Freight & Salvage

PROGRAM NOTE

Freight & Salvage, for string orchestra, is an exploration of the relationship between my work as a songwriter on the one hand, and my work in more formal musical environments, e.g., the concert hall in which you are sitting, on the other! As much as Freight & Salvage sounds little like Schubert or Mahler, it is nevertheless deeply indebted to both of those titans, in the sense that as master songwriters, they found ways to re-use and deepen material from their songs in larger instrumental works. In writing this piece, I thought a great deal about Schubert's journey that led him to his final instrumental masterpieces, and in particular, the last three string quartets, piano sonatas, and the cello quintet.

From an architectural standpoint, however, Freight & Salvage is much more indebted to Bartok, who was a great proponent of the arch form, which is the structure I've used in this piece. To understand an arch form, imagine that a mirror is held up to the first half of a piece, so that the second half resembles the first half, but with the themes or sections played in the opposite order in which they first appeared. In this case, the form is A-B-C-D-C-B-A, followed by the coda, and the entire form (excepting the coda) is a mirror image of itself. The outer most part of the form (A) is a chaotic, fragmented paroxysm of scattered bits of information that nevertheless contains all the DNA for the whole piece. This is followed by a lyrical section (B) that gradually picks up steam until we reach (C), an energetic tune with a bit of a lilt. This is followed by (D), the figurative center-of-the-onion, after which the sections re-appear in reverse order (C - B - A), finally giving way to the coda, in which the original (song) source material is revealed.

— Gabriel Kahane, 2016

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Freight and Salvage

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