Update Title: F7836270-AFDD-42E5-BA20-9A76C03C8A97

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In this piece I have tried to deal with some significant personal milestones that are all converging within months of each other-my fiftieth birthday (about to occur in January 1986), the twenty-five years of marriage that my wife and I recently celebrated this summer, and the twentieth anniversary of my father's death in 1965. I've been fascinated by the idea of integrating aspects of my past and present, and the possibility of going about that in a purely musical way. Since certain memories of mine are associated with early compositions, for Celebrations/Reflections I have quoted freely from some of this earlier material. 
Appropriately enough, I decided to quote music of mine representing three different decades.

From the late 1950s, I chose an exuberant and eve ' ft raucous little march tune, and from the '60s, the composition-in fact, the specific passage-I was working on at my father's death. The quote dealing with the '70s intrigues me on a number of levels. In the first place, it is not really my music, but the reworking of a Victorian parlor song. Secondly, whereas in 1976 1 thought that I was composing a piece about Bowdoin authors-the parlor song, for example, is set to a Longfellow poem--I was really writing about my own 40's crisis. That seems clear now, and nowhere more so than in my subconscious attraction to Longfellow's words. (Entitled "My Lost Youth," the text mingles memories of the poet's youth with the refrain "a boy's will is, the wind's will, and thoughts of youth are long, 
long thoughts.") Finally, the memories evoked in the poem-and the parlor song-are memories of Portland: not only the city of Longfellow's boyhood but my father's as well.

From many viewpoints, then Celebrations/Reflections can be considered autobiographical. But it is not programmatic: there are no specific relationships between musical motives and real-life events. The original materials are "developed "and re-worked in manv different 
contexts, so that any such one-to-one correspondences would never arise. Then, too, despite the personal nature of my initial concept, I quickly became preoccupied, while composing, with strictly musical (as opposed to autobiographical) associations. I especially enjoyed the discovery of two factors: ( I ) that mv seemingly disparate materials (taken down off the shelf of three decades!) were tightly related by their common use of a single interval, and (2) that the piece naturally fell into an orchestral fabric of extreme contrasts-- massive tuttis, many concerto-like passages for solo instruments (the cello in particular), extended chamber music textures, and moments where one sort of texture is transformed into--or engulfed by--another.

A word about the sub-title: about half-way through the piece I began to worry that a simple, sober title like Celebrations/Reflections wouldn't really convey the slightly surrealist, dreamlike quality that I had in mind. The parenthetical addition of A Time Warp provides precisely that added dimension. It may also provide a key to one final element of quotation in the work (this time from the '80s)-and a way of offering special thanks to my two children, in whose company I've been pleased to discover a very different (and often very exciting) brand of "modern music." I hope they enjoy the results.  --Elliott Schwartz

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