Lately, the inspiration to commit musical ideas to any kind of permanence has come from the artists for whom I’m lucky enough to write. The musicians themselves become the fuel that keeps me burning. When I heard Sphere perform in the Spring of 2024, they presented a program of many brilliant arrangements by Alex Vittal and others, followed by Tchaikovsky’s celebrated Serenade for Strings. At that time, my piece had already been commissioned by Christine Harbison, but I had no concrete ideas just yet. After hearing and watching them perform Tchaikovsky’s serenade, I came to grips with just how privileged and lucky I was…that anything and everything was fair game. I could feel my own engine start to rev up even as I walked to my car after that concert. Music for Motion strives to show off these 13 fluent and flexible musicians in the best way possible. Each of these four movements is set to a different kind of motion (by tempo and character).
I. Beneath the Wheel takes its name from the tragic novel by Hermann Hesse. This book, like Damien, and his others, imprinted itself on my memory as an admonition against arrested development at a young age. Ominous at first, the music’s twisted motif wends its way through more elegant and lighter moments; however, there is a Slavic-type despondency (with a question) at the conclusion.
II. Kleiner Morgenwanderer (Little Morning Wanderer), like the seventeenth piece from Robert Schumann’s Album for the Young, depicts a young boy on a morning excursion through the woods. There is both innocence and confidence in this music, and even some marching.
III. Falling is sad but hopeful music. A continuous series of sinking and ever-drooping chorale phrases with unfulfilled promises of breaking its own spell combine to make music of great heartache. Grand, non vibrato “Cathedral music” appears as an antidote to the multitude of valleys and depressions, only to conclude on the very lowest note of the lowest instrument.
IV. John’s Runaway Yacht Rock Vibes fuses two ideas into one: 70s and 80s soft rock dance music with John Adams’ older brand of minimalism (from nearly the same period). Like mixing two colors, the result here was always something I thought about exploring in the future. And here we are!
- Carter Pann
