| program notes:
English Folk Songs was a venture of mine into musical territory that I have not touched for a very long time. I arranged these folk songs because I did not like the idea that one's music should be inherently a certain way, such as difficult to play, of a particular harmonic treatment, a particular orchestration, et al. At the same time, it is quite a challenge to write outside one's usual idiom, and I wrote these pieces as a way of posing the question to myself of whether the material or the way in which the material is
treated makes a piece unique and worthwhile. That being said, in writing English Folk Songs, I realized that if one can pinpoint the specificities of the treatment of material in a particular work, then presumably a similar work can be constructed with different material (i.e. folk songs and the minor scale instead of a tone row, spectrum, or other such device). In composing English Folk Songs, I had to consider the elements that truly made my music unique, regardless of any particular compositional model.
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