Asterisk (2009), for chamber orchestra
Historical Background & Program Notes:
“I miss playing baseball. I miss simply being a baseball player.” -Alex Rodriguez, 2/17/2009
My first year in Boston saw a significant resurgence of interest in my boyhood obsession with baseball. The previous five years of my life (since the notorious “Steve Bartman Incident” at Wrigley Field in 2003) were spent focusing on musical studies, relegating the sport to the distant background of my interests. During that hiatus, I missed many significant events: the crowning of a new home run king, both the Red and White Sox snapping their epic World Series title draughts, and the Moneyball revolution come to mind. But perhaps the single biggest issue of the time was performance enhancing drugs: Steroids.
During the closing decade of the Twentieth Century, the competition from other players and teams, the desire for fame, and the rewards of ever-skyrocketing salaries drove abuse of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) to unprecedented heights. Steroids had become so ubiquitous and rampant in the sport that the period from roughly 1994 (with the players’ strike) to 2007 (with the publication of “The Mitchell Report”) has become known as “The Steroid Era.”
With the fall of some of baseball’s most revered records during this period, many fans and sports writers have viewed PEDs as cheating – a way of artificially inflating the game and its statistics, rather than earning those numbers through dedication, hard work and discipline the way previous generations of ballplayers had done – which turned the game into a freak show rather than a sport. As a result, some have suggested placing an asterisk next to names in the record books to show which players “earned” their statistics and which players “cheated.” Thus, asterisks have come to symbolize this era and the animosity from outraged fans.
In the wake of all the celebrations and controversies, Major League Baseball has only relatively recently implemented much more comprehensive anti-steroid policies, and increased the severity of penalties for violations of those policies. Thus, steroid usage has been severely reduced to the point that The Steroid Era that we have known for the last decade and a half now exists only in history.
The Steroid Era needed to exist. It was a period that revolutionized baseball as we know it today by taking the game to the next level by allowing players to build super-human strength and stamina. This resultant elevated intensity of play served to reawaken the sport’s popularity following the devastating players’ strike of 1994, and that popularity has continued to grow right up to the present day.
But whether one ultimately believes PEDs to be beneficial to the game, or views them as a scar on the face of our national pastime, one fundamental truth remains constant: The Steroid Era is over and it’s time to move forward!
A.K. 12/7/2009
Further Commentary by the Composer:
There comes a point with every composition where enough time has passed since writing the work that the creator can revisit the product with significantly less of the subjective entanglements and emotional attachments inherent in artistic creation. In this case, it has been little more than one year, however upon revisiting this work as I include it in my website, I do find there are several things missing from my above program notes (albeit somewhat deliberately). I would like to take this moment to re-evaluate Asterisk and provide additional commentary to help clarify my intentions with this work.
The gist of this piece is the drawing a parallel between steroid use in baseball with avant-garde aesthetics in music. I very intentionally incorporated many avant-garde techniques, however I just as equally intentionally stole every single one of those techniques from other composers' works. The point here is that such aesthetics and techniques no longer have the cutting-edge quality they used to. At some point in the past, writing such music took a great deal of confidence on the part of the composer, for he/she was breaking new ground. But now, over a decade into the 21st century, it seems to me that it takes much more confidence and courage to write a simple, tonal, accessible composition and present it as "art-music" than it does to write a work like Asterisk.
Please note: This is not parody - I am not making fun of pieces that use these techniques, nor the composers who use them in a serious context - but rather irony. I am making a point by stating the opposite of that point - showing how unoriginal these techniques and aesthetics are by stealing every single one of them and stitching them together like Frankenstein to create a piece (and one, I might add, that I am quite pleased with and proud of). Even my above program notes are a very conscious ironic criticism on "serious program notes" by "serious composers", who blather on and on without ever saying anything remotely helpful to a listener or directly related to the music under discussion.
The indignation baseball fans feel over the steroid scandal and the indignation I feel over the current new-music scene are really not so different, after all.
A.K. 2/22/2011
“I miss playing baseball. I miss simply being a baseball player.” -Alex Rodriguez, 2/17/2009
My first year in Boston saw a significant resurgence of interest in my boyhood obsession with baseball. The previous five years of my life (since the notorious “Steve Bartman Incident” at Wrigley Field in 2003) were spent focusing on musical studies, relegating the sport to the distant background of my interests. During that hiatus, I missed many significant events: the crowning of a new home run king, both the Red and White Sox snapping their epic World Series title draughts, and the Moneyball revolution come to mind. But perhaps the single biggest issue of the time was performance enhancing drugs: Steroids.
During the closing decade of the Twentieth Century, the competition from other players and teams, the desire for fame, and the rewards of ever-skyrocketing salaries drove abuse of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) to unprecedented heights. Steroids had become so ubiquitous and rampant in the sport that the period from roughly 1994 (with the players’ strike) to 2007 (with the publication of “The Mitchell Report”) has become known as “The Steroid Era.”
With the fall of some of baseball’s most revered records during this period, many fans and sports writers have viewed PEDs as cheating – a way of artificially inflating the game and its statistics, rather than earning those numbers through dedication, hard work and discipline the way previous generations of ballplayers had done – which turned the game into a freak show rather than a sport. As a result, some have suggested placing an asterisk next to names in the record books to show which players “earned” their statistics and which players “cheated.” Thus, asterisks have come to symbolize this era and the animosity from outraged fans.
In the wake of all the celebrations and controversies, Major League Baseball has only relatively recently implemented much more comprehensive anti-steroid policies, and increased the severity of penalties for violations of those policies. Thus, steroid usage has been severely reduced to the point that The Steroid Era that we have known for the last decade and a half now exists only in history.
The Steroid Era needed to exist. It was a period that revolutionized baseball as we know it today by taking the game to the next level by allowing players to build super-human strength and stamina. This resultant elevated intensity of play served to reawaken the sport’s popularity following the devastating players’ strike of 1994, and that popularity has continued to grow right up to the present day.
But whether one ultimately believes PEDs to be beneficial to the game, or views them as a scar on the face of our national pastime, one fundamental truth remains constant: The Steroid Era is over and it’s time to move forward!
A.K. 12/7/2009
Further Commentary by the Composer:
There comes a point with every composition where enough time has passed since writing the work that the creator can revisit the product with significantly less of the subjective entanglements and emotional attachments inherent in artistic creation. In this case, it has been little more than one year, however upon revisiting this work as I include it in my website, I do find there are several things missing from my above program notes (albeit somewhat deliberately). I would like to take this moment to re-evaluate Asterisk and provide additional commentary to help clarify my intentions with this work.
The gist of this piece is the drawing a parallel between steroid use in baseball with avant-garde aesthetics in music. I very intentionally incorporated many avant-garde techniques, however I just as equally intentionally stole every single one of those techniques from other composers' works. The point here is that such aesthetics and techniques no longer have the cutting-edge quality they used to. At some point in the past, writing such music took a great deal of confidence on the part of the composer, for he/she was breaking new ground. But now, over a decade into the 21st century, it seems to me that it takes much more confidence and courage to write a simple, tonal, accessible composition and present it as "art-music" than it does to write a work like Asterisk.
Please note: This is not parody - I am not making fun of pieces that use these techniques, nor the composers who use them in a serious context - but rather irony. I am making a point by stating the opposite of that point - showing how unoriginal these techniques and aesthetics are by stealing every single one of them and stitching them together like Frankenstein to create a piece (and one, I might add, that I am quite pleased with and proud of). Even my above program notes are a very conscious ironic criticism on "serious program notes" by "serious composers", who blather on and on without ever saying anything remotely helpful to a listener or directly related to the music under discussion.
The indignation baseball fans feel over the steroid scandal and the indignation I feel over the current new-music scene are really not so different, after all.
A.K. 2/22/2011
ALEA III
Iakovos Konitopoulos, conductor
Iakovos Konitopoulos, conductor
