Z is for Zwilich

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

She is, without a doubt, at least interesting. I often find her work a bit too aggressive for my taste, but there's also many pieces to her name that are quite direct and enjoyable. As far as I can tell, her progression as a composer is hopefully an example the next hundred years of composition can follow.

She studied music under people like Roger Session and Elliot Carter. Both quite brilliant in their own way, but both were big supporters of serial music composition. Lots of atonal, obtuse music, written for the sake of academia pretty much. Zwilich took this style of composing and wrote many pieces like this, but as she became distanced further from the modernist teachers she began to adapt her style into her own voice that retains many points of the serial technique but sheds much of the unnecessary structures and replaces them with (heaven forbid) music that is meant for an audience. That's my hope for music. Take what we learned in the 20th century, shed the unmusical *nimbus* we got hung up on and press on in new directions with proper focus.

Back to Zwilich. Her musical results are still not something that everyone will like, but they aren't immediately off-putting like most 12-tone music. Her writing is more motivic than melodic. She builds her pieces from a small idea that is examined from every angle. This gives her compositions a tight feeling of unity. Maybe not the most diverse thing to listen to but there is a feeling of completion when the final chords play. Her take on harmony is a bit odd as well. She uses traditional triadic writing but will mix in wide stacked chords, mixed modes, and other colorful devices that may not immediately agree with your ears, but hold your attention and may even intrigue you encouraging you to look deeper into the music.

I'm a bit disappointed with the lack of Zwilich material on Youtube. I was hoping at least one or two of her concertos would be there, but I couldn't really find them. Here's what I did find.

First on the list is Concerto Grosso. She wrote this for some Handel festival. She uses the same instrumentation Handel did for his Concerti Grosso (I think that's the right way to plural it) and you can hear pretty direct Handelian stuff in there, along with some extended atonal stuff on top. Kind of interesting and one of her more played pieces due to its accessibility, but not really the most idiomatic.



Second is a solo piano piece. Not really what I'm usually used to hearing from her, but it is pretty nice. It shows off a lot of the major/minor mixed mode stuff that helps give her that unique character.