​VAMP (2023)
Duration: ca. 25 minutes
fl.clar.vln.vcl.perc.pno.

Program Note: VAMP began its undead life as newly-composed score for the 1915 silent melodrama, A Fool There Was.  The film is notable for being one of the few surviving movies starring silent film icon Theda Bara, as well as being the source of her persona,“The Vamp.”  A Fool There Was tells the tale of John Schuyler, a respectable, upper-class family man who is seduced to his downfall by a character known only as The Vampire (Bara).  While ostensibly a morality tale, A Fool There Was invited audiences to be titillated by Bara’s proto-femme fatale, and her flaunting of contemporary sensibilities and decency.  

VAMP embraces this tension between sermon and scandal, filtering campy clichés of early film music through a series of hypnotic rhythmic loops and timbral distortions.  As a concert suite, VAMP comprises five scenes from the original film:  The highly stylized introduction to each of the movie’s main characters (I. Overture, II. Dramatis Personae), the Vampire’s seduction of Schuyler (III. Seduction at Sea), Mrs. Schuyler’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity (IV. The Vamp Returns), and the death of the Vampire’s previous victim, foreshadowing Schuyler’s fate (V. “Kiss Me, My Fool!”)​
Commissioned by the Society for New Music
​Premiered by the Society for New Music, September 2023
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