Symphony no. 3
Stephen Ferre
About this work:
Although not programmatic in the literal sense, this Symphony took as its starting point the plight of the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were an early sect of Christians (possibly the Essenes) who lived apart from the mainstream movement. According to a text I was reading at the time I wrote the initial material of the Symphony in 1987 (the middle portion of the second movement), it was thought that the sect was dying out and hid their writings in jars in the Qumran Caves in the West Bank. When I restarted work in 1988 with what is now most of the first movement, I treated it as the sect leaving Jerusalem and traveling to the West Bank. The second movement deals initially with their realization that they wouldn’t survive with the latter part of it depicting their travails.
In many ways, this work was as much a struggle to compose as the sect’s struggle to survive. I composed a large chunk of the second movement, originally intending it to be the beginning of the first, but abandoned it in late 1987, restarting the following summer. At that time I composed a similar amount of material from the new first movement in a loose Sonata form, breaking off at the recapitulation to work on the second movement, which I originally intended to be longer, but appears in its entirety (although altered) at the beginning of the new second movement. Again, I abandoned work in 1992 to complete commissioned work with more secure performances lined up. I took up the work again in 1996 to enter in a competition, completing the first movement (Exodus), but I ran out of time to finish the rest of the Symphony before the deadline. Around 2000, I made another stab at finishing it, reorganizing existing material into what is now a single large second movement. By 2001, I had finally found the final barline and input the latter part in Finale to get a better sense of what I had written over the previous 14 years, but there were still several gaps that I completed in pencil over the next year, but it wasn’t until the end of 2014, that I resolved to finish the typesetting (in Score, like Exodus) and fill in the few remaining gaps, still tinkering with the orchestration after completing the first proof. The end finally came on January 2, 2015, nearly 28 years after writing the first notes.
I would like to dedicate this work to Dwight Oltman on the occasion of his retirement in May 2014. He taught me more about being a musician than I can enumerate here, and has supported my work even beyond my graduation from Baldwin-Wallace in 1983.
Year composed: 2015
Duration: 00:31:00
Ensemble type: Orchestra:Standard Orchestra
Instrumentation: 1 Piccolo, 2 Flute, 2 Oboe, 1 English Horn, 2 Clarinet, 2 Bassoon, 4 Horn in F, 3 Trumpet, 3 Trombone, 1 Tuba, 1 Timpani, 3 Percussion (General), 1 Piano, 1 Strings (General), 1 Harp
Instrumentation notes: Bsn 2 double Cbn