipartite balance (echoing the classic two-act Broadway musical) of two 20-30-minute-long sides, each divided into approximately 5-8 pop songs, or 2-3 classical movements – has profoundly, if subliminally, affected an entire generation’s musical expectations. The “well made” album, or, with slightly more pretension, the “concept album”, seems to me a particularly congenial form, especially in the songwriter’s sense (Ray Davies, the Beatles, Randy Newman), as opposed to the (less successful) guitar/orchestral tone-poem albums (Electric Ladyland, The Wall). Echo Park, written in 1987, aspires to the spirit of great albums like the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile or Pet Sounds, and the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, Sergeant Pepper, or Abbey Road, and it is Abbey Road’s brilliant and inventively paced second side that provided Echo Park’s inspiration.
Echo Park, I have since found out, is the name of a fairly rough neighborhood in L.A. But I was ignorant of this in 1987 when I wrote it (commissioned by my friend, the eminent flutist Michael Parloff). For me it signified a magical, interior place, brightly hued yet dreamy/nostalgic, a fabric woven of scenes from my 50’s childhood “there beneath the blue suburban skies”, the galvanic, heroic art of the 50’s and 60’s, and the luminous, energetic music of the late 60’s – Lennon/McCartney/George Martin, Brian Wilson, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, artists who transformed the pop album into powerful, unified works. The title “Echo Park” is a riff on “Abbey Road” and Richard Diebenkorn’s shimmering and multi-layered Ocean Park paintings.
The seven connected movements might be described as:
1. Introductory incantation.
2. Medium tempo story-song, sort of strophic.
3. Sky-gazing ballad with 12-tone harmony.
4. Two songs – a medium tempo and a quickly flowing one – intermingle and develop. They finally lead to a wild dance which slowly and bitonally fragments away.
5. A Bill Evans-y interlude in an uneasy 3/4.
6. Smoothly flowing; slowly builds to a shattering climax and a reprise of one of the songs from the fourth movement. Short, quiet coda finally wisps away.
7. Antic, faintly Gallic, Rossini-meets-Charlie-Parker-with-a-fughetta-capper.
Year composed: 1987
Duration: 00:25:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Other Combinations, 6-9 players
Instrumentation: ,1 Flute soloist(s), 1 Piano, 2 Violin, 1 Viola, 1 Cello, 1 Double bass
Instrumentation notes: string section may be enlarged