Don't Write Your Own Reviews (New Work: Concerto for Six Instruments)

...except this isn't a review, it is program notes. What's the difference, you ask? Lovely weather we're having.

As I mentioned last time, I spent the first half of this year working with recalcitrant sketches for one or two chamber pieces, which could not decide what their settings should be. Ultimately I realized that the style had degenerated into academicism and that it was necessary for me to conduct some experiments towards a new or renewed style.

This is the second such experiment and the first that attempts extended form. 10 -- 15 minutes seems the natural length for "large-scale" works in this style category. Within that, I seem to have spontaneously rediscovered Momentform or something like it. Perhaps this is necessary and expectable; that point raises many issues, discussion of which must be deferred. But I worked entirely by instinct and by ear.

The concerto is twelve minutes long and falls into fourteen short sections that may or may not be Momente. The six instruments are piano and the standard wind quintet. Everybody gets a cadenza at some point along the way. I am writing a lot of piano music these days and hasten to restate my awareness of my lack of qualifications to do so. This is not "a piano concerto", but quasi- concertante chamber music. The work clearly ends on D and has an overall tonal structure that is not expected to be perceptible. There are two tempi, slower and faster, and the final section is slower still; the meter is sometimes audible, sometimes not. As in any music, the deployment of contrast is essential to creating form; the kinds and ranges of contrast may be unfamiliar, and their unfamiliarity may make them ineffective.