PROGRAM NOTE

Last modified 28 July 2024

Aspiration (2004-2005)
for solo violin and chamber orchestra

by Roger Reynolds

Aspiration is concerned with the ways in which we reach out, trying to go beyond our apparent limitations. The soloist’s line is always striving higher, irregularly but inevitably. The chamber orchestra is divided into high- and low-register groups. Each has a succession of textured harmonic fields that descends in range throughout the work.

The soloist reaches for the freedom of the heights, the ensemble for the stability of the deepest register. The soloist has two kinds of music: while interacting with the chamber orchestra, s/he is sometimes playing and at others considering the musical spaces that the orchestra evokes. When playing, the soloist’s agitation – their level of need – is reflected by unpredictable, rapid outbursts, as though other “worlds” of possibility were calling to them.

And the soloist does have a personal world: five cadenzas that link and separate the six orchestral statements. The first is rhapsodic and flowing while the second is urgent and iterative. In succeeding cadenzas, these influences coalesce. During the course of the work, the high and low sections of the orchestra, the accompanied and cadenza passages of the soloist all gradually come to influence one another, to become interwoven and collaborative. The orchestra is increasingly influenced by the soloist’s habit of interjection, while the soloist adopts, in turn, some of the textural models which the ensemble has used. Aspiration presents, then, a set of behaviors – of principles – that are thrown into juxtaposition. They all, in the end, have need for accommodation, as do we.

– Roger Reynolds