The Four Seasons

Jennifer Higdon – Autumn Music

“When I started thinking about writing a piece for woodwind quintet, my mind began to contemplate all of the wonderful chamber music that I have played as a flutist through the years. My mind kept going back to one of the greatest contributions to the woodwind quintet literature, Samuel Barber. Having the privilege as I do of having been a student and now a teacher at the same school where Mr. Barber was both, I am ever aware of the gratitude and esteem with which I hold this artist who created so much beautiful music. It is with a humble heart that I pay homage to him and to the genre of woodwind quintet literature with this piece. Autumn comes to us in many guises: incredible explosions of color; air that suddenly snaps with crispness and clarity; a tinge of melancholy on the eve of change in all of our lives. This piece is a musical portrait of the essence and images of Autumn. The first part of the quintet represents the beginning of the season, with its explosions of color, sharp lines, and vivid imagery; always changing and always vibrant. The musical lines are sometimes present with each instrument carrying a different rhythm, reminiscent of the way leaves float down from a tree in a very unsynchronized manner. As the quintet moves into the last part of the work, there is more of an introspective and melancholy quality to the music; the music itself becomes more simplified, with a darker color to the sound. It is the passing of the season.”

This work was commissioned in 1995 by Pi Kappa lambda Music, Honorary.

--Jennifer Higdon

Adam Schoenberg – Winter Music

“Winter Music was commissioned by Quintet of the Americas and is approximately 6 minutes in duration. Barber’s Summer Music proved to be the main source of inspiration, as I have always considered his woodwind quintet to be one of the best written for the medium. He was a true-American composer who, along with Ives, Gershwin, Copland, and Bernstein, helped define the sound of American classical music. I have always felt connected to these composers, so I wanted to write a quintet that feels American in spirit. The theme that the Quintet of the Americas proposed to me was our universe, images of galaxies, planets, and stars. With this in mind, I thought about what it would be like to be on another planet. This led me to think about my New England roots, and how I am now living in Los Angeles and experiencing my first winter. Combining all these thoughts, images, and experiences into one artistic idea, I have come up with Winter Music: A companion piece to the first part of Barber’s Summer Music, and my idea of life on a single planet in one of the 170 billion galaxies located millions of light-years away from earth. That is, a fantasy world somehow paralleling and reflecting my first winter in Los Angeles: magically warm, fairy-tale like, whimsical, light, airy, and full of love.”

--Adam Schoenberg

Roumen Boyadjieff, Jr. – Spring Music

“The work should play as lightly as possible, with a lot of air, short notes durability, airy and jumpy, like a child's play and not have [any] heavy, cumbersome and irregular elements. The key word for this play is ... Lightness, lightness, lightness. Play, joy, spring and air.”

--Roumen Boyadjieff, Jr.

Samuel Barber – Summer Music

“Summer Music was commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Detroit (basically crowd funded by its members, long before that concept became an online technique) for the principals of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, who gave its premiere in 1956. Samuel Barber had composed it, however, with the players of the New York Wind Quintet in mind, utilizing their “favorite effects.” The New York ensemble quickly took up the piece and played it several times both in the United States and South America. The introduction, marked “slow and indolent,” evokes a bluesy atmosphere, specifically of the Gershwin variety, perhaps a reference to his Summertime. One also catches quick glimpses of the introduction to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in the occasional harsh but playful dissonance. After the oboe spins a long, gentle theme, a more agitated section ensues, in which the individual instruments chatter among themselves in ascending solo flourishes. The overall form is palindromic, the same backwards as forwards, with the bluesy opening returning at the quintet’s close, mixed with short echoes of previous sections.”

--LA Phil Archives