Seduction:
"I Want To Have Sex With You"
Tango
for
Mixed Chamber Ensemble
Violin, Viola, Cello, Vibraphone, Piano
Score and Parts available from
Voice House Publishing
$200.00
return to Program Notes
return to Home
Program Note:
Seduction: I Want To Have Sex With You
Like all tangos, the theme of this work is seduction and the lure of sex in
all its complexity and shades of emotion, from flirtatious to cruel, delight
to despair, domination to submissiveness, real and symbolic, animal and robotic,
sensual sex and cyber-sex, sex alone and with others, self-destructive and
self-transcendent, foolish, obsessive, political, personal and charismatic.
The music revolves on a melodic mantra set to the words I Want To Have
Sex With You. The mantra appears continuously in various guises throughout
the work along with six other themes, which comment on it in various ways.
At times the mantra functions as a subtext, and at other times it is a domineering
musical force. Ultimately the mantra merges with the other material. Hoping
to add something of at least idiosyncratic curiosity to the repertoire of
Tango, I sought out the works of Astor Piazzolla for guidance, fearing that
otherwise the work might veer instead into strange lands or simplistic mimicry.
I needed to know how far one could expand the fabric of this folk genre without
rendering it incomprehensible. I do not think that the resulting work sounds
the least bit like Piazzolla, and I offer to his memory my gratitude, respect
and apologies. I may have ended up instead in a strange land after all! I
also attempted, from a contemporary post-modernist viewpoint, to understand
and reflect something of the spirit of the dance. Tango, with its dramatic
gestures and surprising shifts of dynamics, can be regarded (as arguably all
dance can be) as a highly mannered mating ritual. Thus the theme gets right
to the point, with the subversiveness of an advertising campaign and the determination
of a sex researcher, and is pushed, pulled, parried, teased, satirized and
charmed by the competing motives until finally they attain a sort of musical
coitus.
Joseph Waters, December 19, 2004
Biography.
Joseph Waters is Full Professor of Music Composition and Director of
Electro-Acoustic and Media Composition at San Diego State University. He studied
composition at Yale University, the Universities of Oregon and Minnesota,
and Stockholms Musikpedagogiska Institut. His primary teachers were Jacob
Druckman, Bernard Rands, Roger Reynolds, Dominick Argento, and Martin Bresnick.
He is a member of the first generation of American classical composers who
grew up playing in rock bands. Throughout his career he has been intrigued
by the confluence and tensions that entangle and bind the music of Europe
and Africa. Much of his work involves interactions between electronic and
acoustic instruments. He has been involved in inter-disciplinary and collaborative
works since the early 1980's. His works are performed widely, both in the
U.S.A. and abroad. He has received numerous awards in composition, including
National Endowment for the Arts/Rockefeller Foundation, Regional Arts and
Culture Council (OR) and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants. www.josephwaters.com
© 2004 Joseph Waters
All Rights Reserved
return to Program Notes
return to Home