New Music USA Online Library

Sky Scrapings

Don Freund

Sky Scrapings is a subversive Serenade for Alto Saxophone and Piano. Subversive, in that none of the material ends up going in the direction it appears to be pointed. Transient Fixations begins as a rondo between a nonchalant opening tune and rougher, slightly faster music, but the movement prematurely dissolves in swirls of descending dissipation. Hypertoccata is marked “electric, ‘wired’, feverish,” but its opening section is abruptly displaced by torrential unison scales jigsawed against driving zigzags. In Colliding Cantilenas tunes which suggest cocktail piano, “chaste” early Renaissance-style, and pop ballad abut one another, flanking a scurrying middle section marked “anxious, fugitivo (chased).” Gathering begins easy and buoyant, but soon turns darker and threatening, careening through rough juxtapositions to a cumulative cataclysm. In the aftermath, a morphing multiphonic leads to a little Adieu, short, simple, and tinged with nostalgia.

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