Program Note

Composed as companion piece to L’Invitation au Voyage in 1972, A Black November Turkey gets its strange title from a Richard Wilbur poem. This savage barnyard allegory is set against an inane patter of clucking chickens (marked “with bitter sarcasm” in the score), and portrays a sad and endless futility, a celebrated and unnoticed death.

I made this arrangement for the Corigliano Quartet in 2003.

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— John Corigliano