Keyboard Quintet
elec. vln, cl, tpt, elec. vc, synth
Date of Composition: 1997
PROGRAM NOTES:
With the Keyboard Quintet, my original idea was to compose a sonic blockbuster, by using electronic violin and cello, plus synthesizer, clarinet, and trumpet. Such instrumentation, as planned, would make a bright, big, forceful sound, not far removed from rock.
Well, it didn’t turn out that way. The opening movement, Prelude, is quite tame and lyrical; bits of tune, wistful motives, and lighthearted figures tossed among the instruments, each presenting its own character and idiomatic technique.
The Fugato is the most assertive of the four movements. It’s no textbook fugue, but determinedly fugal, imitative writing, at times textural, and rhythmically close to Bach’s concerti. Bach would never have written those pitches or trafficked with such harmonies and progressions. Still, the synthesizer part is not far removed from the baroque, bass continuo: the bass lines and keyboard chords hold the texture together while the other instruments carry on with their counterpoint, subjects and answers, tunes against tunes, all in a syncopated six-four meter (which is not Bach at all).
The Intermezzo is an aria, song-like and melodic. At first, the clarinet carries a long-lined melody accompanied by tremolo violin and cello. (There is something Sibelius about this texture.) It’s a ruminative melody, providing thematic material for each instrument to muse over. Neither quite melancholic nor nostalgic, it is but the portrait of melody, the semblance ofmelody. I love it because it is not the real thing, and here I do not mean to split intellectual hairs when I say that it is but the trace of a melody, a melody lost.
The last movement, I (sometimes known as eight-note music), has long been typical of American composers. Perhaps it is, along with the Intermezzo, nothing more than a portrait of eighth-note, nervous Americana. Rhythmically, it jogs along in a duple (one-two, one-two) meter, though never far in spirit from the Gigue that ends many instrumental suites in the 17th and 18th century with dance instead of song. In this case, the ending fades off into nothing. The energy of the Gigue is soon dispersed, lost, and set apart.
-James Sellars