What Story Awaits Its End?

Description

Thomas L. Read’s What Story Awaits Its End?, for flute, clarinet in Bb doubling bass clarinet, and piano. A richly tonal and vivid continuous concert work, broken up into six internal movements.

From the composer:

‘What Story Awaits Its End presents, in succession six contrasted compositions. Each has a different from, style and mood. The first five are all broken off, either in mid-phrase or just before an expected resolution or denouement. The sixth is a completed composition with a simple and unequivocal conclusion.

Despite such formal discontinuities and, also, lack of traditional tonality, I’ve tried fashion a musical totality; one that would, in the end, express a feeling of inevitability and arrival. I confess to having been inspired and challenged by a reading of Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. The work title, What Story…, is an adaption of a line form one of the ten very different interrupted stories that make up Calvino’s novel.

Outline of the form:
I. The opening ‘story’ is a duet for flute and piano cast as a sonata exposition.
II. A rather austere meditation for bass clarinet and piano.
III. A contrapuntal trio in which an extended melody is very gradually assembled from seemingly unrelated motives.
IV. An accompanied song by the flute with clarinet obbligato in a folkish style.
V. A miniature rondo for the winds. Shortly, loud, clashing piano chords obliterate the duet.
VI. A full-blown theme with five variations and brief coda.’

Duration: 14′. For advanced players.

Additional information