Orchestration
2(2pic).2(EH).2(bcl).2(cbsn) – 2.2.2.1 – timp.2perc – pno – strs
Duration
6 minutes
Program Note
For some time now I have been interested in the very human experience of waiting—often it feels to me like life can be reduced to nothing but an endless sequence of waiting for the next event to happen, whereupon the cycle only begins anew. This piece, Bidings, explores the brutality of waiting, and the more insidious implications of a life spent in (as Sondheim might have put it) perpetual anticipation.
The opening measures contain the piece in miniature: a frenetic chromatic motive in the strings is heard together with a blast of air from the brass, as if the music itself is sighing nervously. Out of this, sustained in the flutes, emerges the sonority of a perfect fifth, an interval which will be heard somewhere in the orchestra throughout almost the entire piece. I envisioned Bidings as a series of gradually collapsing fifths—when one sequence reaches its lowest point, another simply begins anew, resetting the spiral of anxious waiting to its beginning. Though each spiral goes in a different direction from the last, none of them succeed in liberating themselves from the incessant downward pull of the fifth, which always lingers somewhere in the background.
It is only at the point where the gargantuan climax of one spiral seems to have driven the piece off a cliff that we catch a glimpse of another world; the fifth, while still present, is heard in a new light, refracted through a haze of sustained percussion and string harmonics. Yet, as beguiling as it may be, this prospect of something new is destined to come to naught. The work ends where it began, but perhaps even more starkly, rooted to the spot by a combination of timpani, bass drum, and relentless swells in the whole orchestra. With one final “sigh” from the brass, Bidings snuffs itself out, still waiting. May we all become able to recognize when expectation has taken over the actionable aspects of our lives, so that we might avoid a similar fate.
Tristan Wilson 