Plastic Structures (2012)
for solo piano
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Carl Patrick Bolleia, piano
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PROGRAM NOTE
Plastic Structures was commissioned in 2012 by the New Jersey Arts Collective for a recital at the Montclair Art Museum featuring one-minute “micro-commissions” performed by pianist Carl Patrick Bolleia. The commissions reflect on a specific work by Philip Guston: Untitled #142. The painting is an example of Guston’s late style, in which he returned to objective painting after many years of primarily abstract work. Plastic Structures is similarly objective, using a simple three-pitch motive (C-sharp, E, and D) treated as an “object”—observed from different angles but not developed. A fourth pitch (G) is added near the music’s conclusion. In a 1979 interview about his representational late work, Guston opined: “I think you enter into a really complex, almost insoluble, ‘contest’ between meaning and structure—plastic structure—and that is what I miss in totally nonobjective painting.”