Program Notes

The idea for this work came when bassoonist Anthony Parnther said he would play the piece I would write for the ArtOfVirus project.

The ArtOfVirus is an initiative by Modern Art orchestra using music to model the spread of a pandemic, the mutation of a virus, its latency, disappearance, and re-appearance, in other words behavior. Unfortunately, these questions became part of our everyday lives for the past weeks and months during 2020. AOV is a grade-scale virtual work of art created by Kornél Fekete-Kovács.

Kornél created a melody consisting of nine notes, which can be considered the strain of the virus. This melody lacks rhythm, tonality, harmony or any other context so it is easily adapted to different musical trends and styles of different artists. As a first step, he sent the virus motif to ten composers, who created the first mutations of the body, thus the first ten branches of the spread of the virus. Each sent their nine-note virus to another two composers and so it began. I received my nine notes from Barbara Croall [B Eb B Bb E C F# F D] with the first four notes based on the call of the mourning dove. I had the image of a tree, hearing the call of the mourning dove, deciding to sing back!

My parent is #1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1 Barbara Croall (Odawa) Pipigwan descended from Peter Eötvös (Hungary) #1.