Abstract
Finding a title for the piece we are hearing for the first time this evening has been a difficult task. To call it a Concerto for 'cello and orchestra would be misleading, since the term 'concerto' implies a form as well as a relationship. In general my musical thinking is not comfortable with conventional modes of construction, nor does it rely on received conventions of form. While the music is constructed with great attention to contextual unity and formal coherence, it also strives for a sense of the informal, the improvisational, the spontaneous. Increasingly, my music has welcomed the absorption of musical elements from many sources, not for the purposes of quotation or superficial reference, but for the possibility of fusion and transformation. Among these sources has been popular music of our culture. I see the vernacular much in the wav the American poet William Carlos Williams did - as raw material which awaits the transforming power of the imagination. As an artist I seek to explore this material, to trace connections with other seemingly unrelated materials - unrelated in terms of culture, time, style, genre - and to allow the contrasts and collisions to evoke new states of being. The magic of unanticipated transformation is what interests me. When it happens in my own work I am surprised and grateful. The present composition is composed without movement divisions: nevertheless, it will travel through a variety of clearly characterized musical territories. The duration is roughly 20 minutes. It is dedicated with affection and respect to Ralph Kirshbaum.
—Yehudi Wyner