Update Title: FCDD8806-E125-4365-921A-F0D49A987346

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Hymnal was composed during the summer and fall of 1987. In it, a world, cross-sected by the textures and sounds of l8th-century New England hymnody, is pitted against a world of contrasting, sometimes even contradictory, original material.

The work begins with "Quincy," a hymn by Timothy Swan (1758-1842), a composer whose work has interested me for many years because of its striking use of dissonance and original melodic language. Swan evolved his compositional style from l8th-century New England Singing School sources, grafted it onto a more secular style in his Songster's Assistant of 1799, attempted with it to establish himself as a composer of hymns in the New England manner with his New England Harmony of 1801, and then largely gave up composition as the market for native idioms waned during the early 19th century.

To my ear and sensibility there is something emblematic in Swan's work and in the New England idiom of the late 18th century. Its use of bare fifths and thirds, especially when these formative intervals are bluffed by unexpected dissonances, has opened up an idiom in which blurred consonances can become harmonic building blocks and intersecting scales can become the basis for complex and original structures. Hymnal takes this blurring as its point of departure, introducing then superimposing and otherwise developing simple and easily remembered materials (Swan's hymn, an original fiddle tune, a long flute litany, a fanfare) over the course of a single movement laid out in five parts.

Like many composers (Ives and neo-classical Stravinsky immediately come to mind), I find the superimposition of very different musical idioms useful to the creation of works and a contradiction of means to be moving. Thus, Hymnal uses hymns and the idiom of hymnody to convey through juxtaposition a sense of the past in contemporary terms.

Hymnal was premiered by Christopher Kendall and the Seattle Symphony on April 16, 17, and 18, 1989 at the Seattle Opera House in Seattle, Washington. Since then it has been performed many times by such orchestras as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Young Artists Orchestra.

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