Coleccion nocturna

Coleccion Nocturna was composed in 1982 and 1983 for the clarinettist William Powell, and the pianist Zita Carno. It exists in two versions: one for the two instrumentalists and four-channel tape, and the other for soloists, mid-sized orchestra, and tape. On the technical level, the piece takes a wholly self-contained musical object from a work that I composed for solo piano, entitled ?Rocket Summer?, and develops five extended variations on it. The segment itself is about thirty seconds' duration and was selected because of an "emotional profile" that I found to be quite resonant with the extraordinarily rich poem of Pablo Neruda from which my composition appropriates its title. Each of these five continuous variations develops characteristics latent in the original musical and poetic originals as the musical perspective moves progressively more distant from, and then successively closer to uncovering the musical source. The trajectory of Neruda's poem lent an emotional and psychological context for the music, though not any moment-to-moment descriptive ?transcription? of imagery. Nevertheless, the haunting isolation, and fecund nostalgia bloated with romantic yearnings become explicit as a fertile ground for the composition at the close, only in retrospect. The orchestral version of the work was premiered in the 1985-6 season by the Buffalo Philharmonic with the composer as conductor, and Yvar Mikhashoff, pianist, with William Powell, clarinets. The chamber version is available on Mode CD 89, the orchestral version on EMF 33, with Jean Kopperud, and Jim Winn as soloists. ?David Felder