Delusions of Grandeur
The Grand Delusion
string quartet (1988) 25' (12'/13')

published by Sweet Child Music

• composers' Forum New Music/New Composers Award, 1989
• selected for Artsweek '92, University of Colorado at Boulder

"Paul Siskind's Delusions of Grandeur had a lively drama and freshness."
John Rockwell, New York Times, 3/10/89

"... [an] imaginative, skillfully crafted score that left one asking for more."
Peter G. Davis, New York Magazine, 3/27/89

"...a tautly arranged panorama of highly effective string gestures...."
Kyle Gann, The Village Voice, 4/4/89

"...showed considerable compositional craft, not least in the fugue at the end of the second part."
Michael Fleming, St. Paul Pioneer Press, 5/22/90

This diptych explores the exaggeration of musical affect and expression. Quickly-changing moods, densities, textures, dynamics, registers, and coloristic effects are used to create a variegated, unsettling atmosphere, which at times treads dangerously close to the border between an ultra-heightened sense of drama and empty bombast. The word-play of the titles reflects the inversional formal and motivic relationships between the movements. While the work is not overtly programmatic, it is, to a degree, a reflection upon attitudes that a composer might have about the process of composition.