WNMF in the Community

WNMF In The Community in partnership with Virtuosi Concerts and the Millennium Library’s Out Loud at the Library series present:

New Music Emerging

January 18, 2025 @ 2 pm
Carol Shields Auditorium, 2nd floor of the Millennium Library
Free Admission

Brandon University Music Students, Class of Dr. Leanne Zacharias

Warm up your ears as the next generation of brilliant composers and performers brings us into Winnipeg New Music Festival season! Emerging musicians studying with Dr. Leanne Zacharias at Brandon University present music for cello, piano, and more by some of today’s most exciting Canadian and international composers.

Re-Sound: Every Freeze is Different

January 22, 2025 @ 7:30 pm
Desautels Concert Hall
Free Event

Reserve Tickets

University of Manitoba Percussion Ensemble, Victoria Sparks, director
Winnipeg Chamber Winds Collective, Jacqueline Dawson, director
eXperimental Improv Ensemble, Gordon Fitzell, director

Paul Lansky – Threads (2005)
Jocelyn Morlock – Stone’s Throw (2018)
Karen Sunabacka – The Great Flood (2024)
Carmen Braden – Every Freeze is Different (2017)

WNMF Program

For this closing concert of WNMF 2025, music director Daniel Raiskin and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra begin with two nature-inspired Canadian works. Manitoban Nic Bray first presents the world premiere of his Spruce, the winning piece of this year’s CMC Emerging Composer Competition. We are then joined by Montreal-based Keiko Devaux for her texturally rich Listening Underwater.

The festival comes to a resounding end as the WSO is joined by the Attacca Quartet for a performance of the concerto for string quartet Absolute Jest by American master John Adams.

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PROGRAM NOTES

Nic Bray – Spruce (2023)

Beams of sunlight gently twist between emerald needles, cascading across a calm but flowing creek near a shaded hammock as the overwhelming, yet calming beauty of the mighty spruce tree seeps from my consciousness into my subconscious.

Spruce was originally conceived while camping at Riding Mountain National Park, laying in a hammock, looking up at the simultaneous might, beauty, chaos, and tranquility of the spruce tree. This piece brings the simplicity, the complexity, and the awe-inspiring beauty of the spruce tree to life. After rising from the hammock, using a stick, I scrawled the form of the composition into the dirt below my bare feet. This would lay the foundation for the formal structure of the piece and would serve as the first step in the writing process. The work cycles through these emotions as they occurred to me in the moment, climaxing in a feeling of overwhelming love not only for nature, but for the life it brings and life itself.

Keiko Devaux – Listening Underwater (2023)

The inspiration for this work brought together my general interest in hydro-acoustics with underwater noise pollution and the effect it has on sea-life communication. For this piece I focused particularly on the communicative sounds of toothed and baleen whales. Toothed whales, which include orcas and dolphins, use echolocation to communicate, navigate, and hunt whereas baleen whales produce a series of sounds or “songs” to communicate. Using these two types of vocalizations as inspiration points created a nice contrast between echolocation—a series of clicks and pops—in the ultrasonic range, with the pitch-bending/wavering “songs” produced by baleen whales in the infrasonic range creating two very distinct frequency bands.

The piece establishes and builds an underwater environment of organic ambient noise including surface waves, deeper swells, general underwater movement, and an overall muffled quality with frequencies in the mid-range more attenuated highlighting the extreme high and low intermittent and droned sounds. Eventually the underwater communication, expressed as foreground melodic themes is introduced. These thematic motifs are presented as communicative calls in one section of the orchestra receiving a response in another section often truncated or diffused in nature. As these call-response motifs continue to build and develop in nature, the thrum of human noise (ships, machinery, drilling, etc.) begins its slow crescendo. As this crescendo builds, the calls adapt by adjusting their frequency range higher or lower. Eventually, as the noise builds, the responses become more distant, diffused, disfigured, and ultimately lost. As this crescendo reaches its climax, the underwater calls and responses are stamped out, and the ocean is “silent” again. As the piece comes to an end, melodies are slowly reborn and begin to call out again, first to no response, and eventually life and communication rebuilds and reemerges.

John Adams – Absolute Jest (2011) for string quartet & orchestra

Absolute Jest was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony in celebration of its 100th anniversary, and first performed March 15, 2012 by the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, with the St. Lawrence String Quartet. A revised version was given its first performance December 1, 2012 by the New World Symphony, conducted by the composer and also featuring the St. Lawrence String Quartet.

The idea for Absolute Jest was suggested by a performance by Michael Tilson Thomas of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, a piece that I’d known all my life but had never much paid attention to until hearing MTT conduct it. Hearing this (and knowing that I was already committed to composing something for the San Francisco Symphony’s 100th anniversary) I was suddenly stimulated by the way Stravinsky had absorbed musical artifacts from the past and worked them into his own highly personal language.

But there the comparison pretty much ends. Stravinsky was apparently unfamiliar with the Pergolesi and other Neapolitan tunes when Diaghilev brought them to him. I, on the other hand, had loved the Beethoven string quartets since I was a teenager, and crafting something out of fragments of Opus 131, Opus 135, and the Grosse Fuge (plus a few more familiar “tattoos” from his symphonic scherzos) was a totally spontaneous act for me.

“String quartet and orchestra” is admittedly a repertoire black hole – is there a single work in that medium that is regularly heard? And there are good reasons for why this is. The first is a simple issue of furniture: the problem of placing four solo players in the “soloist” position but still in front of the podium (so that they can follow the conductor) is daunting. The inner players, the second violin and viola, are frequently lost to the audience both visually and aurally.

But placement on the stage aside, the real challenge is in marrying the highly charged manner and sound of a string quartet to the mass and less precise texture of the large orchestra. Unless very skillfully handled by both composer and performers, the combining of these two ensembles can result in a feeling of sensory and expressive overload.

At its premiere in March of 2012, the first third of the piece was largely a trope on the Opus 131 C-sharp-minor Quartet’s scherzo, and suffered from just this problem. After a moody opening of tremolo strings and fragments of the Ninth Symphony signal octave-dropping motive, the solo quartet emerged as if out of a haze, playing the driving foursquare figures of that scherzo, material that almost immediately went through a series of strange permutations.

This original opening never satisfied me. The clarity of the solo quartet’s role was often buried beneath the orchestral activity, resulting in what sounded to me too much like “chatter.” And the necessity of slowing down Beethoven’s tempo of the Opus 131 scherzo in order to make certain orchestral passages negotiable detracted from its vividness and breathless energy.

Six months after the premiere I decided to compose a different beginning to Absolute Jest – a full 400 bars of completely new music, replacing the “quadrangular” feel of the Opus 131 scherzo with a bouncing 6/8 pulse that launches the piece in what is to my ears a far more satisfying fashion.

The rolling 6/8 patterns recall the same Ninth Symphony scherzo but also summon up other references – of the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, of the Eighth Symphony, and other archetypal Beethoven motives that come and go like cameo appearances on a stage.

The high-spirited triple-time scherzo to the F-major Opus 135 Quartet (Beethoven’s final work in that medium) enters about a third of the way through Absolute Jest and becomes the dominant motivic material for the remainder of the piece, interrupted only by a brief slow section that interweaves fragments of the Grosse Fuge with the opening fugue theme of the C-sharp-minor Quartet. A final furious coda features the solo string quartet charging ahead at full speed over an extended orchestral pedal based on the famous “Waldstein” Sonata harmonic progressions.

Absolute Jest had elicited mixed responses from listeners on its first outing. Quite a few reviewers assumed, perhaps because of its title, that the piece was little more than a backslapping joke. (One Chicago journalist was offended and could only express disgust at the abuse of Beethoven’s great music.)

There is nothing particularly new about one composer internalizing the music of another and “making it his own.” Composers are drawn to another’s music to the point where they want to live in it, and that can happen in a variety of fashions, whether it’s Brahms making variations on themes by Handel or Haydn, Liszt arranging Wagner or Beethoven for piano, Schoenberg crafting a concerto out of Monn or, more radically, Berio “deconstructing” Schubert.

But Absolute Jest is not a clone of Grand Pianola Music or my Chamber Symphony. Of course there are “winks,” some of them not entirely subtle, here and there in the piece. But the act of composing the work (one that took nearly a year of work) was the most extended experience in pure “invention” that I’ve ever undertaken. Its creation was for me a thrilling lesson in counterpoint, in thematic transformation and formal design. The “jest” of the title should be understood in terms of its Latin meaning, “gesta:” doings, deeds, exploits. I like to think of “jest” as indicating an exercising of one’s wit by means of imagination and invention.

Composer John Adams is Creative Chair for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

SOLD OUT!

WNMF Program

Taking a decidedly brighter thematic turn, WNMF heads to Winnipeg’s sparkling new Desautels Concert Hall to present the scintillating string stylings of the Attacca Quartet.

The New York City-based ensemble has garnered numerous accolades since its foundation, including two Grammy awards for their collaborations with composer Caroline Shaw.

The playfully virtuosic program features two of Shaw’s works, alongside Gabriella Smith’s irreverent Carrot Revolution, Mingjia Chen’s cross-stylistic floatwalking, and the sizzling Dark Energy by Canadian master Kelly-Marie Murphy.

The evening culminates in the tour de force of string quartet writing LIFT by composer and Kronos Quartet cellist Paul Wiancko.

PROGRAM NOTES

Caroline Shaw – Blueprint (2016)

The Aizuri Quartet’s name comes from “aizuri-e,” a style of Japanese woodblock printing that primarily uses a blue ink. In the 1820s, artists in Japan began to import a particular blue pigment known as “Prussian blue,” which was first synthesized by German paint producers in the early 18th century and later modified by others as an alternative to indigo. The story of aizuri-e is one of innovation, migration, transformation, craft, and beauty.

Blueprint, composed for the incredible Aizuri Quartet, takes its title from this beautiful blue woodblock printing tradition as well as from that familiar standard architectural representation of a proposed structure: the blueprint. This piece began its life as a harmonic reduction — a kind of floor plan — of Beethoven’s string quartet Op. 18 No. 6. As a violinist and violist, I have played this piece many times, in performance and in joyous late-night reading sessions with musician friends. (One such memorable session included Aizuri’s marvelous cellist, Karen Ouzounian.) Chamber music is ultimately about conversation without words. We talk to each other with our dynamics and articulations, and we try to give voice to the composers whose music has inspired us to gather in the same room and play music. Blueprint is also a conversation — with Beethoven, with Haydn (his teacher and the “father” of the string quartet), and with the joys and malinconia of his Op. 18 No. 6.

Kelly-Marie Murphy – Dark Energy (2007)

We live in a cosmologically interesting time. First, Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet reducing our solar system to 8 planets. Then, an ancient cosmic mystery came to light. Apparently, five billion years ago, there was a sudden expansion of the cosmos. The galaxies started moving away from one another at a faster pace, as if repelled by some kind of antigravity. Recently, a group of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope observed that billions of years before this antigravity sent the galaxies flying apart, it was already present in space and affecting the evolution of the cosmos. This antigravity force is known as dark energy.

The existence of dark energy was first postulated by Einstein in 1917 as a way to explain why the universe doesn’t collapse. In November 2006, the New York Times explained it this way:

“Because it is a property of empty space, the overall force of Einstein’s constant grows in proportion to the expanding universe until it overwhelms everything.”

Dark Energy was commissioned by the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the CBC as the imposed piece for 2007. In a single movement, the quartet opens softly and simply. It is melodic and displays many different colours using various techniques. It gains momentum and is eventually consumed by its own propulsion. The piece is virtuosic in every way, yet there are flexible moments in which each performance can be different.

Mingjia Chen – floatwalking (2018)

foatwalking is inspired by hearing author Andrew Forsthoefel speak about travelling across America on foot, listening to the stories of the people he met along the way and describing the various types of walking he experienced.

Gabriella Smith – Carrot Revolution (2015)

I wrote Carrot Revolution in 2015 for my friends the Aizuri Quartet. It was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia for their exhibition The Order of Things, in which they commissioned three visual artists and myself to respond to Dr. Barnes’ distinctive “ensembles,” the unique ways in which he arranged his acquired paintings along with metal objects, furniture, and pottery, juxtaposing them in ways that bring out their similarities and differences in shape, color, and texture.

While walking around the Barnes, looking for inspiration for this string quartet, I suddenly remembered a Cézanne quote I’d heard years ago (though which I later learned was misattributed to him): “The day will come when a single, freshly observed carrot will start a revolution.” And I knew immediately that my piece would be called Carrot Revolution.

I envisioned the piece as a celebration of that spirit of fresh observation and of new ways of looking at old things, such as the string quartet – a 250-year-old genre – as well as some of my even older musical influences (Bach, Perotin, Gregorian chant, Georgian folk songs, and Celtic fiddle tunes). The piece is a patchwork of my wildly contrasting influences and full of weird, unexpected juxtapositions and intersecting planes of sound, inspired by the way Barnes’ ensembles show old works in new contexts and draw connections between things we don’t think of as being related.

Caroline Shaw – Entr’acte (2011)

Entr’acte was written in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2 — with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet. It is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.

Paul Wiancko – LIFT (2016)
Part I
Part II
Part III: Glacial – Maniacal – Lift

LIFT is an investigation of elation in its musical form. Inspired by the Aizuri Quartet’s gift for group expressiveness and virtuosity, I joyously explored the capacity for harmony, color, and rhythm itself to evoke and inspire. Though I drew heavily from my experience as a chamber musician to articulate its many interlocking parts, the piece ultimately represents the journey of a soul – laid out in fervent, celebratory detail.”

WNMF Program

The second orchestral concert of this year’s festival features two works that both, in their way, grapple with the connection between worlds.

Opening the program, we welcome Greek composer Konstantia Gourzi and trumpet soloist Simon Höfele to Winnipeg, collaborating on Ypsilon for trumpet and orchestra.

Symphony No. 6 was the last completed work by the great American composer Christopher Rouse before his death in 2019. Part of a set of works he referred to as his “Death Cycle”, he composed this final symphony as an epitaph to himself. A powerful and introspective work, Rouse chose not to share the personal meaning he conceived for it, instead inviting the audience to absorb and interpret its mysteries each on our own terms.

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Presenting Patrons

Curt and Cathy Vossen

PROGRAM NOTES

Konstantia Gourzi – Ypsilon, A Poem for Trumpet and Orchestra in Five Scenes (2020)

Simon Höfele, trumpet

The title “Ypsilon” is inspired by the Greek letter Y, which has several meanings. The most striking is the letter itself, which can also be seen as a person with arms stretched upwards. The translation of the word “Ypsilon” from Greek means “the High”, but also “to look at the High”.

The symbol Y has a strong effect on me and is a reminder to honor the higher dimension and at the same time to feel its connection to the earth and to ourselves. This energy inspired me to compose Ypsilon, A Poem for Trumpet and Orchestra in Five Scenes and the music tells the story.

When I started to write down the sketches of the piece in 2019 and composed the first notes immediately afterwards, I had planned a different concept for the course of the composition than it turned out to be. I was already in the middle of the composition process when the corona pandemic started, when the lockdowns of the corona phase and the other restrictions forced us to behave differently than before. I realized how my ideas and thoughts were changing and taking me in a different direction than I had planned. Fundamental questions about life and music resurfaced again, and I urgently searched within myself for new answers of existence and art. An even stronger longing than usual for melody, rhythm, sounds and their simplicity accompanied me intensely. The different moods, a new musical dramaturgy, playing chamber music in an orchestra, silence and the contradictory sounds were urgently seeking a union within me.

A poem of notes, about the coexistence of different sounds, musical styles and about the memory that everything is one and can exist together, was created as a result. This is how the dramaturgy of the musical poem unfolded with the five scenes of Ypsilon.

In Ypsilon, the solo instrument is the bearer of various statements that become noticeable throughout the piece with different musical elements – as they express themselves sometimes subtle, sometimes leading, sometimes flattering and sometimes explosive. The orchestra acts, reacts, comments, stimulates and thus constantly enters into a new sonic union with the soloist. The composition flows between the scenes with short pauses for suspense and sounds as if the sonic events of Y are being told like a story under a common arc.

Ypsilon, A Poem for Trumpet and Orchestra in Five Scenes begins with a solo in the trumpet – like a cadenza, like a signal. The orchestra sings and plays in a calm but intense mood and both together move between calls, lullabies and blues. A short improvisational mood by the first percussionists after the specified elements then characterizes one of the quiet passages.

The second scene sounds like an intense dialog between the explosive rhythmic elements of the orchestra and the cadences of the soloist, which are described as a speech between the orchestral groups. Rhythmic elements, which are distributed in different groups, recur and each time they sound more intense than the previous time.

The third scene builds up more and more of an atmospheric mood and serves as an intense echo of the second scene and at the same time as a sound bridge to the next scene. Here the groups of the orchestra also perform as soloists, reacting to the overall sound that is created in a chamber music style – playing predetermined elements and also shaping them themselves individually. This influences the mood of the composition and creates an individual, new sound combination and tension in each performance. The role of the conductor in this scene is to balance the overall mood and coordinate the performances of the various groups and their silencing.

In the fourth scene, new, strongly melodic-rhythmic elements appear and create a characteristic, accentuated dance, which is reminiscent of a slightly jazzy character due to the frequent changes of beat. The soloist acts and reacts explosively and is partly free to decide on the dramaturgical design, the sequence of phrases and the combination and repetition of the given patterns.

The fifth scene has the final character of a complete echo, a transformation: a new signal, which differs from the one at the beginning of the work, unites with the orchestra. The result is a final, simple, short dialog between the percussionist and the soloist, like a question and answer. In this scene, it is desired that the audience also takes on a singing role, which the conductor indicates to the audience and leads them. The conductor decides whether this action is possible and appropriate. The singing action for the audience seemed necessary to me in this composition, because therefore the stage and the audience unite to experience something together. The singing only lasts a short time, but the emotional and unifying experience can last a very long time.

The recurring attitude of the self-styled solo voice – also in this part – depends on the soloist and how they realize it. The dialog between soloist and orchestra should remain lively from beginning to end.

The piece concludes with an atmospheric, unexpected tonal openness to provide space for resonance, reflection and empathy.

Christopher Rouse – Symphony No. 6 (2019)
I. Desolato
II. Piacevole
III. Furioso
IV. Passacaglia

In my earlier years I found the task of writing a program note for a new work a comparatively easy, even pleasant, one. More than a few of my pieces had some sort of quasi-programmatic basis, and I found that I could often say much about the sources of inspiration in hopes that my observations might help the listener better understand my intent. In more recent years, however, I find that my new pieces fall into one of two categories: (a) scores that, while always placing emotional expression at the forefront of my intent, had no particular story or triggering event that led to the work’s composition, or (b) works that were so deeply personal that I found myself reluctant to share intimately private sources of motivation. In both cases, though, it seemed that there wasn’t much I could say.

My Sixth Symphony inhabiting the second of these two groups, I hope listeners will not be disappointed if I limit myself to more “objective” observations about the music. Commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, this twenty-five minute symphony was completed at my home in Baltimore on June 6, 2019. The first challenge I face when planning a new piece is to settle upon a beginning and an ending and to decide the number and order of movements; in this case, I (rather unusually for me) chose a more-or-less standard four-movement structure with the outer movements being slow in tempo and elegiac in mood. The two middle movements are faster and the third, in particular, is meant to be highly dramatic. As is usual in my music, each movement connects to its successor without a break. In each of my symphonies I’ve also chosen to use an instrument or instrumental combination that might be seen as somewhat unusual in a symphonic context. My First Symphony, for example, requires a quartet of Wagner tubas. Here I have chosen to make use of the fluegelhorn, a larger and more mellow member of the trumpet family, and it is the fluegelhorn that presents the symphony’s opening melodic material; it returns later in the first movement and again near the end of the entire work as a way of bringing the music “full circle”. The scoring comprises two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets (second doubling of bass clarinet), two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets (first doubling on fluegelhorn), three trombones, tuba, harp, timpani, percussion (two players), and strings. As is also my wont, the harmonic language traverses areas of substantive dissonance as well as sections much more consonant (especially near the end of the symphony).

I know the “meaning” of this work in my own mind but wish to leave it to each listener to decide for him or herself what this could be. My main hope is that it will communicate something sincere in meaning to those who hear it.

WNMF Program

To open the Winnipeg New Music Festival this year, the WSO welcomes back Canadian composer and conductor Samy Moussa who has twice been featured at WNMF with his orchestral music.

He returns to lead the orchestra from the podium in a program that plays on light and shadow, from Dark Patterns by American composer-pianist Timo Andres, to Moussa’s own Nocturne, and circling back to Dawning by Welsh master Huw Watkins. The evening culminates in Moussa’s monumental Symphony No. 2.

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PROGRAM NOTES

Timo Andres – Dark Patterns (2022)

Dark Patterns is a repetitive, methodical, obsessive piece. This focus was a reaction to my initial idea for the piece’s most brazen outburst, a passage in which chromatic scales peel off in layers from a broad, arch-shaped melody. The task of writing the piece became, essentially, digging a foundation and building a structure to support this brief dramatic moment.

The piece contains two kinds of material—a scale and a melody, both “circular” patterns that lead into restatements of themselves, and both of which pivot harmonically around a repeated central E. This regular pulse, heard first in the flute, harp, and muted piano, is interrupted, with increasing frequency and urgency, by low pedal tones that form the first rising scale. The end of this scale leads directly into first notes of the melodic material of the piece, introduced by a solo bassoon and always accompanied by chattering E’s. That scalar upbeat to the melody becomes increasingly elaborate, intense, and harmonically adventurous with each new iteration, yet always ends up drawn back to that central E.

A return to the opening material follows, but compacted and concentrated, the low, rising scale underscoring tempestuous excursions around the E. As the scale gradually rises from the bass to the treble, it turns distant and ambiguous, a hazy recollection of the bassoon melody accompanied by gently motoric percussion, keyboards, and harp. Wind solos moving at different speeds accumulate momentum once more, building to a section that is essentially a huge, scalar upbeat to that original dramatic crux—the climactic restatement of the bassoon melody. After this, the music plunges down once more, for a dark and chaotic restatement of the opening scale pattern, this time tangled in baleful natural-horn calls, the ostinato E now heard in shrill string harmonics.

Samy Moussa – Nocturne  (2014)

Nocturne is a work dedicated to Moussa’s principal composition teacher at the Université de Montréal, José Evangelista. Moussa writes that “this could well be the composition in which I have maximized to the fullest economy of means in harmonic terms. The work is based on four chords, the most important of which is a major-seventh chord, which gives rise to nearly everything in the score. The melodic unfolding of this chord is heard in the opening ‘theme’ played by the solo horn, which returns throughout Nocturne, sometimes in inversion, but hopefully always recognizable. The overall colour is rather grave, due to the use of the low register of most instruments. Three times the music attempts to rise from the depths; each time it falls back.”
(Duration approximately 10 minutes.)

Huw Watkins – Dawning (2019)

Dawning is a short, celebratory overture commissioned by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne written to be paired with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. It begins quietly, with playful flutes and clarinets above gentler strings, but quickly builds in energy and momentum, soon reaching some exuberant music for the whole orchestra. After the first climax, there is a much quieter passage – a slow-moving chorale for strings accompanying delicate brass fanfares – but thereafter, the music regains its vitality and remains high spirited until the end.

Samy Moussa – Symphony No. 2  (2022)

In three movements, played without a break

Samy Moussa turned to a quote from Xenophon’s Anabasis – ‘At this stage entered musicians blowing upon horns such as they use for signal calls, and trumpeting on trumpets, made of raw oxhide, tunes and airs, like the music of the double-octave harp.’ Though Moussa’s vision of this passage is primarily aesthetic rather than metaphorical, we might think we hear such instruments right away, their menace turned to majesty as they become a quartet of regular orchestral horns buttressed by a pair of flugelhorns (which have a warmer, rounder sound than their trumpet cousins), euphonium and tuba. Two of the horns push up through small steps to a major chord and then, with the woodwind now engaged, another. Not so much a theme, this music is more a state of being – effort and arrival, repeated – and it will recur throughout the symphony, usually associated with the brass.

Here immediately, though, it is brought back by the strings, and followed by a magniloquent descent, in slow triple rhythm. These two types of music are alternated further, until the woodwind carry the first music into the upper air and leave it floating.

A new sort of music arrives: a quick scale pattern descending through four notes. Soon this is snaking everywhere in the woodwind and tuned percussion. The scoring has all the usual keyed instruments – vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel and so on – together with harp and piano, as well as a timpani part that becomes more prominent through this passage. Returning frequently, the original four-note pattern is keyed to grand harmonic modulations as the music grows in power.

Everything the symphony needs is now in place. The harmonic progression reaches a point where the brass can bring back the first music, but this does not now happen. Instead the work moves into what is marked in the score as the second movement, though the musical progress is continuous. The symphony remains a play of forces: a whirling pounding and the brass group’s first music.

Eventually this music rises to where a breakthrough seems inevitable. Yet this does not occur. Instead the symphony moves into its third movement, but again there is no break, only a shift of tone, a release into airiness. The re-entry of the brass changes this, and a solo flugelhorn announces the end by restoring the grand descent in threefold steps. But the brass seem intent on starting all over again, to the shock of their companions. An F major chord provides the conclusion promised from the unison F of the beginning, but we may sense that in the background the great sphere is still turning, will not be stopped.

Programme note © Paul Griffiths