Six Riffs After Ovid
for solo oboe (2021)

Titus Underwood, oboe

1. MACEO PARKER (Pan)
2. BUDDY HOLLY (Phaeton)
3. JONI MITCHELL (Niobe)
4. JIM MORRISON (Bacchus)
5. PRINCE (Narcissus)
6. ARETHA FRANKIN (Arethusa)

Instrumentation: Oboe

Publisher: Michael Daugherty Music

World Premiere:
Bang on a Can Marathon, April 18, 2021  |  Commissioned by Bang on a Can

Program Note:

Six Riffs after Ovid (2021) for solo oboe was commissioned by Bang on a Can, and premiered on a Bang on a Can Marathon on April 18, 2021 by oboist Titus Underwood.

My composition is inspired by The Metamorphoses, written by the Roman poet Ovid in 8 AD. Like Six Metamorphoses after Ovid for solo oboe, composed in 1951 by the English composer Benjamin Britten, I have selected six characters from Ovid’s epic poem:

Pan, who played on a reed pipe; Phaeton, who rode the chariot of the sun and was struck down by a thunderbolt; Niobe, who lamented the death of her children and was turned into a mountain; Bacchus, who revelled at drunken feasts; Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image and turned into a flower;  and Arethusa, who was turned into a fountain.

Transforming these characters from classical mythology into icons from American mythology, the six movements of my composition are musical metamorphoses with a modern twist:

1. 1. Maceo Parker (Pan)
   2. Buddy Holly (Phaeton)
   3. Joni Mitchell (Niobe)
   4. Jim Morrison (Bacchus)
   5. Prince (Narcissus)
   6. Aretha Franklin (Arethusa)

~Program note by Michael Daugherty