Classical Music | Clarinet Music

Recorded on 01/01/2002, uploaded on 06/08/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

American Rest, a meditation on the American experience in Vietnam, was originally written in 1975, the year the U.S. defeat in that country, and revised in 1982 and 1984.  It seeks to portray a troubled rest from war, perhaps in the form of a night's sleep teeming with bad memories, nightmares and inner turmoil.  American Rest might also suggest the act of dying, where physical pain and painful memories fill the transition to death, the final rest.  American Rest spawned a set of nocturnes for piano, Pieces of Night....

I'm sure many aspect of American Rest (the use of solos/cadenzas, the non-piano trio, many of the textures) were influenced by Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (but Messiaen's violin has become my darker viola).  I also believe that some of Elliot Carter's busy quartet textures, and Charles Ives' piano writing have found their way into American Rest.

The pitch organization in American Rest is controlled by the early C#-D-A piano trichord.  It strikes me as a sound always and never at rest, like a body reclining while twisting and turning - a sleeping or dying figure full of inner turbulence.  No part of the music is ever far from this trichord, its many extensions and transformations.  Tonal sameness prevails throughout the violent and peaceful music, and regardless of texture every moment reflects any other moment.  This poetic notion along with formal and textural considerations influence the use of pitch classes throughout the American Rest, including the deployment of American Rest's basic septachord (pitch classes forming the chromatic scale C# up to D)

Repetition and recall help to define American Rest formally, structurally, poetically, from the tiniest detail to whole sections.  They are meant not only to assure coherence, but to allow returning elements to tug at the listener's memory with different levels of insistence as the work becomes increasingly complex collage of itself through the ensemble cadenza, then finding release in the final lullaby.

American Rest is intended as an expression of my own disquietude over American actions in Vietnam, and more generally the world, as these actions define for me a troubling national personality.

George Flynn