Update Title: 2C8599F0-3002-47A5-8180-24CA3C0AC228

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A Brandenburg Autumn was composed in response to a request from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra for a new work using the same instrumentation as the first of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.  This had, in fact, long been a particular project that I had wanted to pursue, and, as fortune would have it, I found myself in Germany as a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin at the very time I had to compose it.  Thus the piece emerged as something of a musical diary of my impressions of living not far from the palace of Charlottenburg where the dedicatee of Bach’s Brandenburgs himself lived.

The area of Brandenburg itself is, in fact, a land of lakes, and my studio was quite close to the Wannsee, the lake that borders on western Berlin as well as Potsdam, the capital of Brandenburg.  The first movement – Nocturne: Barcarolle – is a musical sketch of the lake, even incorporating suggestions of the sound of halyards striking against the masts of the sailboats moored at a nearby marina.

The second movement is a more playful piece – Scherzo: Colloquy – about conversation and, more particularly, the speech rhythms and dynamic of a dinner table discussion among scholars.  Against a background of polite expectation, a proposition is set forth, then elaborated, questioned perhaps, even misunderstood, and so forth.  Other ideas arise, some only tangentially related to the topic, and each in a different mode of speech.  In the end there has been some transformation but of an inconclusive sort and the underlying politeness of the encounter prevails by quietly drawing a halt to the proceedings (coffee is served in the next room?)

The final movement – Sarabande: Palaces – is an autumnal, valedictory sort of piece, that turned out to be very much about my strolling through the parks of Potsdam admiring the many Hohenzollern palaces and other buildings there.  It is all very beautiful, especially in the autumn with the trees changing color and the sky dark and feeling so very close.  It was hard not to think about Bach coming here to visit his son Carl Philip Emanuel, who was working at court, and, in the end the movement came to have a few more overt references to the Baroque period.  The idea of doing a sarabande came from my regular recreational playing-through of the Bach keyboard suites, in particular the English suites -- my favorite being the one in D minor.  The harpsichord textures in this movement, then, spring from those of the Sarabande Double in that suite.  And a harmonic juxtaposition in the opening seems to have led me to quote a Hohenzollern melody:  the theme by Frederick the Great that Bach elaborated in the Musical Offering.

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