Eleanor Hovda

for clarinet, electric guitar, cello, doublebass, and percussion

 

"Mountain Goat File is made for the Bang on a Can All-Stars. It is a piece from other pieces, because BOAC All-Stars wanted to perfrom an already-extant piece, and I decided to make a piece where the new ideas would be the combination of instruments and the overall form, but the specific music for each instrument would be borrowed from other pieces. My task was to work with already-extant material in a new format. Mountain Goat File, as a title, comes from a file I have in my computer for things that relate tangentally or, only if one makes a huge conceptual leaps from one place to another. I have been interested for some time in "journey music" - music that deals with testing boundaries, traversing shifiting landscapes and projecting evolving fields of energy. Mountain Goat File leaps, rather than shifts, from pinnacle to pinnacle. Sometimes it is isolated and slippery there, and sometimes it is a sociable plateau."