Duration: 20’
Instrumentation: 1(=picc, a.f.).1(=corA).1(=E-flat clarinet, Bcl).1(=cbn) – 0.1.0.0 – perc (1 player: drum kit, marimba, tam-tam, wood block, suspended cymbal, tambourine, ratchet, 4 tom-toms) – 1.0.1.1.1
Performance Note:
Through the Looking Glass is a set of five movements for large chamber ensemble written in the late summer of 2014. Its tone is, if not always bleak, is more wistful than not—a reflection, perhaps, of the year’s grim news forecasts (and, in hindsight, prophetic of worse to come).
By design, the music tends to look to the past. Looking Glass’s first movement, “Threnody,” appropriates the title of the ancient Greek lament, with wailing oboe and clarinet answered by an inexpressive string chorale and an enigmatic trumpet/percussion figure. The fourth movement, “A time there was…?,” presents a mythologized soundscape of an imagined, easier time: the strains of an invented hymn alternate with the gentle syncopations of a 1920s-era dance hall tune. Additionally, a kind of corrupted simplicity also emerges in the finale, “Serenity Now,” in which an insistently rhythmic melody is broken up by contrasting episodes that recall musical forms from past times only to be finally silenced by a return of “Threnody’s” caterwauling.
The second and third movements also look back, but here the rearward view is more internal and personal. In the former, bright, pulsing figures suddenly give way to violently accented gestures and the music unravels mechanistically.
At the heart of Through the Looking Glass, “Tombeau,” whose title references Ravel’s marvelous memorial, Le tombeau de Couperin, but whose content never quotes anything from it. Instead, recurring string chords form a backdrop to a series of “memorials” played, respectively, by alto flute, English horn, and trumpet. A more animated central section begins to move things forward but collapses under its own weight. The chords and fragments of the “memorials” return and the movement ends with a disconsolate figure of lamentation.