• Workaday Pages

    • 8 Duets for 2 Oboes (2011)

    Download the score

    Program Notes:
    This is a set of 8 duets for 2 oboes. In this piece I incorporated many musical devices: tonality, atonality, rhythm, time signatures, and some other things.

    The interplay between the 2 oboes is meant to serve as a commentary on modern life. New inventions such as the World Wide Web, cellular telephones, VCRs, and self-cleaning ovens are certainly a blessing, but they can also be evil. They confuse us, pull us in many directions at once, compete for our attention, and will eventually rip out our souls. The obvious outcome of all this is a robot apocalypse. I had started to write an essay on this very subject but discarded it after 48 pages. I wasn’t getting my point across. The best way to critique modern society, the way we are connected and, at the same time, paradoxically and cliche-ly, disconnected, I decided, was in an oboe duet.

    Anyway, modern life, blah blah blah, something about duality. Oboe 1 is yang and oboe 2 is yin. Or maybe I have that backwards. The point is that the oboes are constantly playing off of one another, trading and transforming each other’s material (except when I got lazy and just copied and pasted). It's just like the feelings we all get while going about our daily activities. It’s the same as being stuck in rush hour traffic or going to the barber shop or massage parlour. Come to think of it, maybe oboe 1 is id and oboe 2 is ego. But wait, what about super-ego? I should have added an English horn part. A trio ruins my duality idea though, so forget about super-ego for now. Unless you want oboe 1 to be ego and oboe 2 to be super-ego. I suppose that works. Also, it would help if the two oboists hated each other.

    I didn’t realize it until after the fact, but all the musical material in Workaday Pages is derived from two preexisting melodies: the main theme from the first movement of Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf’s Symphony in D and Burt Bacharach & Hal David’s song “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself." This somehow escaped me during the compositional process, but, listening to the piece now, it’s clear as day. Sort of enhances the duality, don’t you think?


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