Harbison: Twilight Music
Just as John Harbison imagines the unlikely pair of horn and violin “meeting best under cover of dusk,” Twilight Music cloaks its abstract architecture beneath the warmer veneer of lyric chromaticism. Rather than forcing an unhappy marriage, Harbison’s approach to the incongruities between horn and violin is to juxtapose and celebrate their distinct identities, using that friction as a dramatic impetus of the piece. And in the Antiphon, the piece’s third section and the source of much of its generative material, Harbison drapes his sophisticated intervallic processes in an exterior that he finds “simplest and most familiar, where the piece seems to make no effort.” This represents one of the composer’s most stalwart efforts in the American musical landscape: to revive a fledgling American musical identity that had been cut short by the postwar, university-sponsored avant-garde, whose relationship with lay audiences verged on antagonistic. Harbison achieved a rare synthesis by which he crafted a more palatable surface than his mid-century contemporaries Babbitt and Boulez, but without diluting the intellectual integrity of his works’ construction. Twilight Music needs no explanation of its secret organizing forces, although they are there; its evocative, smoky sonorities and dynamic part-writing speak for themselves.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
Just as John Harbison imagines the unlikely pair of horn and violin “meeting best under cover of dusk,” Twilight Music cloaks its abstract architecture beneath the warmer veneer of lyric chromaticism. Rather than forcing an unhappy marriage, Harbison’s approach to the incongruities between horn and violin is to juxtapose and celebrate their distinct identities, using that friction as a dramatic impetus of the piece. And in the Antiphon, the piece’s third section and the source of much of its generative material, Harbison drapes his sophisticated intervallic processes in an exterior that he finds “simplest and most familiar, where the piece seems to make no effort.” This represents one of the composer’s most stalwart efforts in the American musical landscape: to revive a fledgling American musical identity that had been cut short by the postwar, university-sponsored avant-garde, whose relationship with lay audiences verged on antagonistic. Harbison achieved a rare synthesis by which he crafted a more palatable surface than his mid-century contemporaries Babbitt and Boulez, but without diluting the intellectual integrity of his works’ construction. Twilight Music needs no explanation of its secret organizing forces, although they are there; its evocative, smoky sonorities and dynamic part-writing speak for themselves.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival