Audio Sample
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Performance by Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Michael Brimer from the CD Selected works by Douglas Knehans |
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Score
Winter steps : for orchestra / Douglas Knehans.
Library shelf no. Q 784.2/KNE 3 [Available for loan]
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Work Overview
Winter steps was composed in the early weeks of June, 1980 and was my first work for orchestra since graduating from undergraduate music school in Canberra in 1980. The intervening years were taken up (apart from some film and television music) solely with a set of five songs on which I worked very hard to liberate myself from the compositional techniques I had learned as an undergraduate. With these songs I intended to free myself from the constraints of what seemed to me 'self-conscious modernism'.
Winter steps is an extension of this liberation. My goal with this work was three-fold. Firstly, to use the form, like most composers, as a test of contrapuntal skill and invention. Secondly, as a study in orchestral colour and texture. Third, as a study in dissonance, tension, climax and resolution in the broader formal sense. Winter steps is to a ground of 9 bars with a subsequent set of eighteen variations. The theme, while not being clearly diatonic is implicitly tonal and this tonal bias is borne out in subsequent argument.
Work Details
Year: 1980, this version: 2002
Instrumentation: Piccolo (doubling flute 3), 2 flutes, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 tenor trombones, tenor/bass trombone, bass tuba, timpani, percussion, piano/celeste, strings (14, 12, 10, 8, 6).
Duration: 11 min.
Difficulty: Advanced
First performance: by Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Michael Brimer — 1981. Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University, Melbourne
Previously titled: Passacaglia, Op. 3
Performances of this work
1981: Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University, Melbourne. Featuring Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Michael Brimer.
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