Chester Jankowski: music catalogue

Irrational Exuberance is a piece that works to summarize on a large scale many of the compositional ideas that had occupied me during my years in the University of Toronto graduate school of music, 1992-1998. This was somewhat intentional since the piece was submitted as my doctoral thesis, but after all, it's a piece of music with a logic of its own and not a scholarly work. Self-similarity, where forms are expressed at various scales, stochastic or chaotic processes (and the Max programming environment), the exciting opportunities that come from pairing live instruments with taped music, all of these figure prominently in the piece.

The work is in a single movement with five sections that are relate to both the movements of a traditional symphony and the sections of a sonata form. You might say that these are superficial similarities since this is not a tonal work.

I - first movement/first theme
II - slow movement
III - scherzo/second theme
IV - finale/recapitualtion
V - finale continued/coda

Irrational Exuberance is dedicated to my sister, Susan Jankowski-Fratarcangelli