Fred Lerdahl: Waltzes

Program Note

Fred Lerdahl studied at Lawrence University, Princeton, and Tanglewood. He has taught at UC-Berkeley, Harvard, and Michigan, and since 1991 he has been Fritz Reiner Professor of Music at Columbia University.
 
Lerdahl's music has been commissioned and performed by major chamber ensembles and orchestras, including the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, and the Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Seattle Symphonies. He has been resident composer at leading institutions and festivals, including IRCAM, the American Academy in Rome, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His music has been widely recorded for numerous labels, including Bridge Records, which has initiated an ongoing series devoted to his music.
 
His book A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, co-authored with linguist Ray Jackendoff, is a founding document for the growing field of the cognitive science of music. His subsequent book, Tonal Pitch Space, won the 2003 distinguished book award from the Society for Music Theory and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award. A third book (in progress), Composition and Cognition, is based on his 2011 Bloch Lectures at UC/Berkeley.
 
The composer offers the following note about tonight’s piece: 
 
Waltzes (1981), a cycle of twelve virtuoso waltzes for violin, viola, cello, and bass, was commissioned by the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, where the first nine waltzes were premiered in 1981. Soon thereafter I composed the final three waltzes. The work is dedicated to Scott Nickrenz. 
The character of Waltzes arose from three impulses: first, to compose a work that was suitable for summer-festival listening; second, to provide a challenge for brilliant string players accustomed to 19th-century repertory; and third, to simplify the intricacies of my contemporaneous string quartets (1978 and 1982). The piece includes occasional references to the music of past composers, transformed to fit my syntax and style and the playful character of the work. The instrumentation, for “low” string quartet, is reminiscent of Schubert’s Vienna; the lack of a second violin often forced high writing for the viola and cello. The part-writing and motivic treatment, which are quite classical in spirit, are woven out of a harmonic and voice-leading system of my own invention, one that I have used in one form or another in a number of pieces. This system is “tonal” in an extended sense and allows for orderly progression across the extremes of consonance and dissonance.
 
Fred Lerdahl was Yellow Barn’s Composer in Residence in 2006.