by Layne Anspach
Hello musicians!
This month’s Chamber Music Corner features Emma Lou Diemer’s Quartet for Trumpet, Horn, Trombone, and Piano (2001). Diemer was born in 1927 in Kansas City, Missouri, and she composed and played piano as an adolescent, even becoming an organist for her church at age 13. She received degrees in composition from Yale (BM, MM) and Eastman (Ph.D.). While on a Fulbright Scholarship, she studied in Brussels, Belgium. Diemer has been the recipient of many awards, including a NEA fellowship in electronic music and the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. She has taught composition and theory at several institutions including the University of Maryland (1965-1970) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (1971-1991). Her compositions range from large ensemble pieces to those for solo instruments, voices, and electronics.
Quartet for Trumpet, Horn, Trombone, and Piano (2001) was written for the Borealis Brass Trio (Fairbanks, Alaska). In September 2001, it was premiered at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland. The inside cover describes the work as “music that is rather tonal, rather restless in mood, with the piano supplying most of the rich, timbral background over which the brass instruments are allowed to be unabashedly melodic.”
The A section of the work’s ternary form, moving rapidly and expressively, is supported by the piano while each brass instrument presents the melody on their own. Following the final entrance by the trombone, the brass parts combine for the full ensemble. At the end of the A section, the piano drops out as the brass subside in dynamics. After a repeat of the A section, the B section, slower, begins with 27 measures of solo piano. The B section is split into four subsections: Slower, Much slower, Much faster, and Slower, express. Much slower follows the same format at the A section, each brass instrument in turn carrying the melody with the piano. Much faster returns to a similar tempo as the “slower” section but with the inclusion of the brass in a mostly homorhythmic texture. The fourth section, Slower, express, features a slow texture where all four members fill in the sound, dwindling though to just trombone and piano by the end of the section. The final A section, Tempo I, is identical to the first A section with only the bombastic concluding coda deviating from the original presentation.
The reference recording is from the album Emma Lou Diemer from Albany Records USA. The hornist is Sandra Woodward.
