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Program
note for Quiet Music
Quiet Music (1994) was commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation for the American Composers Orchestra, which premiered it in 1994 at Carnegie Hall under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies. The instrumentation consists of triple woodwinds, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, piano, harp, and strings. The piece is in one movement about 14 minutes long.
The sonic surface of Quiet Music displays two unusual constraints. First, as a manifestation of the work’s expressive character, the dynamic is pianissimo in all instruments throughout. The means of achieving tension and climax are thereby displaced from dynamics onto texture and density of instrumentation. Second, at every point until the final sonority there are running sixteenth notes somewhere in the orchestral fabric, a feature that I adapted from an earlier orchestra piece, Waves. In both cases the purpose was to establish a regular rhythmic background against which other rhythms could play. In Waves, the sixteenth notes propel the music in an agitated manner, but in Quiet Music the pace is slower and the effect more like that of a flowing river.
Quiet Music employs overlapping expanding variations, a formal process that I have utilized in several pieces but which I carry here to an extreme of structural strictness and polyphonic virtuosity. Each section grows from a single melodic or harmonic cell that elaborates into complexity until it reaches a point of completion; meanwhile another section has begun a similar process in another strand. Some strands contract after expanding, resulting in a palindromic shape. The resources of a full orchestra enable the transparent projection of separate streams of timbral activity, and I exploit this possibility to the fullest, so that sometimes there are three or even four strands going on at once. Every aspect of the instrumentation is part of the structural discourse.
Behind these considerations lies an expressive quality that is difficult to describe. Quiet Music is perhaps my most intimate work. Its hushed and obsessive surface weaves a dream-like tapestry of inward ruminations and intimations.
Fred Lerdahl
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