This reading material exists to be consumed as you listen to the music of Evan Tucker. Please do not read this while other people are performing. as that is impolite, and while we are all tempted every day of our lives to be rude, it does not become one to add to the obnoxiousness of a world in which the cyberbullying of instagram and twitter already seems impossible to imagine without. So please only read it while you are listening to Mr. Tucker's music, and please only read the program past this point if you find yourself bored and/or confused. If you are intrigued by Mr. Tucker's music, you may stop reading right now....
.....Alright, now that all of you are bored with his music and are therefore still reading, let us confide in you, dear un-attentive listener, the truth of the matter, which is that like all musicians, Mr. Tucker is highly self-conscious about presenting his music to you. It's not that he finds it bad, though he hears it suffused with that touch of bombast present in all that he does; but as all composers are, he's aware of that sad possibility of polite but uncomprehending audiences who listen to what a new composer produces out of a sense of responsibility, but then go about their lives unaffected by what he's written - another forgettable experience that takes years to assemble, minutes to consume, and an instant to forget. If you are reading this, dear listener, you probably number yourself among those uncomprehenders. Fie upon you, for shame and p'shaw.
This anxiety is present in all artists of every form and every genre, but how much more true is it for the composer? It is a truth universally acknowledged that most Americans of the 21st century often find listening to classical music of any kind a chore, even classical musicians sometimes do. Therefore the thought occurred to him that it might be a good idea to give a little bit of reading material to go along with it so that the uncomprehending listener (in whom, once again, for shame sir or madame or theyperson of philistine incomprehension) might slightly better understand to what his music might be alluding.
Of course, Mr. Tucker thought about turning this explanation of his music into a fire and brimstone Jeremiad bemoaning tempora and mores like so many elderly and often atonal composers saw fit to issue in their working years from the humiliating ignominy of their tenure granted endowed chairs while their Baby Boomer students' eyes glazed over before they left class and blasted Led Zepplin while smoking 'grass' while they should have been practicing. Mr. Tucker is rather known himself for blasting similar denunciations into the ether of the internet, and god knows, he never cared much for those bluesman plagiarists in Zepplin, though he certainly prefers them to Mike Love and Billy Joel....
(if you're still reading, dear listener, his first piece is probably over by now so you should be listening to the next composer's music)
But in this era of trial and tribulation, our troubles are so omnipresent that they needn't elaboration even from those clearly willing to give it. What is there he can add about our current zeitgeist you haven't read a thousand times before in twitter-length compaction?
Whatever he has to say about this era of ours matters not at all; for the great Evan Tucker, as I'm sure his orotund prose telegraphs by now, does not exist in your universe. He is, or at least his music is, an holographic apparition from a parallel universe, perhaps even a parallel Twenty-First century; or perhaps he's rather a bizarre admixture of nineteenth and the twenty-third centuries, creating music in which a seemingly useless database of music's entire history, and perhaps even the history of the arts itself, exists alongside technology just barely yet invented, still in its incubatory phases, which more talented musicians would never think yet to use.
'Talent' is, of course, the world's most loaded word. Some would say it is in the eye of the beholder, Boston musical legend Gunther Schuller would say that what seems like talent is the hard work that mines what is only the potential for talent. But Mr. Tucker has well over enough useless musical erudition to realize that by any metric, he has no talent at all, just a certain low musical cunning - on the one hand, his ineptitude at the violin he's played incomptetently since he was three years old is second only to his lack of desire to remedy it through practice, his knowledge of theory remains sadly rudimentary for reasons we shall yet explain, and his achievements in music? Well, you're currently listening to the highlight of his musical career so far.
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