I wrote this piece in my early twenties. Looking back, it stands out as not only the first work I'm still happy with, but also the first to deal more-or-less directly with themes of place, belonging/misplacement, liminality, and what I now know to be termed “psychogeography”. It is also among the first of my compositions to engage in a sort of meta-commentary on canon, though I had started thinking about that in a composition completed the previous year, Sado.
The original inspiration for this work was the book Cheap Hotels (ISBN 3-8228-1440-7) by travel journalist and photographer Daisann McLane. Ideally, Hotel Ecstasy should be performed in a darkened room. Behind the performers should be a large projection screen, upon which pictures of cheap hotel rooms (preferably a selection taken from the above-mentioned book) should be cast from a slide projector.
An excerpt from the book:
The strangest things can push the buttons of my hotel desire. All around the world, each culture holds fast to its own versions of hotel room comfort, and to the little detail that it would be unthinkable to overlook, even in the humblest lodging. In Japan it’s the teapot on the lacquer tray, beside a lacquer cup and a container of green tea. In Thailand, always, there’s a miniature house somewhere on the hotel premises, with little plastic people in it. Sometimes, as in the case of the ‘Liberace Room’ at San Antonio’s Painted Lady Inn, my hotel room window looks out on nothing more interesting than a side alley. But when alley-facing rooms are dripping in chandeliers and hung with gold-framed portraits of Liberace, how can you complain to management?
When flipping through the pages, it conjured a glut of fuzzy but potent feelings. When I was fortuitously asked to write for saxophone quartet, I had an instinctual feeling saxophone quartet could work to express them. I can’t quite remember how I came up with the title, but I do remember liking how saxophones in combination with the words “hotel” and “ecstasy” have a kind of seedy connotation. I liked the idea that this might set up the wrong context initially, leaving the listener a bit disoriented at first (“Where am I?”).
My composer's note on the score states that “I had the sound of a hand-pumped harmonium in mind” as I wrote this piece. Drukqs by Aphex Twin was a relatively new album at that point and quite a non-diffused influence on my music. Those who know the album will be familiar with the harmonium on the track QKThr, with its decidedly homespun and non-classical sounding performance. I seem to remember liking the idea of taking that sound (which in itself was quite surprising on an EDM album) and transplanting it into the concert hall. It felt mildly subversive and also not the usual saxophone quartet fare.