Postludes for solo alto saxophone and wind ensemble (2015)
i. Consecration; Fire Dance
ii. Game of Drones
iii. Interlude: Prelude; Postlude
ca. 22 minutes
i. Consecration; Fire Dance
ii. Game of Drones
iii. Interlude: Prelude; Postlude
ca. 22 minutes
In 1977, as I was finishing my master's degree, I wrote a set of Preludes for solo piano.
While the original impulse was to explore various 20th-Century approaches to tonality,
the piece became a kind of stock-taking of my compositional personality as I approached
the beginning of my career; additionally, several movements became homages to various
composers (Chopin, of course, but also Schumann, Bartok, Scarlatti, and Ives) whose work
was important to me. The second piece of the set used a pair of complementary hexachords
(D-flat, E, F, G, A-flat, A and B-flat, B, C, D, E-flat, F-sharp) that returned in the next to last
movement.
Twenty years later, I wrote a piece for the Potsdam Piano Quartet that also turned into both
a stock-taking and a set of homages (this time to Bartok, Chopin, Crumb, the minimalists,
and Messiaen). At this mid-career point, it made sense to call the piece Interludes. Near the
end of the last movement of that piece, I included a brief moment based on the hexachords
of the Preludes.
In the year after I turned 60, it felt right to complete the trilogy, hence the title Postludes.
In the past several years, like many current composers I have found the generosity and
open-to-anything attitude of the saxophone world to be especially welcoming. I've been
honored to be friends and colleagues with many remarkable saxophonists, most recently
Robert Young. Similarly, Brian Doyle has insightfully conducted premieres of three of my
pieces. With their characteristic enthusiasm for the idea, I decided to make the Postludes a
concerto for alto saxophone and wind ensemble. This piece does not consciously allude to
earlier composers, but I think it does represent my current compositional voice, even as it
includes some music that I feel is unlike anything I've written before. The pair of
hexachords, relatively fleeting in the earlier two pieces, here appear repeatedly (but not
incessantly) throughout the first two movements; they are the only pitch material of the
cadenza that ends the second movement. The third movement begins with a scoring for
winds of the original Prelude; here serving as an interlude before the final movement.
The hexachords then disappear until the final gesture of the piece.
While the original impulse was to explore various 20th-Century approaches to tonality,
the piece became a kind of stock-taking of my compositional personality as I approached
the beginning of my career; additionally, several movements became homages to various
composers (Chopin, of course, but also Schumann, Bartok, Scarlatti, and Ives) whose work
was important to me. The second piece of the set used a pair of complementary hexachords
(D-flat, E, F, G, A-flat, A and B-flat, B, C, D, E-flat, F-sharp) that returned in the next to last
movement.
Twenty years later, I wrote a piece for the Potsdam Piano Quartet that also turned into both
a stock-taking and a set of homages (this time to Bartok, Chopin, Crumb, the minimalists,
and Messiaen). At this mid-career point, it made sense to call the piece Interludes. Near the
end of the last movement of that piece, I included a brief moment based on the hexachords
of the Preludes.
In the year after I turned 60, it felt right to complete the trilogy, hence the title Postludes.
In the past several years, like many current composers I have found the generosity and
open-to-anything attitude of the saxophone world to be especially welcoming. I've been
honored to be friends and colleagues with many remarkable saxophonists, most recently
Robert Young. Similarly, Brian Doyle has insightfully conducted premieres of three of my
pieces. With their characteristic enthusiasm for the idea, I decided to make the Postludes a
concerto for alto saxophone and wind ensemble. This piece does not consciously allude to
earlier composers, but I think it does represent my current compositional voice, even as it
includes some music that I feel is unlike anything I've written before. The pair of
hexachords, relatively fleeting in the earlier two pieces, here appear repeatedly (but not
incessantly) throughout the first two movements; they are the only pitch material of the
cadenza that ends the second movement. The third movement begins with a scoring for
winds of the original Prelude; here serving as an interlude before the final movement.
The hexachords then disappear until the final gesture of the piece.