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pages: pg 1, pg
19, pg 30
In Winter, for orchestra, was composed in late fall 2006. The
initial ideas for the work emerged during my stay in Minnesota last
winter when I engaged in intensive study of orchestral literature. Winter,
incidentally, was something with which I had little recent experience
after a decade in San Diego, but the shock of frigid winds and snowy
walkways has merely a marginal relation to the musical ideas I developed.
Winter has broader implications, of course, and it evokes iconic images
that one imagines are unique to each person. My own were born from a
jumble of sources, most importantly from my childhood in New England,
where I would often go cross country skiing through the ample woods
and fields in the area. In these idyllic, rural settings where snow
had fallen, I was always conscious of a pervasive silence, of stillness.
While my own observations about winter were essential to the work, I
was compelled to write the piece after encountering a haiku written
by Basho. He writes:
Winter solitude –
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.
Clearly, Basho’s experience of winter in 17th century Japan differs
from anything I have faced, but for me the beauty of his writing (and
of haiku in general) is in its capacity to evoke a rich series of images
and ideas through a remarkable economy of words.
In Winter is a quiet piece, marked by slowly shifting bands
of sound. The work is sparse: there are no themes or figurative gestures
to speak of; rather harmonies are frozen, and significant emphasis is
placed on reconfiguring the orchestral colors that comprise these harmonies
in order to offer a dynamic (or prismatic) view of the materials. There
are three basic ideas in the work, each one allied with a line from
the haiku, and like its textual source, the music is at once concentrated
and evocative. The work does not intend to present a particular image
or series of images, nor does it illustrate a program; however, in its
recursive ruminations of the haiku emerges a physicality animated by
spaces, textures, and sensations I associate with winter.
The metaphorical lens offered here is, I hope, helpful in establishing
the basis for the work’s composition and for the aphoristic nature
of the materials. The piece offers a means of listening to the orchestra
in a renewed manner. Woodwinds, in particular, are exposed in a number
of places, never with a soaring soloistic melody, but rather emerging
as crystalline, isolated figures. Indeed the contrast of sounds that
are combined and diffused throughout many instruments with sounds that
appear concentrated in one instrumental voice becomes a sort of motive
in this otherwise non-motivic piece.
