Marga Richter

5. Expansion: 1980s

85 5 Expansion 1980s You can find her work if you seek it out. They might not have it at every record store and it might not be in the top ten, but it takes you places that those top ten hits won’t, and they’re places worth visiting. David Garland, remarks on Evening Music, WNYC, March 31, 1999 the compositional atmosphere of the 1980s was extraordinarily varied. Some composers continued to compose serial, electronic, and chance music. Others wrote sound-mass music and sound poetry, used environmental sounds, and became performance artists. Richter continued to go her own way. Eager to continue her 1970s success, she wrote primarily symphonic and chamber music but also returned to writing vocal and choral music, all in a richly chromatic language. English and Irish Influences In 1980 Richter completed her Spectral Chimes/Enshrouded Hills for three orchestral quintets and orchestra. She had begun work on it in 1978 after she received her first National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to write a piece for Ainslee Cox and the Oklahoma Symphony.The initial working title was “Music for Three Quintets and Orchestra.”1 (In a January 8, 1980, letter to Richter, Skrowaczewski playfully suggested the title M435aO.) This was soon expanded to Music forThree Orchestral Quintets and Orchestra, to indicate that an orchestra would not have to hire outside quintets but that the quintets, standard woodwind, brass, and string, were drawn from within the orchestra itself. 86 This twenty-five-minute work is uniquely scored for wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon), string quintet (2 violins, viola, cello, bass), brass quintet (2 trumpets, horn, trombone, tuba), and orchestra. In her performance note for the piece, Richter explains: The quintets are drawn from the orchestra and should, ideally, be seated at the front of the stage as solo groups. They are employed both as quintet groups and as a pool of 15 soloists functioning in a variety of groupings with and without the orchestra, and at times in unison with the orchestra in concerto grosso style. In short, the quintets do not serve exclusively as separate entities in dialogue with each other or the orchestra. Rather, their function is to “personalize” the thematic material to add a special acoustic and expressive dimension which would not otherwise be present.2 Some time after completing the work, she changed the title yet again and added the following to the performance note: While writing Spectral Chimes I was reading Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. My consciousness was gradually permeated with the image of Tess constantly toiling up and down those misted English hills, seeking something which proved to be always beyond reach. These feelings are reflected in the music . . . Hardy’s references, in his poetry, to phantoms and to tolling bells, became my spectral chimes and his distant vistas my enshrouded hills. In 1995 Richter traveled to Prague, where the work was recorded, along with her Quantum Quirks of a Quick Quaint Quark, by the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz. In the liner notes to this recording, composer Mark Lehman suggests that the specific images are not as important as the colorful scoring and more abstract relationships within the work: This description may suggest a misty, impressionistic tone-poem, but Richter’s composition is much more ambitious, uncompromising, and original than that. . . . The resulting work is a remarkable synthesis of complex scoring, rigorous structural integrity, and deeply-felt emotion that—like Thomas Hardy’s doomed protagonists and desolate landscapes—encompasses impassioned defiance, granitic strength, evocative mystery, forlorn majesty, and, ultimately, stoic resignation.3 Lehman then provides an extended analysis of the loosely sonata-form movement . His description of the primary theme and its transformations reveals the grand scale of the piece: Spectral Chimes opens with sound and fury: a rugged fortissimo statement of its main motive, whose repeated notes, skips, and spring-loaded triplet motion will appear again and again, in various guises, throughout the piece, becoming the source of much of its thrusting, impulsive energy. m a r g a r i c h t e r : Expansion 87 This allegro theme is divided among the quintets, beginning in the brass quintet, continuing in the wind and string quintets, and returning to the brass quintet.The contrasting secondary theme, introduced at a new andante tempo by a solo trumpet , is accompanied Richter-style with steady ostinatos in...