| Program Notes | Roethke Preludes is the third piece which I have written for my good friends, the musicians of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. The first piece was composed for an ensemble of oboe and string quartet; the second for pairs of oboes, bassoons, horns, solo piano and string orchestra; now finally I have written for the full complement (and then some - this piece has three trombones and added percussion). There are six short movements in Roethke Preludes, with the entire piece taking a little over a quarter of an hour. The movements range in length from under two minutes to about four minutes, and explore a wide variety of mood and orchestral color. Each prelude takes as a point of departure a fragment from the poetry of 20th century American poet, Theodore Roethke. These fragments, which I gleaned from reading many of Roethke's poems and notebook entries, are strongly evocative to me, and the music grew directly out of them. So, for example, the violins are almost literally 'tethered' to the high register ('another moon') while the rest of the orchestra tries hard to reach them. The 'sherpherd of slow forms' is the time-honored musical structure known as the chacone, in which a repeated chord progression is the vehicle for additive variation. In 'Straw for the Fire' clumps of notes (exclusively from the C major scale) are thrown in fugally, beginning with solo piccolo, which is a musical straw if there ever was one. And so on. Roethke Preludes also features the percussion section in an important and structural way. The timpani play a fairly important part throughout, and each movement has its own particular 'percussion color,' which is often expressed in pairs of instruments. These percussion sounds are clear enough, and I will let you discover them as the piece unfolds. Roethke Preludes was composed in May-November, 1994. --Donald Crockett |
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