Jonathan Sokol, DM 2011
Gradient: Waves [12:15] February 5, 2011, IU dissertation
IU New Music Ensemble; David Dzubay, conductor
A Mythology (2009)
3.3.3.3/4.3.3.1/timp + 3 perc/harp/piano/strings
IU Concert Orchestra, Charles Latshaw, director.
Reading, November 29, 2009
Jonathan Sokol (b. 1981) is currently a doctoral candidate at the
Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he has studied with
Sven-David Sandstrom, Michael Gandolfi, Claude Baker, and P. Q. Phan.
Sokol's music has been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and
the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and he has received international
performances in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Brazil. Selected
awards include: winner of the 8th annual NEC/BMOP ConNECtion
competition (2005); winner of the Indiana University Kuttner String
Quartet competition (2007); winner of the 2nd annual MAYO Composition
Contest (2009); and recipient of an ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young
Composer’s Award (2010).
PROGRAM NOTE
A Mythology attempts to reinterpret literary forms and ideas into
music. Structures that began in the realm of prose—i.e. Essays and
Poems, among others—have over time found new life in musical thought,
and mythologies, too, are unique in form and content, often exceeding
the legends, folktales, stories and moral offerings to which some
misconceptions limit them.
While not a literal re-telling of any one particular Myth, A Mythology
is rather a celebration of the commonality between innumerable cultures
and religions whose mythic fables seek to identify solutions, usually
via the supernatural, to life’s greatest mysteries. One such mystery is
the creation of the world (including humanity, life and the universe),
and this is the specific type of myth that A Mythology explores.
Every culture and religion has various explanations and stories
regarding the world’s birth, firmly rooted in the mythology of its
people. Furthermore, and especially with creation myths, common threads
or motifs run throughout, often providing an underlying skeletal
structure that is seemingly reinterpreted by other cultures. A
Mythology latches onto these motifs and tells its own narrative of
creation.