Roger Zahab - Second Mass for the Poor

Second Mass for the Poor
Date Completed:	July 2, 1988
Duration:	7 minutes
Instrumentation:	flute and piano
First Performance:	February 9, 1993 by Elizabeth Brown, flute and Susan Walters, piano, Renee Weiler Concert Hall of the Greenwich House Music School, New York City. February 9, 1993 by Elizabeth Brown, flute and Susan Walters, piano, Renee Weiler Concert Hall of the Greenwich House Music School, New York City. It is inscribed for Elizabeth Brown
Comments:	The European premiere was given in London during the Vth CIMA Festival at City University, London, UK, on 2 April 1998 by Laura Falzon, flute and Chadd Merrigan, piano.
Program Notes:	Second Mass for the Poor was written for Elizabeth Brown during the summer of 1988 in Long Island City, New York. It follows, in my imagination, the unwitting vow of poverty made after I began to refuse free-lance work and refers also to Erik Satie's Mass for the Poor, which I got to know from a recording in Bennett Lerner's apartment, where I was then living. The seven-minute work is composed of densely-packed and often irreconcilable statements for flute and piano which must, like all masses, be accepted strictly on faith. I revised the work in the Fall of 1991 and the the first performance was given on February 9, 1993 by Elizabeth Brown, flute and Susan Walters, piano at the Renee Weiler Concert Hall of the Greenwich House Music School in New York City. RZ