Reliquary : for piano and orchestra

1 score (145 p.) ; 43 cm. Duration: ca. 45:00. Includes program and performance notes. Accompanied by: The dynamic contextual nexus and the composition of self : Franz Liszt’s Trois odes funèbres : a case study in intertextuality / by David Henning Plylar (viii, 196 leaves : music).Reliquary is a repository of fragments, relics of my imagination and musical past. They have been recalled here, protected through their invocation, and evolved through their use and the passage of time. The contexts in which these relics persist are constantly changing; their appearances range from unorthodox sacramental iterations to more profane incarnations. Reliquary is a large, single-movement work for piano and orchestra. It is quasi-fractal in design, in that elements of the music at a local level are replicated or represented at higher structural levels. The piece begins with a piano solo, during which seventeen relics (brief thematic units) are presented. Each unique event/relic is related to the others harmonically, motivically, and/or texturally, lending cohesiveness to the group of seventeen relics as a whole. These seventeen events are the primary relic-types, the fragments from which the rest of the music for Reliquary is drawn. Reliquary is, in essence, a collection of seventeen sets of variations, one for each event/relic initially presented by the piano, dispersed throughout the work. The variations are organized into seventeen sections (labeled A through Q), each of which includes one variation of each relic-type. The events are dilated, compressed and distorted as the work unfolds across a dynamic spectrum of possibilities. The large sections could be viewed as reliquaries in themselves, as each contains an altered form of every relic-type. Each of these seventeen reliquaries is also a relic itself, as a composite of variations on the relic-types. Together they form Reliquary in its complete form. The reordering of the relics through a rotation process also plays an important role in the work. The events, though continuous, are initially grouped into eight collections: ABCD-E-FG-HI-JKL-MN-OP-Q. At the midpoint of the piece (the ninth section, a duet for piano and celesta), the groups have been rotated to a retrograde ordering: Q-OP-MN-JKL-HI-FG-EABCD. By the final section, the groups have returned to their original ordering. Not only are the events reordered, but the basic proportions of one to the other are rotated as well, allotting different amounts of time to each event over the course of the work. The reverse of the initial proportions of the first section accounts for the temporal relationships between the seventeen large sections. Additionally, there is a seventeen-note series, embedded in several of the relics, that is developed throughout the piece. This series is explicitly voiced in the final relic presented by the solo piano in the first section of the work. The series is there presented in counterpoint with its retrograde. The series goes through a process of rotation similar to the one governing the order of events over the course of the piece, ultimately arriving at its retrograde (and therefore in counterpoint with its retrograde, which is the prime form of the row) by the eighteenth iteration. Because there are only seventeen larger sections, this final iteration is presented as a reflection, a postlude