Update Title: 769BE823-030B-4C5C-8F3A-4C10A43FE0D8

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My Nonet No. 2 for String Quartet and Reed Quintet is in five connected sections. A brief Intro and Outro frame three large movements:
Floating (Concert champêtre after Titian)
Learning (Mambo fugato)
Coming Home (Song without Words)

The initial impulse behind Floating was my memories of a rafting trip on the Deschutes River many years ago, but it was also shaped by playing barcarolles by Fauré and Bartók. Later I realized that my “out of doors” music also connected to Titian’s great painting at the Louvre, titled Concert champêtre – a picture of a bucolic orgy-with-music. This movement progresses from near-stillness to a raucous rock which might recall either the rapids on the Deschutes or the implied partying of Titian’s picnic-goers.

The second movement mixes the history of the fugue with the mystery of the mambo. I decided that I would write a fugue for this nonet only if I could balance a show of learning (in the 18th century fugue was a hallmark of what was termed the “learnèd style”) with an equal amount of fun. Part of the fun comes in the fleeting homages to well-known fugues by Bach (listen for his initials), Beethoven, and even Richard Strauss; the mambo element is an homage to the great Cuban musician Mario Bauza, best known perhaps for his song “Mambo Inn”.
Coming Home brings us back to what for me is the very core of music: melody. Although the style of the movement is unrelated to Mendelssohn, it pays homage generically to Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, which I first played when I was eight years old and which were my first hands-on experience of musical beauty.

In composing my second nonet I was constantly inspired by the coloristic resources of the string quartet and reed quintet, and, in particular, and my the many different ways of mixing their colors while bringing out the expressive potential of each instrument in the ensemble. I was supremely delighted when David Shifrin told me that the premiere would be performed by the Dover String Quartet and the Akropolis Reed Quintet, two astonishingly mature young ensembles whose playing I admire greatly.

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