Daniel Stephen Johnson on "2001"

"In a sense, when composer/bassist Jack Vees began to write Party Talk for chamber ensemble and narrator, the words came first. Vees, a featured composer at the Yale School of Music's New Music New Haven concert this week, had stumbled years earlier on a Japanese friend's guide to American party etiquette. … As we chatted in the suite of recording studios under Sprague Hall, Vees suggested that working with an extra-musical element — text, images, drama — might also give the composer a kind of permission to experiment in sound without losing the audience's patience. For example: 'Throughout the past couple of centuries, the way audiences encountered new sounds, the way instruments got introduced into the orchestra, was often through opera.' Or in film works — 'especially in film works!' he says — like 2001, in which György Ligeti's Requiem and Atmosphères, both dense and dissonant works, become emotionally comprehensible to the novice listener thanks, in part, to its juxtaposition with Kubrick's cinematic imagery. And so it is with Party Talk" ("Music: Monologues, Monoliths," New Haven Advocate, 11/19/09, p. 42).