Program Note:   

A Dog’s Life is a thirty-five minute concert work for mixed ensemble (or chamber orchestra) that can be performed either as accompaniment to Charlie Chaplin's 1918 silent short film A Dog's Life (as it was for the premiere) and in concert or as a ballet score. For the joy of it, I set myself several technical challenges before writing any notes down on paper. First, of course, I wanted a piece that would work either with or without visuals. I required that the music alone had to be of sufficient interest that it didn't lose the audience without the film's narrative. Second, I wanted to use no more than three musical ideas to generate the score. The first was a falling re-do#-la-re melodic motive that has meant a lot to me over the years and originates in my opera Shining Brow associated with the character of Mamah Cheney. In this score, I pin it to the character of Scraps, the Tramp's beloved dog. The second idea was a rhythmic motive  short-long-short-long that I have played around with since I first attached it to the male characters in my opera Bandanna.  It is ubiquitous in this score, in which I associate it with the character of Chaplin / the Tramp. The third unifying idea  (and technical challenge) was that the entire score is in multiples of "quarter note = 60," with nowhere a ritardando or accelerando to be found.  

 --Daron Hagen, April 2017