The Blue Guitar

THE BLUE GUITAR, for piano
Performed by Paul R. Dab, pianist, at the San Francisco Community Music Center, September 20, 2024.
PROGRAM NOTES
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’
Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”
Stevens’ poem is an extended meditation on the nature of art, performance, and imagination. To conceive a work is to construct new from old. To perform a work is to transform it yet again and again. In art, as on the blue guitar, all expectations are subverted.
This piano work is in three short movements each of which links back to a specific work by a composer from a past century-18th, 19th, and 20th. These movements are not variations on the originals, but new works built from small borrowings: a motif, a rhythm, a harmony. I have not attempted to imitate the aesthetics of the originals but have simply taken a few seeds from the past and allowed what they are to be changed upon the blue guitar.
The three short movements are
00:16 …standing in mist by a haunted tree…
03:24 …dawn rain, all the flowers are forms of water…
04:46 …spread on the hill, the washed colors of the afterlife…
CREDITS
Opening screen quotation from “The Man with the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens. "The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems". New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937
First movement title from “Losing A Language” by W. S. Merwin.
"The Rain in the Trees". New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
Second and Third movement titles from “Rain Light” by W. S. Merwin.
"The Shadow of Sirius". Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2008.
Opening screen image created by the composer, 2024.