Brian Fennelly

The music on this recording is drawn from a range of solo, chamber, and orchestral works composed by Brian Fennelly (b 1937) over a period of two decades. In his thirty-year career, Fennelly has contributed more than sixty works to the repertoire of twentieth-century music. His most significant teachers were Mel Powell, Donald Martino, Gunther Schuller, George Perle, and Allen Forte.

The works presented here make use of a variety of harmonic systems: the complex and sophisticated serialism of In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World (1975), Sonata Seria (1976), and String Quartet in Two Movements (1971-74); the tonal orientation of Empirical Rag (1977); and the more freely atonal and harmonically consonant language of his later works, represented by On Civil Disobedience (1993). Despite this diversity of harmonic approaches, all of the music on this recording shares certain central characteristics.

Fennelly often combines the most advanced techniques of twentieth-century composition with traditional forms and gestures. He utilizes the sonata or rondo, or aspects of the scherzo, aria, or dance when they serve his creative purposes. His music is inclusive, borrowing judiciously from the past rather than rejecting it—and he is brilliantly economical, with the ability to generate disparate material from a single source. At the same time, however, a spirit of spontaneity and fancy pervades his work. Above all, his music tends to be densely motivic and often contrapuntally rigorous; Fennelly's motivic concerns generate the sonic textures.