Concerto for Ensemble

For the last several years, I’ve been mainly composing pieces that were (at least partially) inspired by non-musical phenomena. For example, a recent orchestra piece, Tuolumne, was based on images of and near Yosemite, California by Ansel Adams, a pioneer in photography, and my first piece for Ensemble intercontemporain, Blur, grew from contemplations about the strangeness and timelessness of high-speed travel. But I’ve always been attracted to so-called absolute music, or music for music’s sake, and am reminded of Stravinsky’s polemics: "…I consider music, by its very nature, is essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc." I know many who vacillate on that point, including myself (and probably even Stravinsky). While our ability as listeners (or creators) to associate music with other art and other ideas can reveal much about both, I can’t help but agree with Stravinsky’s final thought, some thirty years later, on the matter: "Music expresses itself."

When I began planning a large work for the Ensemble, I thought it paramount—owing to what I learned about the special way it works and functions—to find a way to feature both the individuals and the group as a whole. But in my mind, the best concerti (whether for violin and orchestra, à la Brahms or Ligeti; or for orchestra alone, à la Bartók, or Britten with his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, or chamber concerto à la Berg) make the point via the means, rather making the means the point, the experience of which (first the flutes, then the oboes, then the clarinets…) I find can be like listening to a grocery list being read out loud.

So I’ve avoided a plan that one could put a name on, and in my Concerto most sections and players have many moments to shine. But I’ve taken different approaches in shaping each interaction, and so each player’s musical role ebbs and flows nearly constantly. At the opening of the piece, the entire ensemble acts as a large bloc, and over the course of the first movement, smaller blocks (the percussion, or the strings, etc.) begin to break and spin off from each other, obsessively preoccupied with their own disparate musical materials. In music in the second and fourth movements, soloists emerge and textures and dimensions are in flux, ranging from small chamber groups to full tuttis. The third movement is a kind of anti-concerto—a sparse texture where no one person or group is really featured, virtuosically speaking, at all. In the end, the interest while composing the piece was less about patent virtuosity and more about musical character. One hopes that listening feels the same.

Concerto for Ensemble is dedicated to Matthias Pintscher in warm admiration and friendship; to Hervé Boutry, General Director of the Ensemble intercontemporain, with gratitude; and to each of the soloists of the Ensemble intercontemporain with deepest appreciation.

—S. S.