So In Love

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Details

Refraction No. 3: “So in Love” by Greg Anderson, based on “So In Love” from Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate / Solo piano / Full score / Difficulty: Very advanced / Duration: 5 mins / Pages: 5 / Copyright: 2012 / Work number: 068 / Apple Music / Spotify

Program Notes

Refraction No. 3: “So In Love” transforms Cole Porter’s celebrated love song into a virtuosic concert etude built around the piano’s sostenuto pedal. Part of my series of musical “Refractions,” the piece takes Porter’s melody and subjects it to a highly personal reimagining, magnifying the deep desire and vulnerability present in the original song.

The arrangement draws inspiration from the song’s most unsettling confession: “So taunt me, and hurt me, deceive me, desert me…” Porter’s melody is itself an act of yearning, repeatedly leaping upward in ever more desperate attempts to reach beyond itself. To intensify this longing, I layered the melody in overlapping canons, allowing its upward-reaching gestures to climb ever higher, as though the music cannot stop striving toward an unattainable goal.

The work uses the middle, sostenuto pedal to sustain the melody independently, while surrounding it with dry, fragmented interruptions that anxiously dart across the keyboard like nervous tics. The result is a striking sonic illusion: a warm, singing voice seems to occupy one acoustic world while brittle, almost mechanical gestures inhabit another. As the music’s emotional pressure builds, these interruptions become increasingly insistent, finally erupting into jagged virtuosic outbursts at the work’s climax.

— Greg Anderson