Passionate Isolation
David Hahn
About this work:
Mandolin and guitar, *Winner 1st Prize* Composition Contest American Classical Mandolin Society.
The title Passionate Isolation comes from the prose-poem No More Secondhand God by R. Buckminster Fuller. The following lines begin the book:
Late tonight
(April 9, 1940)
I am just sitting here
for one of the many reasons that
people find themselves passionately isolated.
(The cause is rarely noble.)
Written in solitude during a period of international turmoil at the beginning of World War II, Fuller's text attracted me as a mirror of our own troubled world in 2004. To the many isolated individuals in our world, it can appear that, as human beings, we are locked into a fate of a continuous cycle of abuses of power leading to armed conflict. Consequently, I saw the movements of this piece as: 1) the Ritual of impotent international deliberations, 2) the Misgivings of the World's population in the face of impending war, and 3) the inevitable March of the military machine
Premiere: Denver, CO, Marilynn Mair and Robert Paul Sullivan, Spring, 2005.
Year composed: 2004
Duration: 00:08:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Guitar Ensembles
Instrumentation: 1 Guitar (Classical/Acoustic), 1 Mandolin