Quartette for Wind Quintette (Symphony No. 13)

Julia Perry enjoyed wordplay, often choosing witty titles for her compositions. Her archaic spelling of Quartette for Wind Quintette looks tongue-in-cheek. The work is both a quintet, since it is scored for five players, and a quartet, as it consists of four movements. The instrumentation deviates from the traditional woodwind quintet by replacing horn with alto saxophone. The saxophone was a favorite instrument of Perry’s, one that she used in several orchestral works as well in chamber music.

Quartette for Wind Quintette exemplifies Perry’s concise and concentrated expressive style. While influenced by serial techniques, the work is not serialist in a strict sense. There are also no extramusical references and no adaptations of Black American musical styles. Here, melody, harmony, rhythm, and tone color tell the whole story.

The first movement begins with a palindromic motive played in triple octaves by the upper three instruments against a rising bass line scored in octaves. The motive in the upper winds proves ripe for development. As in all four movements, wide-ranging melodic motion settles into long-sustained pitches, a procedure that serves to decompress the initial energy. The relaxed triad in the final bar is echoed at the conclusion of the third movement.

The energetic second movement presents two main thematic ideas: the opening theme, repeated in augmentation later, and a second melodic idea that follows in the bass line. The second motive makes a dramatic reappearance in the final bars of the movement, where all five instruments move in parallel dissonance, but where a sleight of hand creates momentary unisons and octaves.

At the beginning of the third movement, Perry casts the bassoon solo using another favorite device, octave displacement, causing what would otherwise be a rising line to descend. The bassoon melody comes to rest on a pitch—G#—around which the entire movement eventually organizes. Imitations of this melodic idea extend to all instruments except clarinet, whose entrance turns the motion to drone-like repeated notes and two-note oscillations. The massed sound of the full ensemble comes only once, at the movement’s peak, from which clarinet and saxophone emerge sometimes in unison, sometimes in octaves. The bassoon presents the contours of the opening melody once again before the music settles into a chord formed around the central pitch.

The clarinet introduces the dynamic main subject of the final movement, a theme with an improvisatory character. Perry’s development follows quasi-Baroque procedures, including repetition of the theme—or its opening intervals—in the style of a ritornello. Again, all instruments but one respond in imitation. Here, the bassoon is held mostly in reserve until the final ringing phrase.

In 1976, Julia Perry revised Quartette for Wind Quintette, renaming it Symphony No. 13. She reworked only the third and fourth movements, leaving the first two movements unchanged. The revised version came after her paralytic stroke in 1970, and the manuscript is often difficult to decipher. Most of the 1976 changes come in the final movement, and mainly in the flute part, where she removed nearly all the vigorous virtuosic lines. While both versions are of interest, the editors have chosen the original 1963 version for this edition.

Program note © 2024 Videmus Inc. Free use permitted with recognition in all materials