Bang on a Can

The idea of program music always seemed odd to me, but when I began writing this piece I had a physical vision in my mind. My neighborhood, like many in New York, has a varied history - 100 years ago it was an exotic slum, 100 years before that another kind of exotic slum - and I was thinking of all these things happening at once , all these different people dancing in the street. So I thought of the title literally, like 'good looking corpses' who died young, or like Messiaen's piece - Glittering Bodies - who were raised from the dead. "Exquisite Corpses" was a surrealist parlor game, where one person would draw a head, fold the paper and hand it to the next person, who would draw the torso, etc. The completed picture was the exquisite corpse - but I wasn't really thinking about that when I originally conceived the piece.

I'm very much a Macintosh composer: I used to have a real anti-technological attitude, but using the sequencer really influences the way I work. It gives back as much as any other artistic process, without compromise or loss of intensity, and in this case it directly led to some of the structural elements in this piece. With the sequencer as note processor I was able to move things around, take them out, put them back other places. I was connecting the knees to the neck, pulling out the head, so in the end I ended up playing "Exquisite Corpses" after all. -Phil Kline

Exquisite Corpses was commissioned by Bang on a Can with funding form the Jerome Foundation.