Exorcisms
marc faris
About this work:
I began sketching an orchestral work during the summer of 2008, while simultaneously working on a piece for violin and piano in memory of a friend and colleague who had recently died of complications from breast cancer. Initially, both pieces overlapped substantially in their emotional and musical content, dwelling on themes of grief, longing, and meditative reflection. As my work on the violin/piano piece drew to a close, however, I began to want the orchestra piece to do something different – to be about casting out those feelings, which, if left lying around for too long, could become like bad spirits. It turns out that 2008 was a year with a lot of “bad spirits” to cast out – both for me personally and for a great many people around the country and the world, struggling with a collapsing economy and an uncertain future on many other fronts… so perhaps Exorcisms will have resonance with listeners for a variety of reasons.
The work is cast in ABA form. After a series of pounding chords in the brass and strings (alternating with a rapidly unfolding set of dissonant sonorities in the winds), the main theme – an ascending line that begins with a small step and a wide leap – is introduced in the low strings. The theme gradually passes into the upper registers of the strings before dissipating. A rhythmic ostinato drives a series of short variations on the main theme, accompanied by a “sighing” figure in the strings and winds (one of a handful of musical ideas derived from the violin/piano piece). The ostinato is then recast as a wild, obsessively “yelping” figure in the clarinets and violins, as an inversion of the main theme in the low brass foreshadows the return of the pounding chords. After a brief pause and a sigh in the winds, the B section gets underway. Over a seemingly static background of high, nearly inaudible sustained sonorities in the violins, the other instruments articulate repetitive but constantly mutating figures, the resulting patterns going in and out of sync with one another unpredictably and creating a sense of prolonged, quiet discomfort; the periodic intrusion of long melodic lines (in cellos and trombones) does little to offset this general mood. The section concludes with whispering winds gradually overtaken by the piano and percussion. The strident opening chords return, but with a newly obsessive quality, relentlessly repeating and gradually increasing in tempo and volume. The final section recasts the opening material in a mode that is by turns more optimistic (even hinting at major-key sonorities!) and more violent, and the piece draws to a close with one last highly dissonant return to the opening gesture (marked “brutal” and “stabbing” in the score), before finishing with a sigh, a whisper, and an inconclusive chord.
Year composed: 2008
Duration: 09:30:60
Ensemble type: Orchestra
Instrumentation: 1 Piccolo, 2 Flute, 2 Oboe, 2 Clarinet, 2 Bassoon, 2 Horn in F, 2 Trumpet, 2 Trombone, 1 Bass Trombone, 1 Tuba, 1 Timpani, 2 Percussion (General), 1 Piano, 1 Strings (General)