Written by a twelve year old
Notes to the listener:
In this CD I chose to exhibit two works that share structural form and the 6/8 time signature. You will hear East European articulations in the Quintet and echo’s of American Folk music in the Symphony. I pay homage to the music of Leonard Bernstein, Béla Bartók, and Igor Stravinsky along with jazz and other forms of popular music as inspirational guides.
The Symphony #5 is a large-scaled work in four movements. Its overall form is traditional, a standard first movement, scherzo, slow movement, and finale, forming a miniature checkerboard of slow/tragic – fast/jovial movements. The first movement is an Allegro painted in broad brush-strokes and featuring several lyrical melodies and tunes; the first group alone contains no fewer than four distinct and separate elements, a fifth added in the second group, all of which are combined in the codetta section. In this extended sonata-form, the movement fades into silence and nothingness, paving the way for the jovial combination of orchestral blues and tarantella-like dances which form the scherzo that rises out of the same void.
Following the scherzo is a long, mysterious slow movement, the Lento quasi fantasia.
The Fantasia was the last movement to be completed, excluding a few minor technical revisions to the Finale; it is also the most structurally perfect movement in the piece, as it follows a mathematical function, y = 1/x2. The graph of this function is based around the asymptotes of the x- and y-axes; from very close to, but still not quite, zero, it ascends slowly but steadily between the integers of x = 1 and x = 0 to almost touch the y-axis, which it once again fails to reach; this is mirrored across the axis.
While rooted in mathematics, the music strives to elicit emotion; I tried to illuminate the natural beauty of geometry and mathematics; music as a language is capable of expressing both logic (rationality) and emotion (irrationality). This third movement springs from a great well of silence, ascends to a climax it never quite reaches, and then descends once more into quiet – true silence never completely attained. The movement’s form is based on two major themes, a long flute melody and a wind chorale. The themes intertwine in a fugal section culminating in a dramatic climax that fails to resolve. Instead it simply dies away into the tolling of bells as muted strings intone the chorale in the highest register. The chorale has an eerie premonition of the corresponding passage at the end of the entire piece.
Barely before the last chord has died away, the whirlwind finale descends upon us, heralded by brass fanfares. The plethora of runs, scales, arpeggios, and other forms of virtuosic energy comprises the first fifty bars in the first minute of music, during which five different motifs emerge, all of them rapidly coming into prominence, reworked into tapestries of sound and color of the movement. The symphony concludes with a restatement of the chorale tune of the previous movement, fully orchestrated and under the continuing perpetual motion of the woodwinds and strings.
The Quintet shares the overall harmonic and thematic structure of the symphony. Like the first movement of the Symphony, its opening Adagio begins and ends quietly, filled with impassioned drama and featuring a pair of lyrical melodies. The harmony is worlds apart, however: compact and tightly woven, exploring a dense jungle of string writing including overtones, harmonics, and mutes. This was among my first forays into the world of pan tonality, or music with no definite tonal center or established scale.
The second movement is a rhythmically complex scherzo, featuring flighty melodies, pizzicatos, and repeated grace notes that put large amounts of strain upon violists’ fingers; its harmonic fluctuations keep a sense of perpetual motion and restlessness throughout the movement. The finale is a fugal perpetuum mobile, drawing on a wealth of harmonic and rhythmic material as well as string effects to bring the work to a rousing conclusion.
The Quintet describes the three facets of the human psyche according to Freudian theory: the superego, or conscience that restrains the rest of the piece (the Adagio); the ego, in touch with reality, and fulfilling the old adage that “to those who feel, life is a tragedy; to those who think, it’s a comedy” (the scherzo); and the id—the impulsive and instinctual, unconscious and ultimately most gratifying (the Prestissimo).I didn’t actually realize this semi-programmatic facet of the Quintet until after I completed the work.
In these efforts I wish to acknowledge a large number of people without whom this project would not have been possible: my parents, my grandmother’s cat, who first taught me that one must look backwards into the past to go forwards into the future; my management at IMG; David Lai, who spearheaded the operation and had trust in the music which he had never heard before; José Serebrier, for looking through the score of the Fifth Symphony and correcting all of its typos; the LSO and JSQ, without whom we would not be listening to anything at all as we undoubtedly read this; Leon Constantiner, for donating the computer with which the score was written; and my teachers Sam Zyman for believing in me, Sam Adler for teaching me, and Antony John for giving me feedback on my music.
People at any age could enjoy COB
