Marc Chan (1975-)
My Wounded Head 3

Rob Haskins, piano

Marc Chan’s My Wounded Head 3 is loosely based on the Passion Chorales from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion — a sequence of five chorales often collected under the title “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (“O Sacred Head Now Wounded”). Every measure in My Wounded Head 3 is also repeated and the number of repetitions is left up to the performer. As Chan says in his liner notes: “Repetition is also what all musicians do in private: we exalt in a moment that we wish to make perfect. … It is how I listen to a Bach chorale: with its intentional mishearings, its prolonged duration, and the patterns that shift in and out of focus. If a work is finite — a fixed point in history — then re-hearings are infinite. … And if one begins to imagine an infinite number of possible re-hearings of a Bach chorale, then one begins to lose the thread of repetition’s point of origin.” Pianist Rob Haskins says: “…the performer is invited to become a co-creator in many respects. … it’s the kind of piece that invites and rewards an intimate, ongoing relationship. I want to change and be changed by the music I play, and My Wounded Head 3 is one of a handful of pieces that I can say I would be willing to live with for the rest of my life.”