Op. 171 SEX AND THE ORCHESTRA
(January 23, 2009)
I. Happy Funeral Music (The Little Death)
II. Downfall (Detumescence)
Score:
https://imslp.org/wiki/Sex_and_the_Orchestra%2C_Op.171_(Alburger%2C_Mark)
Performance:
February 28, 2009
San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra
Old First Church, San Francisco, CA
Recording:
IMPROVISED LIAISONS
(Complete Works, Volume 80)
SEX AND THE ORCHESTRA is a diptych in preparation for the mounting of Sex and the Bible, in the spring of 2010, as part of San Francisco Cabaret Opera's Fresh Voices X season. The two pieces are new orchestrations of Happy Funeral Music from Diocletian: A Pagan Opera, Op. 90 (2000, depicting a Christian massacre), and Downfall from Samson and Delilah, Op. 65 (1998, Abimelech's death by the hand of a woman in the Book of Judges). The music is troped respectively on titular compositions by Henry Purcell and Camille Saint-Saens.
Dr. Mark Alburger (b. 1957, Upper Darby, PA) is a multiple-award-winning ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. His compositions are generally assembled or troped over pieces ranging from ancient and world music, to postmodern art and vernacular sources -- 171 opus numbers (markalburgerworks.blogspot.com), including 16 concertos, 20 operas, 9 symphonies, and the four-hours-and-counting opera-oratorio work-in-progress, The Bible. He is Music Director of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra (sfcco.org) and San Francisco Cabaret Opera / Goat Hall Productions (goathall.org), Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music Journal (21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com and 21st-centurymusic.com), Instructor in Music Literature and Theory at Diablo Valley and St. Mary's Colleges, and Music Critic for Commuter Times. He studied at Swarthmore College (B.A.) with Gerald Levinson and Joan Panetti, Dominican University (M.A., Composition) with Jules Langert, Claremont Graduate University (Ph.D., Musicology) with Roland Jackson, and privately with Terry Riley. Alburger writes daily at markalburger2009.blogspot.com and is in the fourth year of an 11-year project recording his complete works for New Music Publications and Recordings.
