Anecdoche

Listen to the work here!
 
Anecdoche is a work for sax quintet (SAATB), with title taken from John Koenig’s
collection entitled The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which first existed as a blog
before becoming a book. Koenig defines anecdoche as “a conversation in which
everybody is talking but nobody is listening,” where everyone simply borrows bits of others’ personal anecdotes without really responding, until the conversation putters out. The word bears similarities to both anecdote, a retelling of part of one’s life, and synecdoche, a figure of speech by which a part represents a whole or vice versa.
 
I have represented here the idea of an anecdoche in two contrasting movements for sax quintet. The first movement, “Everybody’s Talking”, is a study on the asymmetric layering of five short motifs, which slowly converge on a single key center without becoming any more melodically coherent. The second movement, “Nobody’s Listening”, gives the musical voices a chance to try having a conversation again, cast as a set of variations on a neo-Classical theme, which incorporates the short motifs from the first movement as the variations progress. This can represent the musical voices finding a sense of symbiosis in their conversation, and finding a joyous and triumphant ending.