The Lives and Opinions of Literary Cats
Composer:
Scoring:
piano trio (vln., vc., and pno.)
Duration:
ca. 6:00
Materials:
score (9.5 x 13) and parts (8.5 x 11)
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Program Note:
I was asked by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble to write a piece that imagines the Brahms’s B Major Trio being heard through the looking glass, and all I could hear were cats.
Let me explain: there was a time when Johannes Brahms signed his musical works with the moniker “Johannes Kreisler,” a fictitious composer found in E.T.A Hoffman’s novel The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. In this novel, a printer’s error accidentally splices and mixes the Tomcat Murr’s autobiography—yes, an autodidact cat wrote his own autobiography—with a book about the composer Johannes Kreisler, and the reader has a hard time figuring out who is the cat and who is the composer.
And if one cat isn’t enough, at the beginning of Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is playing with her kittens Snowdrop and Kitty, one of which is behaving badly (it’s the black one), right before she steps through that infamous looking-glass.
This ultimately begs the question: is this cat music or composer music? Is Johannes Brahms now Johannes Kreisler, or even Tomcat Murr, Snowdrop, or Kitty?
— Jennifer Jolley
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Reproduction Notice:
This program note may be freely reproduced in concert programs, provided that proper credit is given to the composer.