Spleen Queen
⌊ Composition for chamber ensemble with tape.
This piece owes as much to Vincent Youmans, Les Claypool, and Rush as it does to Anton Webern, Igor Stravinsky, and Frank Zappa. It attempts to speak many languages, though never attempts to communicate coherent thoughts or ideas. Spleen Queen was created under strict laboratory conditions using equal parts of satire, parody, and syncretism, with a dash of copyright infringement as a preservative.
Spleen Queen was written for the McGill University Contemporary Music Ensemble, directed by Denys Bouliane. It was a first for me in many ways: it was my first attempt to write for instruments and tape, and it was my first attempt at incorporating parody, quotation and stylistic allusion into a piece of music. It was also the first time for me using what would become my basic aesthetic, the combination of short pieces of widely different styles of music with each other. One of my goals here was to provide the audience with some of the things that are often missing from new music concerts: comic relief and social commentary. Although seen from a uniquely Canadian (or perhaps North American) perspective, it represents the confusion and chaos which results from the inundation of pop and commercial culture which drowns out, or sometimes appropriates, both Western, folk and Indigenous cultures.