Programme notes:

Four Songs on Texts by Oscar Wilde was the second of five compositions, written between 1989 and 1992, in which I actively sought to re-examine my use of harmony, rhythm, and timbre: the goal of these studies was to blend contrasting parameters in a manner by which they would serve to highlight one another. (For example, chromaticism was used to emphasize diatonicism, a steady pulse was to used to emphasize a freer rhythmic movement, and so forth.) Also, it was a search for how these contrasting parameters could be layered simultaneously so that several musical moods were developing concurrently with one another. My aim has been to blend all these techniques in a type of polystylism. This is not to say that my music seeks to sound polystylistic. Rather, my aim is that the eclectic elements which are used contribute in shaping a musical language which wavers on such a fine line between styles that the audience can not tell whether they are listening to tonal or non-tonal music, or to neo-romantic or post-modern music. The texts by Oscar Wilde were a natural choice since his poetry contains an inherent contradiction between its form of presentation and its subject matter; the latter tending towards the decadent or grotesque, while clothed in wit and humor, or shrouded in a kind of translucent beauty. I have attempted to reflect this dualism in the poetry by relating various musical strata with certain literary parameters. At the same time, however, the principle goal of the music is to capture the overall mood of the poems. Daniel Nelson