Update Title: F047EF4F-EAC9-4F5A-A6A2-41D81E1B7A9E

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Homage to Tchaikovsky is the result of a commission from the Santa Barbara Symphony and its conductor, Gisele Ben-Dor. The symphony's manager, Rob Birman, called me in the summer Of 2000 to ask if I would write a short opening work for the May 12 and 13, 2001 concerts, whose theme was to be "Mostly Tchaikovsky." Rob conveyed Gisele's wish for a work with a duration of 5 to 8 minutes.

So with those guidelines, and knowing the tremendous talents and abilities of Gisele Ben-Dor and our symphony, I pondered the commission for awhile and thought it appropriate to become in a direct way part of the concert's theme, "Mostly Tchaikovsky." Tchaikovsky was a great melodist, he was a colorful orchestrator, his music has a neoclassic clarity and directness. Those are qualities that many of us appreciate in the music of any period, and they account for much of Tchaikovsky's appeal.

I decided to do something I have never done before in symphonic music: take a few actual motives from another composer's music and develop them within a work of my own. This practice, incidentally, was prevalent in earlier periods of music, and other composers of our time have engaged in it, so there is nothing revolutionary or "verboten" about it. I chose a dozen or so motives from some of Tchaikovsky's compositions and built a 7-minute overture around them. It seemed advisable in such a brief work to keep the mood light and lively, eschewing the heart-breaking pathos of which he was a master. There are motives from The Nutcracker, the 4th, 5th, and 6th Symphonies, the song "None But the Lonely Heart," Romeo and Juliet, and a tiny allusion near the end to the opening chords of the Bb minor piano concerto. There are some original themes, too, and the whole short piece does not come across, I hope, as a work by Tchaikovsky, but one by a 21st century composer who looks back appreciatively on the melodic gifts of a 19th century writer of music.

Homage to Tchaikovsky uses the orchestration of the other works on the concert, the 3rd Symphony and the 1st Piano Concerto. Therefore, there is not the plethora of percussion instruments that grace many a contemporary work, only timpani, plus the woodwinds, brass, and strings of what is called a "standard" orchestra. --Emma Lou Diemer

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