Program Note for Performance on 3/23

 To Jewish music listeners whom it may concern,

You are about to listen to two pieces by Evan Tucker, one of many Jewish composers featured on this very Jewish concert. Evan Tucker is not the best composer on this program, but he can assure with relative certainty that he is among the most Jewish - raised to speak both Hebrew and Yiddish, two languages which he tries to forget with only some success, and was brought up with so much Jewish content that he never really learned math or science (by the way, he's learning disabled). Were it not for music, he would not have known a single non-Jew until he was 16.   

The two pieces are settings of biblical Psalms, all 150 of which were supposedly written by King David, but probably written by an assistant adjunct court poet paid part time for full time work while still paying off their student loan along with two side jobs, one in a furniture moving company and one waiting tables in a Jerusalem restaurant for tips. The Psalms are generally regarded as so boring that John Mulaney based a whole bit on how much people hate them, but they were meant to be chanted as music, not poetry, and as music have a history so long and illustrious that they range from Monteverdi and William Byrd to Stravinsky and Steve Reich. 

The first of these Psalms is the first of these Psalms: Psalm 1. Mr. Tucker wrote this work in 2009: nearly homeless, living on the couch of friends with nothing to his name but fifty dollars and Sibelius software. He had dreams of starting a chorus and achieving 'choral glory', whatever that means, and rather than fix up his life, he decided to begin a mad project, ambitious as only undertaken by the delusionally desperate. For this chorus he'd found he would write settings of all 150 Psalms over the course of a lifetime. A Jewish Music Apollo Program. As befits a traditional chorus, this is a very traditional Psalm setting, no doubt filled with subconscious echoes of the Chazzanus and Yiddishkeit from which he then felt deeply alienated. 

The choral glory ended, but the dream of the Psalms did not. It followed him everywhere for years thereafter with almost supernatural obsession, and by 2016 he decided to resume them as electronic works: Musique Concrete, representations of the divine whose performers would not be present in corporeal form. 

The second of these Psalms, Psalm 16, was written when he had no idea what his next Psalm should be, but he had an idea in his back pocket. Baroque composers would set the old Spanish dance, La Folia, to music, creating virtuoso instrumental variations on a very simple sixteen-bar harmonic scheme. Mr. Tucker wanted to do a version that took La Folia through all its many possibilities in electronic music. This was just to be one of a number of La Folia settings he would do through the Psalms whenever he couldn't come up with a new idea for the next Psalm. 

After eight years, or possibly fifteen, Mr. Tucker is now 18 psalms into his project. He figures he will procrastinate on the rest until he's seventy, then do them all in a single all nighter.