Please DONATE to help with maintenance and upkeep of the Wind Repertory Project!

Mr Tambourine Man

From Wind Repertory Project
Jump to navigation Jump to search
John Corigliano

John Corigliano (trans. Verena Mösenbichler-Bryant)


Subtitle: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan


General Info

Year: 2000 /
Duration: c. 38:50
Difficulty: (see Ratings for explanation)
Original Medium: Soloist and Orchestra
Publisher: G. Schirmer
Cost: Score and Parts - Rental


Movements

1. Prelude: Mr. Tambourine Man - 4:48
2. Clothes Line - 7:20
3. Blowin’ in the Wind - 6:22
4. Masters of War - 4:05
5. All Along the Watchtower - 4:00
6. Chimes of Freedom - 7:35
7. Postlude: Forever Young - 5:50


Instrumentation

Full Score
Flute I-II-III (II and III double Piccolo)
Oboe I-II-III (III doubles English Horn)
Bassoon I-II-III (III doubles Contrabassoon)
B-flat Soprano Clarinet I-II-III (I and II double Clarinet in A; III doubles Bass Clarinet)
E-flat Alto Saxophone (doubles Baritone Saxophone)
C Trumpet I-II-III-IV
Horn in F I-II-III-IV
Trombone I-II
Bass Trombone
Tuba
Harp
Piano
Timpani
Percussion (three players), including:

  • Bass Drum, large (2)
  • Flexitone
  • Glockenspiel
  • Hammer
  • Metal Plate
  • Police Whistle
  • Slapstick
  • Snare Drum
  • Suspended Cymbal, large and small
  • Tambourine (2)
  • Tam-Tam, large and small
  • Temple Blocks
  • Tenor Drum
  • Triangle
  • Vibraphone
  • Vibra-slap
  • Wood Block
  • Xylophone

Solo Soprano


Errata

None discovered thus far.


Program Notes

When Sylvia McNair asked me to write her a major song cycle for Carnegie Hall, she had only one request: to choose an American text. I have set only four poets in my adult compositional life: Stephen Spender, Richard Wilbur, Dylan Thomas (whose major works generated the oratorio A Dylan Thomas Trilogy) and William M. Hoffman, collaborator with me on, among other, shorter pieces, the opera The Ghost of Versailles. Aside from asking Bill to create a new text, I had no ideas. Except that I had always heard, by reputation, of the high regard accorded the folk-ballad singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. But I was so engaged in developing my orchestral technique during the years when Dylan was heard by the rest of the world that I had never heard his songs. So I bought a collection of his texts, and found many of them to be every bit as beautiful and as immediate as I had heard -- and surprisingly well-suited to my own musical language. I then contacted Jeff Rosen, his manager, who approached Bob Dylan with the idea of re-setting his poetry to my music.

I do not know of an instance in which this has been done before (which was part of what appealed to me), so I needed to explain that these would be in no way arrangements, or variations, or in any way derivations of the music of the original songs, which I decided to not hear before the cycle was complete. Just as Schumann or Brahms or Wolf had re-interpreted in their own musical styles the same Goethe text, I intended to treat the Dylan lyrics as the poems I found them to be. Nor would their settings make any attempt at pop or rock writing. I wanted to take poetry I knew to be strongly associated with popular art and readdress it in terms of concert art -- crossover in the opposite direction, one might say. Dylan granted his permission, and I set to work.

I chose seven poems for what became a thirty-five-minute cycle. A Prelude: Mr. Tambourine Man, in a fantastic and exuberant manner, precedes five searching and reflective monologues that form the core of the piece; and Epilogue: Forever Young makes a kind of folk-song benediction after the cycle's close. Dramatically, the inner five songs trace a journey of emotional and civic maturation, from the innocence of Clothes Line through the beginnings of awareness of a wider world (Blowin' in the Wind), through the political fury of Masters of War, to a premonition of an apocalyptic future (All Along the Watchtower), culminating in a vision of a victory of ideas (Chimes of Freedom). Musically, each of the five songs introduces an accompanimental motive that becomes the principal motive of the next. The descending scale introduced in Clothes Line resurfaces as the passacaglia which shapes Blowin' in the Wind. The echoing pulse-notes of that song harden into the hammered ostinato under Masters of War; the stringent chords of that song's finale explode into the raucous accompaniment under All Along the Watchtower; and that song's repeated figures dissolve into the bell-sounds of Chimes of Freedom.

Thanks are due to Carnegie Hall; to Sylvia McNair, for her commitment as well as her luminous artistry; and to Mark Adamo, to whom Mr. Tambourine Man is warmly dedicated.

- Program Note by composer


Media

(Needed - please join the WRP if you can help.)


State Ratings

None discovered thus far.


Performances

To submit a performance please join The Wind Repertory Project


Works for Winds by This Composer


Resources

Retrieved from "https://www.windrep.org/index.php?title=Mr_Tambourine_Man&oldid=416997"