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The Transitive Property of Equality (2005)
Laura Karpman (b. 1959)
Born in Los Angeles, Laura Kaupman began composing at age seven. She went on to study in France with renowned teacher Nadia Boulanger and in the United States at the Juilliard School of Music where she received her doctorate in studies with Milton Babbitt. She has written a considerable amount for film and television and has won four Emmy Awards for her scores to the science fiction series “Taken” and the series of PBS specials called “The Living Eden.”
The Transitive Property of Equality received its first performance on October 1, 2005 in New York’s Carnegie Hall by the Red Bull Artsehero, for whom it was written. Laura Kaupmanr has provided the following notes:
The Transitive Property of Equality is a logical syllogism, expressed as:
For all numbers a, b and c, if a = b and b = c, then a = c
The Transitive Property of Equality mashes familiar pieces of classical music together, using a contemporary end with orchestral means. Taking the audience and players on a journey of unfolding sounds, the work discovers familiar orchestral resonances and reclaims ones’ relationship with the classical music through digital electronics married to the live symphony orchestra.
The Transitive Property of Equality celebrates renowned works by Mozart, Rossini, Mussorgsky, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Dvorák with interpretations and new music by composer Laura Kaupman. Highlighting both the very familiar and lesser known commonalities of these works, while jamming on the rhythmic and melodic material that is suggested to our contemporary ears, The Transitive Property of Equality builds a continuum of symphonic sounds that stretches from 1773 to 2005, encouraging the listener to re-imagine his/her relationship to the orchestra.
All of the familiar orchestral excerpts in The Transitive Property of Equality are exact quotations of the original pieces. No note, key, or dynamic is changed. The only element that I affected was orchestrational additions (no subtractions or reconfigurations) in response to the unique instrumental complement of the Red Bull Artsehero. Part of my rehearing of these works changed when I conceived of listening to these works with, for example, seven percussionists instead of the traditional two or three. The electronic samples that weave through the work, often building the grooves and hits that drive the work are all extracted from the works themselves, so that all of the music is derived from sampling and spinning old sounds with new.
In developing The Transitive Property of Equality for the Red Bull Artsehero, I imagined ways of thinking about the orchestral music I knew and loved through the lens of the mash-ups and remixes that have emerged today. The more I thought about connecting the old and new, the more I began re-listening to classical “warhorses,” hearing their odd commonalities and realizing the organic, groove-based, often almost remixed, elemental essences already present in so many of these pieces, I ultimately arrived at a number of passages, from the first movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 to Rossini’s Overture to The Barber of Seville, to Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, to Tchaikovsky’s Waltz from Swan Lake. At a larger level, though, The Transitive Property of Equality is formally most closely related and influenced by Dvorák’s Symphony No. 9.
Antonín Dvorák composed his Symphony No. 9 in 1893 and subtitled it “From the New World.” The piece, introduced in Carnegie Hall, was based on the composer’s exploration of African and Native American music. Dvorák came as an outsider to New York at the end of the 19th century and allowed this music to infiltrate his musical psyche. Throughout the Symphony No. 9 the composer quotes from these traditional sounds alongside important referential classical sounds. This joining of two worlds is very much the same goal as Artsehero’s, and so The Transitive Property of Equality suddenly emerged of the same seed—rehearing, listening anew and mashing seemingly disparate sounds together.
Not recorded
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