JOHN LIBERATORE
composer

For a long time, I have been reading lead sheets and studying jazz harmony, a musical pursuit that started as a hobby but has become less and less peripheral to my composition practice over time. I am perpetually curious about the question: “what counts” when it comes to the realization of a harmony.  In practice, any tone can “belong” to any chord, or nearly so.  The terrain between what can and cannot reasonably suggest, say, “A7” is richly ambiguous, and perpetually surprising. More so than my other works, “Night Music” is a conscious investigation of this question. It is ten “realizations,” in the loosest possible sense, of a lead sheet. 

 

I wrote the work over a long stretch of time, probably starting sometime in late 2019 and finishing in early 2022.  Commissioned by pianist and long-time friend and collaborator Eunmi Ko, we originally expected a premiere in Summer 2020.  The work was intended for a midnight concert under the stars, one of the main events of the festival “En Blanc et Noir” in Lagrasse, a small village in the French Pyrenees.  The evocative and unusual setting of the premiere made think of the jazz standard, “Stella by Starlight,” a tune I had been playing with at the time. The rich voice-leading embedded in the song’s distinct harmonic progression made the process of “lead sheet realization” especially fruitful.  

 

Needless to say, the intended premiere, like practically everything at that time, was cancelled.  Feeling adrift in the first weeks of the pandemic, I found myself writing a nocturne in the style of Chopin, perhaps finding solace in the music and style of this long-admired composer.  When the premiere was officially canceled, I stopped working on the piece, and was left with this nocturne, orphaned from its intended context.  Nearly two years later, I picked up the pieces of this project and brought it to fruition. The piece did indeed premiere in idyllic Lagrasse in Summer 2022 (though not at midnight).

 

The work begins with a somewhat-standard, if idiosyncratic realization of “Stella.”  Following this the work goes through numerous stylistic transformations, exploring different ways of thinking about Harmony, progression, and at times, jazz.  The work is dedicated to Eunmi, the pluralistic nature of the piece showcasing many aspects of her pianism that I admire.  As Ella Fitzgerald sang, “she’s all of these and more.”