1982
for
Wind Quintet
Fred Lerdahl
Emmanuel Wind Quintet
1981 Chamber Music Competition
April 27, 1982
Fred Lerdahl is a composer and theorist whose books include A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, written with Ray Jackendoff. He led Columbia’s composition program for twenty years and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Three of his works have been Pulitzer Prize finalists.
Lerdahl describes four refrains alternating with three episodes. A slow unison melody provides the material for increasingly elaborate refrains, while the episodes are quicker and more contrapuntal. The return of the opening refrain frames the whole.
Fred Lerdahl is a composer and music theorist whose work connects composition with questions about musical understanding. He studied at Lawrence University, Princeton and Tanglewood, and taught at Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan and Columbia. At Columbia he was Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition and led the composition program for twenty years. With linguist Ray Jackendoff he wrote A Generative Theory of Tonal Music; his later books include Tonal Pitch Space and Composition and Cognition. Lerdahl is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His chamber work Time after Time, Third String Quartet and Arches for cello and chamber orchestra were Pulitzer Prize finalists. His music is published by Schott and has been extensively recorded.
Episodes and Refrains (1982), for wind quintet, was commissioned by the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation for the Emmanuel Wind Quintet. It is about 13 minutes long and is in one movement, with the form subdivided into four refrains alternating with three episodes.
Refrain I is a slow, expressive melody played by the five instruments in unison. Refrains II and III successively expand and eleborate this melody into a heterophonic texture. Refrain IV is a da capo of Refrain I; the two function as a frame for the entire piece. The episodes derive in their underlying structure from the refrains. But in other respects the episodes are quite different: they are more contrapuntal, longer, faster, and with a character that is darting and explosive. They are all the same length and are variations of one another.
The whole forms a web of cross-references with alternating contrasts. The tensions produced are not so much resolved as contained by the formal symmetries.
