To my dear friend and colleague (alas, not any longer! Happy retirement, Anne), Dr. Anne Culver, for her trust and confidence in nominating me for this award.

To my wonderful colleagues of the Lamont School of Music, for supporting me with their participation in tonight's performance: James Maurer, concertmaster; Basil Vendryes, principal viola; Richard Slavich, principal cello; John Arnesen, principal double bass; Pam Endsley, principal flute; Art Bouton, flute, piccolo and alto flute; Chad Cognata, bassoon; Joe Docksey and Alan Hood, trumpets; Joe Martin, trombone; John Kinzie, percussion; Alice Rybak, piano.

To the Lamont Symphony and its conductor, Maestro Horst Buchholz, who worked very hard to make this first performance of the piece convincing and successful.

To Roscoe Hill, Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the time, for granting me a two-quarter Sabbatical Leave in 1996, at the end of which I managed to complete the bulk of the composition of Tiempo Muerto.

To the Lamont Music Associates, the dedicated support group of the Lamont School of Music, for awarding me a Faculty Grant that helped defray some of the costs associated with type-setting the musical score.

To the Rosenberry Fund, for a grant used to pay for costs associated with copying and binding of the orchestra parts.

To my wife, Victoria Brandys, without whom nothing in my life would have any importance.

1. The Persistence of Memory

According to Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish philosopher:

"One lives in memory and because of memory, and our spiritual life is, in the end, but the effort of our memories to persevere, to become hope, the effort of our past to become our future."

These words, from Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life of 1913, apply particularly well to those that have experienced a loss of place, a separation from the natural habitat where life began, especially if such separation comes about involuntarily or necessitated by circumstances beyond one's direct control.

A persistence of cultural memory is most notable in those individuals that belong to what we could call "cultures of exile": the Jewish people, with their millennial Diasporas, and the West African natives, forcefully brought to the Americas as slaves. Musically speaking, we see in these ethno-cultural groups the maintenance and development of what Spanish musicologist Federico Sopeña has called "folklore without landscape," the survival of ancestral musical traditions that remain in a people's memory despite the loss of the natural surroundings that first saw their genesis.

In all cases, these traditions gain an unmistakable tinge of nostalgia, of longing, that in a very human way, allows for what, at first sight, might seem like unlikely marriages of apparently antithetical traditions. The evolution of both Brazilian and Cuban music, for instance, readily shows how the encounter of two migrant peoples, the blacks and the European colonizers from Portugal and Spain, respectively, created a new music in which one of the most defining traits is a mixture of nostalgias known as "saudade" in Portuguese, as "morriña" in Spanish.

This is not an isolated phenomenon and can be equally discernible when studying the history of most Latin American folk music. The same can be said about the evolution of American jazz, that cauldron of traditions brought about by a multiplicity of migrant peoples.

Within the context of European art music, the role of émigré composers like Liszt and Chopin is vital in the development of musical nationalism. A logical byproduct of the Romantic aesthetic, with its exalted subjectivism, musical nationalism was another vehicle through which the Romantic preoccupation with individual experience, and its interpretation henceforth, found expression.

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