Programme notes:

Over the past two-year period I have had increasingly frequent contact with the works of Chicago painter Ed Paschke, either at galleries or at the homes of private collectors in and around the Chicago area. Despite my presupposed familiarity with his paintings, I found that very little could have prepared me for the glorious assault of color which I experienced while attending his retrospective show at the Chicago Art Institute last fall. The radiance of color and luminescent glare which here emanated from every painting on wall after wall of each room became the source of inspiration for Pigmentata. This composition is not a study of a specific Paschke painting, nor does it attempt to express specific colors in music. I have attempted, rather, to translate the visual experience in my perception of Paschke's use of color into a sonic event. The resulting composition is essentially based on a succession of three chords – modal in nature – which, to me, possess a sonorous quality analogous to the coloristic sensation that I found present in Paschke's more recent paintings. Pigmentata is a loosely structured archform with an Introduction. Apart from the second half of the Introduction and in transitional materials, the three-chord progression saturates the composition, shifting slightly in timbre and texture at each of its presentations in a new key area. This metamorphosis of material seemed to be a logical way of articulating in music the coloristic similarities in a cross section of Paschke's work, while simultaneously highlighting the differences in and between each individual painting. The transitional material in Pigmentata grew out of no more than a compositional need for contrast. Presentation of a synesthetic relationship between color and music, although an inherently important aspect of the composition, is really not the central purpose of Pigmentata. Rather, my subjective attempts at translating color into music served to supply an appropriate harmonic foundation with which to transmit the sensation I experienced while attending the Ed Paschke retrospective show: a sensation, nonetheless, full of vibrant and radiant colors. Daniel Nelson