Fanfare

Description

Soprano 1, Soprano 2, Soprano 3, Soprano 4, Soprano 5 — In 1981, WFMT Radio in Chicago commissioned twelve composers to write short fanfares in celebration of the station’s thirtieth anniversary.xa0 For one month at a time, each composer’s Fanfare was heard every day at a previously unannounced time slot.xa0 Because of my special fondness for the human voice as an instrument, I decided to make my Fanfare a vocal one.xa0 “My” month in this series being the month of November, the idea of giving thanks naturally suggested itself.xa0 Though the work can be performed live by a minimum of five female voices, I really wanted to limit timbre differentiation to a minimum — hence the idea of pre-recording two singers and multi-tracking them.xa0 And, in any event, it seemed especially appropriate to compose a work of this nature for the radio, a medium that is certainly quite distinct from the concert-hall. For a text, I put together a series of words in English, Hebrew, Italian and French, all concerned with joy and giving thanks.xa0 Except for the word joy which is presented simultaneously in all four languages at the outset of the work, the rest of the composition was composed initially without words.xa0 In a process akin, perhaps, to the orchestrating of music already composed, the words were then strung together by me to fit the sounds and the rhythms (a reversal, at least for me, of the usual process of combining text and music).