haze by erichonour

Composed in 2002.

For alto saxophone, electric guitar, piano, percussion, violoncello, and electric bass.

Recording from a live performance at Northwestern University.

"haze" came from a free association, like many of my works. In general, my music starts with a title first, with musical ideas generated from my responses to that title and different associations I make with it. In this case, the word "haze" came to me as an interesting title for a work. I immediately began thinking in terms of aleatoric music, existing as a “haze of possibilities.” From there it was an immediate jump to the instrumentation. It seemed to me that this group of instruments, with its wide variety of tone colors, could provide quite a range of possibilities in an aleatoric work. The next step was a word-based association, to Jimi Hendrix’s "Purple Haze," which shapes several structural layers of this work, though it is generally obscured by the haze on top.