Publisher: Schott Music
Duration: ca. 11′
FP: Sep 26, 2002, Berlin (Ekkehard Windrich)
Further performances:
April 4, 2003, Stein am Rhein (Swiss premiere, Ekkehard Windrich)
June 3, 2015, Tirana/Albania (Albanian premiere, Ekkehard Windrich)
Introduction:
1.
“Sarasate, whose first concert I missed, performed Mendelssohn’s Violin concerto last Saturday. Personally, I would have been all right with him playing Pop goes the Weasel instead of a masterpiece. Even more, I think he would have liked them both.”
(George Bernard Shaw, excerpt from the musical feuilletons of corno di bassetto)
2.
Lightness
Quickness
Exactitude
Visibility
Multiplicity
[Consistency] (not completed)
(Italo Calvino, headlines of the Six Memos for the Next Millennium)
3.
Pop goes the Weasel was supported by a grant of the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony and is dedicated to Ekkehard Windrich. Originally, this work was mainly intended to deal, according to the Shaw quotation, with all problems of instrumental (and composer’s) virtuosity, with the lack of substance that goes along with easy success.
In the course of composing the conception grew even further. Out of a partly controlled stagnation, a net of inner citations, variations, interruptions and restarts emerges.
While reading Calvino’s Six Memos after the work’s completion I realized that Pop goes the Weasel tries to follow the basic ideas of Calvino’s essays – however, not with the parental work’s sovereignty but more dogged.