Junk Mail

Junk Mail is an anachronistic piano solo in seven short movements (each lasting less than one minute). The titling of each movement comes from actual junk mail that was delivered to my mailbox on Lincoln Boulevard in Los Angeles during the course of one April afternoon in 2013.

The idea for the piece was a response to happening upon several visual artworks using Dadaism at the Modern Museum of Art in Los Angeles. It appeared curiously liberating to ascribe random meanings to music’s intrinsically meaningless Eb’s and F#’s to nonsensical titles. That idea was changed when some of the titles received a less than enthusiastic response from a group of pianists in New York City looking for pieces to program for an upcoming concert that Winter. It then made pulling titles directly from the mailbox not only surprising but more intriguingly appropriate towards following the absurdist creed that writing the piece would be less of a reactionary work if did not use the prevailing standards of writing a musical tone poem and were written according to few, none or completely nonsensical rules as was the trend in certain European circles following WWI and was a prelude to postmodernism and pop art.

Therefore, this music’s genesis began at a point with having seemingly random titles based on the type of junk mail that was going to be received and abstract music with no reason or logic behind it was to be written. The collection of the day’s junk mail are (in order):

MOVEMENTS

1.) Furniture Sale; 2.) Coupons; 3.) Two Local Pizza Menus (A. and B.); 4.) Vote for Congressman Bloomfield; 5.) The Neighbor’s Mail (again); 6.) Continuing Education Coursework; 7.) Hi-Speed Bundles