Program Note

Envoi is a tone poem about lifetimes. Revealed distantly, through the mists of memory, are the sounds of time’s ticking clockwork and the trumpet sennets to which we sallied forth as kids. A smoky saxophone solo acts as guide through a string of angular episodes evoking adult versions of those childish battles, as we climbed to our feet in Big Cities, in the military, and in gentler places, moving into the adult world. When the sennets return, they are muscular, sensual.

Our thirties and forties are recounted in a recurring octatonic tune in the winds that matures through repetition and variation. As we brought up kids, climbed ladders and fell off of them, dodged snakes and were bitten, made mistakes and grew in experience, a rich, sad chorale of adulthood gradually takes shape, alternating with the infernal clockwork of passing time, beneath the tune. The trumpet sennets return again, this time climaxing in a sort of midlife inflection point where each of us settled on terms.

A prolonged cadence opens the door to a genuinely ecstatic return of the octatonic tune we’ve been singing for twenty years, now smoothed out and diatonic. As the mists of memory return, the sennets have been handed off to a trio of tender flutes; we turn to one another, some of us for the first time in decades, realize that the children have moved away, our careers either were or were not, some of us are gone, and take a deep breath. The chorale’s infernal, remorseless clockwork innards are revealed. We exhale.

Envoi was commissioned by a consortium of college bands. It was composed during summer 2025 at Yaddo. It is a sequel to my 1989 tone poem Sennet, Cortege, and Tuckets and is a tribute to my teacher Joe Schwantner, whose ability to conjure musically the dangerous magic of memory and the power of dreams I admire so.