Fiery Wind (1977)

Composer note
Fiery Wind, for orchestra, is continuous but not seamless. The metaphoric wind of the title arises out of the periodic accumulation and dissipation of a seven-layered fabric of ostinatos which should remain subdued. This process takes place at three evenly spaced intervals during the course of the piece. Each time, the pitch content of the component ostinatos remains constant, while their rhythm, timbre, dynamics, and pattern of overlapping change.

Two categories of musical materials are used in addition to the ostinato complexes. One, linear, consists of five phrases with seven pitches each. Together, these extended lines span the entire duration of the compositions. Each elongated pitch is treated in a characteristic way including inflection, ornamentation, reiteration, and service as a core around which pitch clusters are built.

The second category of materials includes three chordal complexes that are repeated periodically throughout. They too undergo alteration through anticipation, anacrusis, suspension, and inversion, though it is their tendency toward inflexibility which is most characteristic.

The emergent “wind” of figurations waxes and wanes behind the inflexible chord successions and expansive phrases. Between the periodic returns of the wind, both basic categories of materials have an opportunity to fulfill themselves, the chordal exclamations after the first third of the work, the lyric linear elements at the two-thirds point.

Two extra-musical sources had a role in germinating this composition: a novel, The Box Man, by the perplexing Japanese writer Kobo Abe and an article on the phenomenon of solar wind. Their unlikely conjunction rekindled my long-term fascination with wind and its perhaps unparalleled range of impact, from the frailest of zephyrs to a hurricane’s unreasoning force.

Abe’s novel provided a metaphysical image: the existence in human affairs of an undefined force, disinterested but catalytic. It was the notion of a powerful but restrained potential that struck me. The underlying image in Fiery Wind, the, is not of excess or abandon, but of a contained capacity that fosters a variety of musical transformations or responses, some subtle, others intense.

Fiery Wind was composed in Tokyo during an extended residency that my family and I had there in 1977. The première performance was on 13 February 1978, in Carnegie Hall, by the American Composers Orchestra, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.

— Roger Reynolds