Chorale Adagietto
a reflection for young players
for wind ensemble (grade 4) - 2019, ca. 7 minutes - Commissioned by Copland House’s “What’s the Score” Program
Excerpt from the Premiere by the Viewpoint School’s Upper School Wind Ensemble, conducted by Kim Gonzales:
Instrumentation
3 flutes, 1 ob, 3 cl, 2 bcl, 1 bsn, 2 a. sax, 1 t. sax, 1 b. sax
3 tpt, 1 hn, 3 tbn, 1 tuba, 1 electric or acoustic bass, timpani, 6 percussion.
The instrumentation was chosen specifically for the players available in the Viewpoint School’s high school band in the spring of 2019. The composer encourages ensembles with differing instrumentations (such as a full horn section) to substitute other parts ad lib..
Program Note
When I received this commission from Copland House to write a work for high school band (my first), there were three major influences that guided my writing. First was my own memory of performing in high school ensembles, and I asked myself, if I knew as much about music then as I do now, what kind of music would I want to play that would be different? The second influence was the input of the Viewpoint band students. When I asked them directly what kind of piece would they like to play, adjectives such as “dramatic, cinematic, emotional, and experimental” were quickly shouted out. I was quite happy with these suggestions, as I too love such music.
The third influence was much more somber, and contributed the most to the shape of the piece. In November 2018, only a couple of weeks after I first visited the Viewpoint school to meet the students and their conductor Kim Gonzales, southern California suffered a devastating series of wildfires, destroying more than 20,000 buildings and structures (the Camp and Woosely fires doing the most damage). The Viewpoint school, being located in Calabasas, was evacuated for two weeks, and came very close to being engulfed in the fire’s perimeter. Unfortunately, a few of the students lost their homes during the blaze. Two months later, starting in January, southern California enjoyed an uncharacteristically large amount of rain for several weeks.
Over the following months, almost subconsciously, I began to write a slowly unfolding series of simple chorales, the melody of which became the theme of this commission. The first two sections are played with a quiet determination in F minor, yet there is a hidden sadness behind the consonant textures. At about halfway through the piece, the music simply runs out of steam, and has to “reset” itself. The third section shifts to D major, and is played “senza misura” - without time. The high winds freely play steadily growing patterns like leaves springing from trees, while the low brass sound steady tones as if they were trunks rising from the ground. The percussion adds a call to action, igniting this sudden regrowth with loud bursts of lightning. When the music has grown to its most dense, a much needed storm of B flat major erupts. This ushers in the final section: a triumphant variation of the opening chorales, leading the ensemble confidently and hopefully to A flat major. In retrospective, I saw that I had created my own kind of response to recent events of fire and water, as well as seeing the Viewpoint students perseverance through a difficult time.
My aim was to write a piece that would not commemorate or depict the California fires, but instead offer an opportunity for both the students and the Viewpoint audience to have their own reflective experience, wherever their emotions and imagination took them. One of the biggest appeals of classical music to me as a high schooler was that the music did not prescribe what my experience of it should be. While I appreciate the great amount of music out there that tells a direct story or has a clear concept that is easy to understand, this for me was the time to write a piece of quiet abstraction, and let the students experience it in whatever way they might after a very challenging year. The title Chorale Adagietto is the most old-fashioned title I have given to a piece in some time, let alone for high school musicians to play, but it was chosen specifically for its sense of mystery and reflection – the kind that I would experience when encountering classical music for the first time in high school before I knew what all those fancy words mean.