[rare]CHARLES WUORINEN Percussion Symphony
The New Jersey Percussion Ensemble Charles Wuorinen, conductor

I composed this Symphony between February 14 and September 13, 1976, supported in part by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Originally, I had thought about a semi-theatrical work for a large number of percussionists. This was to be theatrical in the sense of musical, rather than dramatic, personification, and was to fill an entire evening. As my ruminations proceeded, however, this approach seemed impractical, and at the same time my ideas gravitated toward instrumental "absolutism." The piece was clearly going to be about notes and rhythms, the flux of harmony; and anything it might "mean" beyond that would be conveyed in just the same indirect way through which we attach meaning to other, older, instrumental music. Thus, a projected evening-long percussion opera" evolved into a 40-minute Percussion Symphony. 1 wrote the work for my friends of long standing in the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, and dedicated it to my colleague Raymond DesRoches, the Ensemble's director, whose patient preparation of the rehearsals for the work's first performances early in 1978 was the indispensable foundation for the present recording.
Why a percussion work? Because it seems to me that (whatever the reason) our age has witnessed the rise of this class of sound-producers to true equality with older instruments. Of course, there are many ancient correspondences in non-Western musics (the gamelan—some of whose characteristics are echoed in the present work-is only the best-known example). But the 20th century, and particularly the decades since Stravinsky's Les Noces (1923) and Varèse's lonisation (1931), masks the first time in Western art music that percussion instruments have been elevated to a primary melodic, harmonic, and structural role in works of large dimension. Even more to the point, I like the sound of the instruments: they have and this is true, I think, not just of drums, gongs, and other ancient instruments, but of vibraphones and celestas, too-a marvelous combination of clarity of sound (sharpness of attack) with a very ancient, layered set of associations, reaching well back into our distant past. Thus, modernity and antiquity are pleasingly conjoined. And when this is added to the fact that these instruments can, in the hands of relatively few people, create an enormous amount of sound, I find the opportunities irresistible.

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