About this work: There’s a cafe in my Brooklyn neighborhood that serves me alternately as refuge, office and meeting
place. I do most of reading and writing in there. I meet friends there to catch up. On those days
when nothing is going right, I go there to check out, drink a cappuccino and stare a the world. The
place is an important part of the daily fabric of my life.
One day, I was joking around with the employees that I would write an opera about the place. I came up with leitmotifs for each
employee, and then, my eyes falling on the list of 57 teas for sale, I improvised ‘applejack, apricot,
applejack, apricot floral floral’. The joke quickly got old, but that little improvised theme stayed with
me, and I started fleshing out a six movement chamber orchestra piece, each
movement dedicated to on of the categories of teas on the list.
‘Tea List’ is concerned with the elasticity of language, and in how words and music can inform
each other. The music takes different cue from the text, like the jittery staccato that dominated
(Black), or the 12-tone harmony that is the backdrop to (Special). The unique text, utterly
meaningless, renders itself beautifully to various treatments, at times lending and extra shade to the
music around it (as in the second part o (Green) - ‘Blood Orange Pear’, where juxtaposition of the
words ‘blood’ and ‘orange’ illuminate the sneaky harmony in now a negative, not a positive light. But
mostly, ‘Tea List’ is a celebration of the music that exists in everyday detail, and how many times the
material we need for our art is hiding in the most unlikely plain view.
The piece is in six movements, with the first and final one being fairly independent, and can stand on their own, or as a pair, in performance. The percussion doubling is only required for the third movement (Chai).
Individual movement durations are:
(Black) - 5 min.
(Green) - 10 min.
(Chai) - 1 min.
(Special) - 2 min.
(Fruit Blends) - 6 min.
(Herbal) - 11 min.
Parts, or scores for individual movements are available upon request.