Color

Color is based upon five English folk dances: Stanes Morris, Stingo, Daphne, Argeers, and The Slip. The musical treatment is improvisatory, playful, mischievous, and generally compact in structure, with a strong emphasis on style and tone color.

Quite a few melodies were looked over before settling on the ones for this suite. The entire English Dancing Master (1651) of John Playford, and most of van Eyck’s Der Fluyten Lust-hof (1646) were consulted for the tunes, which are all English country dances -- that is, instrumental folk dances. Yet the fact is, the focus of this music is not the melody, but rather setting -- that is, the accompaniment, the texture, the color, and the harmony. It might be argued that to some extent not only the focus but the very reason-for-being of this piece is its setting; that the style has become the thing itself; and more specifically, the aspect most important thereof is the timbre, or instrumental color. This the title: Color.

Program Note by composer