Chris Byman

PROGRAM NOTE

Coming back from cottage country during the last dregs of summer, I stopped off at a peaceful and tiny (almost private) beach that was located at the end of a road that flows into the Winnipeg River, near Lac Du Bonnet, Manitoba. I spent a good 30 minutes just sitting on a bench listening to birds, waves, winds, reeds, and still, deep breaths with only my racing thoughts to keep me company. As I looked out at the water, to my left was a tall tree growing out of the sand. Nailed to the tree, high up in its lofty branches, was a wooden sign with milled letters: "Harry's Beach".

This piece is inspired by the electronic music genre of vaporwave - a musical practice of taking a sample, really slowing it down, and creating something new. Inspired also by Ludwig van Beethoven's thoughts in his Heiligenstadt Testament and the final lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby ("So we beat on, boats against the current"), I set out to create a work meditating on our individual perseverance and need to accept and even go so far as love our respective fates - a feeling I felt in silence while enjoying a summer's afternoon watching waves come ashore. The musical sample used here (slowed down and doubled over multiple times, and rhythmically manipulated with constant, driving eighth notes) was a few of the first measures from Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major "Eroica".

"komm wann du willst, ich gehe dir mutig entgegen."

"Come when thou wilt, I shall meet thee bravely."

-Ludwig Van Beethoven, Heiligenstadt Testament

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary ... but love it."

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo