Finnissy’s work is yet another of his many transcriptions/paraphrases drawing from diverse musical sources across and beyond the Western Classical canon. Here, he combines two of his primary source interests under one roof: folk music and 19th-century frivolity. These are represented by the Irish folk song “Robin Adair,” an immensely popular air at the turn of the 19th century (named in Jane Austen’s Emma!); and also equally in Beethoven’s arrangement of the song as for three voices and piano trio, his “Irische Volksweise” [Irish Folktune], WoO 157 no. 7. Beethoven’s modestly artful arrangement does reframe the tune quite a bit as “chamber music,” and the song’s aspiration to profundity is most obviously attempted with seven new verses, whose English stanzas (by Robert Burns) and their German translations bear almost no correlation in meaning or poetic feeling to the traditional English text. These various aspects and implications of intertextuality (transtext, metatext, and paratext) are not lost on Finnissy. All filter down, however abstractly, into his diverse collection of movements, each a take-off (send-up?) of Beethoven’s arrangement, music, and the man himself as musical objets trouvés, their various facets viewed through the lenses of Finnissy’s syncretic compositional language, inspired by film techniques especially. The first movement is by far the longest and most varied of the set, functioning as a microcosm for the work as a whole, its seven sections also tracing the abstract narrative of Beethoven’s seven stanzas. The third movement (Andante amoroso) is a disorienting yet soothing “overdub” of Beethoven’s material in one hand, altered significantly but still recognizable, with the other hand interspersing extraneous material. The fifth movement (Presto agitato, spettrale) is a fleeting repository of artifactual remains: little spectral groupings and ghostly resonances of the folk song’s “Scotch snap” figure, a salient rhythmic signature that Beethoven inexplicably excised from his arrangement of “Robin Adair.”

To further indulge the metaphors of digital culture, Internet videos, and meme-ing—a landscape in which (forgive the pun) virtually all of our inter-activities have now been relegated—I gloss the rest of the program: Johannes Quint’s Ein Akkord is a meditative clip of Beethoven’s wildly dissonant, off-beat, floating chord from the first movement of the Sonata Op. 101, like a mesmerizingly filtered GIF on perpetual loop. Ann Silsbee’s Bagatelle is a beguiling bitonal mandala, a brief musical moment of content copied and superimposed in out-of-phase overlay. Finally, the program is bookended with two of my own, beginning with a boisterous Bagatelle, (un)inspired by rote exercises in theory and counterpoint (as Beethoven studied with Haydn), where jumpcuts and jarring edits abound, as in the uniformly super-short videos on the now-extinct Vine platform (RIP). We end with giant moon / light steps, a meme of a meme of a meme (TL;DR: “Moonlight Sonata but it’s Giant Steps”). Hopefully, my little sonata quasi una sacrilegia soothes more than it offends, a small demonstration of how even major (sorry, pun) and unsettling paradigm shifts can potentially yield “sometimes…astounding things.”

Thank you for reading, watching, and listening! Special thanks to Annette Richards, Mike Lee, Xak Bjerken, Thomas Feng, Gina Genova, and Michael Finnissy.