Center City Brass
"Street Song"
Chandos Records
November 1, 2004
Premiere performance: September 17, 1988, by the Empire Brass Quintet, Suntori Hall, Tokyo
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Michael Tilson Thomas is Founder and Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, and Conductor Laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra. In addition to conducting the world’s leading orchestras, MTT is also noted for his work as a composer and a producer of multimedia projects that are dedicated to music education and the reimagination of the concert experience. He has won eleven Grammys for his recordings, is the recipient of the National Medal of Arts and the 2019 Kennedy Center Honors, and is an Officier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.
Program Notes by Michael Tilson Thomas:
Street Song is a work in three continuous parts - an interweaving of three songs. The first song opens with a jagged downward scale suspending in the air a sweetly dissonant harmony that very slowly resolves. This moment of resolution is followed by responses of various kinds. The harmonies move between the world of the middle ages and the present, between East and West, and always, of course, from the perspective of twentieth-century America. Overall the movement is about starting and stopping, the moments of suspension always leading somewhere else.
The second song is introduced by a yodel-like horn solo. It is followed by a simple trumpet duet, which was first written around 1972. It is folk-like in character and also cadences with the suspended moments of slowly resolving dissonance.
The third song is really more of a dance. It begins when the trombone slides a step higher, bringing the work into the key of F-sharp and into a jazzier swing. The harmonies here are the stacked-up moments of suspension from the first two parts of the piece. By now I hope these "dissonant" sounds actually begin to sound "consonant." There is a resolution, but it is in the world of a musician who after many after-hours gigs greets the dawn. Finally, the three songs are brought together and the work moves toward a quiet close.
Street Song was originally written in 1988 for the Empire Brass Quintet. It is dedicated to my father, Ted, who was and still is the central music influence on my life. The sounds of his nighttime improvisations echo in the work.
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