Wuorinen – Music for Orchestra

Born in New York City, Charles Wuorinen began composing at the tender age of five and had decided on composition as his career by age 12.  He progressed rapidly as a composer, winning four prestigious BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) prizes while still a student.  (His teachers included Otto Luening and Vladi­mir Ussachevsky, whose collaborative work Rhapsodic Variations was featured on the Pomona College Orchestra’s October 2001 program.)  In 1970, his electronic compo­si­tion Time’s Encomium, written on a commission from Nonesuch Records, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music, making Wuorinen the youngest composer to receive that honor.  He has held academic positions at Columbia University and the Manhattan School of Muisc, and he is presently Professor of Composition at Rutgers University.

Wuorinen has taken an experimental approach to composition throughout his career, as is clear even in this early work, written when he was 18.  Melody is virtually non-existent, and the sense of tempo is obscured by minimal rhythmic activity and slow-moving glissandos.  One gets the impression that the metrical organization (every measure in 4/4, the most common time signature in Western music) was selected for notational convenience, rather than to illuminate any properties about how the music sounds.  The harmonic language (even when the pitches are steady) is also deliberately disorienting – although not random, as some of the same combinations of pitches from early in the piece are retrieved at the end, helping to provide a sense of closure.  The overall result is a fascinating exploration of sonic textures that takes advantage of the orchestra’s full palette of sonic color.

2002-03 PCO repertoire