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Drive
2015

solo violin
3 flutes 3º doubling piccolo and alto flute 
2 oboes
english horn
3 clarinets in Bb 3º doubling bass clarinet
3 bassoons 3º doubling contrabassoon 
4 horns
2 trumpets
3 trombones
tuba
2 percussion
  1: drum set, thunder sheet, whirly tube 
  2: drum set, nipple gongs, whirly tube 
strings 

duration 25'

commissioned for Danielle Maddon and the New England Philharmonic by 
Margaret Hornady-David and Donald David 
first performance:
Danielle Maddon with The New England Philharmonic, cond. Richard Pittman
Tsai Performance Center, Boston / May 2, 2015

RECORDING—first performance 

SCORE

PROGRAM NOTE
This is the second violin concerto I've written for Danielle Maddon and the New England Philharmonic, and after being offered this commission one of the first questions I had to ask was whether this new piece would be a complement or a contrast to the first.

A couple of things were nagging at me at this time: from many years of teaching composition I've noticed the gradual retreat of harmonic thinking in much contemporary classical music. By 'harmonic thinking' I mean the deliberate manipulation of changing and evolving pitch centers over substantial spans of time to enable sounds to be re-contextualized – to mean something new in a new environment. A second trend is out of the box, unmixed, 'crayola' orchestration in which the choirs of woodwinds, brass, and strings rarely intermingle and their musical materials rarely stray from one group of instruments to another; musical roles are assigned and then adhered to, and there is little of the organic, shifting orchestral conversation that, to my mind, leads to complex and multi-faceted works.

I was thinking, too, that a lot of the rock, pop, and electronic music I most enjoy is locked into two-chord patterns and how these can give a sense of panoramic opening and continual motion, like driving cross-country. . . and this seemed strange alongside my yearning for more adventurous and convoluted harmonic expeditions.

So, I decided to limit myself to something I seemed to like and yet complain about, and to compose a piece that essentially has only two chords and that deliberately uses the orchestral sections as fixed choirs. What, now, could the soloist do that would be of any interest? I decided to follow the practice of virtuosic lines played over a set of chord changes that fuels most improvisatory solos in jazz and in rock – particularly apparent here in the call and response challenges between soloist and orchestra that precede the violin's cadenza.

Things soon became more complex, but underlying the whole work is nothing more than this alternation of only two chords, albeit in many different voicings. (For those interested, the two chords are D/E/G/A, or A7sus4; and D/E/F#/C#, or Dmaj9).

I believe that close listening to music gives us opportunities for insight into the nature of relationships. Music is, after all, a communicative, collaborative act that unfolds in time and space, and any true understanding of a musical work depends upon the listener using memory, anticipation, and reassessment to think about what is heard.

Shortly before I began composing Drive two family members passed away after illnesses; one a young woman of 36, the other an elderly woman of 91. My concerto changed only a little in shape because of these two deaths (the opening now presents two brief elegies before the solo violin's repeated low D speeds up and into the original opening, and the end returns to a tiny fragment from the elegies), my relationship to the material, however, did change. The significance of the shapes and events I had set up now had a new resonance and what was simply to have been an enjoyable manifesto became also a celebration of the lives of two determined women. The sense of 'drive' and of 'journey' now became more than topographical; the two chords reflected polarities of young and old, life and death, departure and arrival; and the role of the soloist as an individual passing through repeating cycles became focused and vital.

So Drive ends up still being about driving and traveling, literally, but also figuratively about an individual's life as a set of journeys, large and small, intercut with everyone else's large and small journeys.