Robert Aitken – Folia (1981)
Daniel Foley
Aitken’s “Scherzo for Woodwind Quintet” Folia was commissioned by the York Winds with the assistance of the Canada Council in 1981 and was composed in the fall of that year at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Both the time and place of the work’s creation are commemorated in the title of this work, which reveals the composer’s intention to “reflect the random order and rich colours of nature as exhibited by tree and ‘foliage’ while maintaining a high lever of intensity throughout. Even the few sustained passages offer the musicians extra technical challenges such as trills of variable speed, flutter tonguing and simultaneous singing and playing.” The dense forest of notes that evolve from the wooden instruments that send forth the first roots of the work may indeed strike certain listeners as ‘random’, yet they are in fact derived from the subtle change ringing of a carefully chosen series of notes and durations: “The music follows an idea of all things relating and flowing into each other and, while there are certain random aspects, it is not at all a ‘free piece’.” Towards the conclusion of the composition a measured degree of rhythmic freedom is introduced, before giving way to a single, sustained harmony that sounds the intervallic ‘seed’ of the work: “The melodic and harmonic material is entirely based on a major/minor ninth chord in all its inversions which, coloured with unusual overtones, slips in and out of focus, much like the variety of autumn foliage. Hints of relaxation and timbral changes are achieved by varying the density of the texture, suggestive of the wildness of nature.”
Daniel Foley
Aitken’s “Scherzo for Woodwind Quintet” Folia was commissioned by the York Winds with the assistance of the Canada Council in 1981 and was composed in the fall of that year at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Both the time and place of the work’s creation are commemorated in the title of this work, which reveals the composer’s intention to “reflect the random order and rich colours of nature as exhibited by tree and ‘foliage’ while maintaining a high lever of intensity throughout. Even the few sustained passages offer the musicians extra technical challenges such as trills of variable speed, flutter tonguing and simultaneous singing and playing.” The dense forest of notes that evolve from the wooden instruments that send forth the first roots of the work may indeed strike certain listeners as ‘random’, yet they are in fact derived from the subtle change ringing of a carefully chosen series of notes and durations: “The music follows an idea of all things relating and flowing into each other and, while there are certain random aspects, it is not at all a ‘free piece’.” Towards the conclusion of the composition a measured degree of rhythmic freedom is introduced, before giving way to a single, sustained harmony that sounds the intervallic ‘seed’ of the work: “The melodic and harmonic material is entirely based on a major/minor ninth chord in all its inversions which, coloured with unusual overtones, slips in and out of focus, much like the variety of autumn foliage. Hints of relaxation and timbral changes are achieved by varying the density of the texture, suggestive of the wildness of nature.”