Joseph Schwantner, Velocities (1990)

Joseph Schwantner was born in Chicago in 1943 and is Professor of Composition at the Yale School of Music. He has also served on the faculty of the Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School. Schwantner received his musical and academic training at the Chicago conservatory and Northwestern University, completing a doctorate in 1968.

From 1982 to 1985, Schwantner served as Composer-in-Residence with the Saint Louis Symphony orchestra as part of the Meet the Composer/Orchestra Residencies Program funded by the Exxon Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been the subject of a television documentary entitled Soundings, produced by WGBH in Boston for national broadcast. His work, Magabunda "Four Poems of Agueda Pizarro," recorded on Nonesuch Records by the Saint Louis Symphony, was nominated for a 1985 Grammy Award in the category "Best New Classical Composition," and his A Sudden Rainbow, also recorded on Nonesuch by the Saint Louis Symphony, received a 1987 Grammy nomination for "Best Classical Composition."

His orchestral work Aftertones of Infinity received the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. Other awards include First Prize in the Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards 1981 for Music of Amber and Third Prize 1986 for A Sudden Rainbow; Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1978; Consortium Commissioning Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1974, 1977, 1979 and 1988; Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation Grant, 1978; ISCM Composers Competition, 1978 and 1980; CAPS Grants, 1975 and 1977; Fairchild Award, 1985; first recipient of the Charles Ives Scholarship presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1970; Bearns Prize, 1967; and BMI Student Composer Awards, 1965, 1966 and 1968.

Velocities, which Schwantner describes as a moto perpetuo (perpetual motion) for solo marimba, was composed in 1990 and dedicated to Leigh Howard Stevens. A perpetual motion piece is one in which a single short rhythmic value is maintained without break from being to end. The composer provides the following note:

The music, as the title suggests, is characterized by continuously changing textures of rapidly articulated pitches within a framework of continually shifting meters. The linear, harmonic and gestural elements of the work are derived from a series of four, five, six and seven note pitch sets. The first major division ("relentlessly, with energy and intensity") opens with a series of aggressive articulations of a repeated harmonic idea followed by wave-like ostinato figures presented in 7/8 meter. The second principle section continues with persistent sixteenth-notes and rhythmic ideas and gestures framed in triple meter. The last major section reengages the primary musical elements presented and developed earlier and leads to a forceful and spirited conclusion.