Includes score.
fakebook
9 continuous movements. 10-11 minutes.
fakebook in context
This classical fakebook remixes the piano's core repertoire from Chopin and Liszt through Debussy and Ravel. Although it riffs continuously on virtuoso gestures it is not ultimately concerned with either quotation or nostalgia. Underneath its smooth surface of rapidly shifting motifs fakebook plays out as a study in musical plausibility: of continuity affirmed, continuity deflected, continuity frustrated, continuity implied, continuity demolished, and continuity reinvented. For Western concert music at the end of the twentieth century, the question of what constitutes musical plausibility was the last frontier. Schoenberg had liberated dissonance. The cross-fertilization of world musical cultures after World War II had liberated rhythm. But a consensus about what constitutes musical continuity was left standing, remarkably, even after the pillars that supported it—the pitch and rhythmic systems—had been chipped away. And chance music, whether by Cage or by any of his lesser-known colleagues, did not succeed in liberating Western musical thought from inherited notions of cause and effect. Cage's complete renunciation of purposefulness was in effect a gesture of "no comment" on the question of how one might create a new or enlarged sense of continuity in Western music after the acoustic universe of mediocre twelve-tone music had exhausted the collective ear. fakebook, which is equally rooted in the information theory of Norbert Wiener and the Warner Brothers cartoon scores of Carl Stalling, is an expedition into unknown territory, into an alternate sense of musical cause and effect—even at the risk of sounding a bit wacky, if you insist.
fakebook was written in the Spring of 1976. It was first performed by the composer at a private party in the studio of composer Betsy Jolas at Tanglewood (Lenox, Massachusetts) in the summer of the same year. Other performances of note were given by Arthur Maddox, Joseph Kubera, and Virginia Hommel Gaburo. A recording by the composer is available on the Einstein Records CD Gringo Blaster.
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