Wind Quintet
Steve Cohen
About this work:
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When I was at school and even afterwards I found wind players much more approachable and willing to look at new music than string players, possibly because there is so much classic literature for strings and, comparatively, so little for winds. I quickly found myself writing transcriptions for friends who’d formed woodwind quintets, and, once I’d gotten familiar with the techniques involved, I was emboldened enough to write a Sextet for Piano and Winds (with the impetus of a commission from the eminent piano pedagogue Isabelle Yalkovsky Byman) in 1978 and the Wind Quintet which I wrote in 1982–1983, and revised in 1992. The Wind Quintet is dedicated to Laura George, who was flutist with the Kaiser Quintet, which rehearsed the piece many times reading from the score, through numerous revisions, and made quite a few practical suggestions about the technical aspect of writing for the various instruments.
The Wind Quintet is in three movements and makes no claim to profundity of any kind. My main concern was to create an agreeable romp for a disparate cast of colorful characters, the five instruments of the quintet. I was also very intrigued at the time with the idea of seeing what spiky dissonances could be achieved while limiting the harmonic palette to the diatonic scale.
The first movement (Vivace) is more or less in the key of F major, flirts with conforming to Sonata-Allegro form and is built on a motive of the first five notes of the scale, (do, re, mi, fa, sol) played in a different inversion by each instrument (a technique Rayburn Wright of the Eastman School of Music used to refer to as “cartwheeling”) and treated as a chord. The dissonance is inherent in having a suspension (the fourth tone) and its resolution (the third) being sounded at the same time. The motive evolves into a flowing, active theme and is contrasted with a second more sustained theme first heard on the Horn. A brief episode on the opening sequence serves as a development section. A series of strettos culminates in a loud “A” sustained over five octaves leading to a sly allusion by the Oboe to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (for no reason other than to be cheeky) followed by the recapitulation and coda.
The second movement, marked Andantino, hovers around the key of A flat and is an orchestration and expansion of a movement from a Suite (written as a theory assignment) modeled after Bach’s French and English Suites. Its original title was Gavotte for a Drunken Archduke, and very little else is needed to understand this music and its purpose. The movement features many odd juxtapositions of instruments in extreme registers, i. e., Bassoon in its highest register paired with the Flute in its lowest.
The third and last movement, marked Presto, explores the world of the perpetuum mobile, and can’t quite decide whether it wants to be a Tarantella or a Saltarello. It is tonally centered around C major, but extensive use is made of an eight-note scale, built on alternating half- and whole-steps; Rimsky-Korsakov’s so-called Scale of mystery. A contrasting section is centered around A flat. After a series of contrapuntal episodes the main theme emerges as a bona fide fugue subject. The contrasting theme returns, this time in C major, and after all the main themes return, as if for a bow, the piece ends with an unexpected “black-note” chord and some fortissimo octave unisons on “C.”
Year composed: 1993
Duration: 00:12:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Woodwind Quintet
Instrumentation: 1 Flute, 1 Oboe, 1 Clarinet, 1 Bassoon, 1 Horn in F
Instrumentation notes: Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Horn, Bassoon (one of each)