deLise, LA :: Salone del Astor

Salone del Astor

deLise, LA

Louis Anthony deLise presents Salone del Astor for flute and vibraphone.

From the composer:

In Salone del Astor, I bring together several disparate musical and personal ideas I have been toying with for several years. These include the intersection of my work in popular music and life as a composer of concert music; the exploration of my European ancestry; the preoccupation I have with music for dancing and singing; and only recently, a survey of compositions by Astor Piazzolla.

For me, music is most often the impetus for dance or for song. In my musical world, music never just is: it has function in addition to purpose. It is natural (almost to the point of expectation) that I would create movements that are abstractions of dances. The movements of Salone are marked, Introduction and Tarantella, Slow Dance, and Come una salsa. I employ the rhythms of the tarantella and the salsa in the outer movements and develop the melodies and harmonies using elements borrowed from popular American music, quartal or quintal harmonies, and octatonic and Lydian scalar collections. My use of the Lydian collection is personally significant since this scale is often a significant feature in the folk music of Calabria, the birthplace of my maternal grandparents.

I also composed the middle movement, Slow Dance, using the Lydian scalar collection. In it, I make great use of the collection s key feature, the interval of the augmented fourth, by contrasting it with the interval of the perfect fourth. I introduce the main theme of the movement in measure three of the second movement and then throughout the movement present it in various transpositions and rhythmic modifications.