Madrigali
Spirituali was composed…for Music at Angel
Fire, a festival held in New Mexico. The composer’s
creative process, [Fine] explained, followed a very
personal and natural path: New Mexico is, to her, a place
of great spirituality; a similar feeling was present
during a performance of Palestrina’s music by her
daughter’s choir; the trumpet is, by tradition, a
heavenly spiritual instrument; Stephen Burns and the Ida
Kavafian String Quartet would be at Angel Fire; and the
piece was born. The Women’s Philharmonic
commissioned the orchestration of this work in honor of
our Tenth Anniversary.
–Program for Women’s
Philharmonic concert, Berkeley, California, November 3,
1990
The first
section, marked Lento (there are six sections), is a
series of arched antecedent and consequent phrases
occurring between the trumpet and cello and later the
first violin. Each acts as a solo vocalist…creating
the impression of spatial antiphonal voices. The movement
is short, with the string quartet providing several
cadences of a unison G or major third of E-flat-G. Such
attention to consonance is becoming more prominent in
[Fine’s] later works. The second section continues
the slowly moving unison and consonant texture using the
ensemble with muted trumpet… Fragments from the
beginning are heard, sometimes rearranged and recombined
in a meditativelike setting. The third section
introduces… techniques from previous compositions,
such as string harmonics from Missa Brevis,
trumpet half-valving to produce quarter tones heard in
the Quartet for Brass, and a texture of rapid
dynamic envelope changes also from the Quartet and
Missa Brevis… The next section recalls
another favored texture, a canon between the two
violins… The fifth section, an allegro, is a
rescoring of material from Asphodel with the trumpet
having the soprano line. The ending is a return to the
beginning section. Fine’s Madrigali
Spirituali is a scrapbook of favorite ideas or
voices from her past works that summarizes some of her
deepest feelings.
–Heidi Von Gunden,
The Music of Vivian Fine, Scarecrow Press,
1999