Symphony No. 4 “The Unnameable”
ENS.1995.1
Orchestra:
1.1.0.1-2.2.2.0-Timp.4Perc.BGtr-Strings
I. Hallucination I
II. Equilibrium
III. Hallucination II
IV. Tango
Symphony No. 4 “The Unnameable”
Between 1993 and 1997, while a student in high school, I composed seven symphonies for orchestras of various configurations.
All were brief and basically terrible: I had no idea what I was doing. The first, for soprano and strings, was a rip-off of Gorecki’s
popular third, and is now lost; the second, for brass and strings and intended in some way to musically represent geometric
figures, was never completed; the third, “The Sinking of the Titanic,” became the largest single musical work of my high school
years, and I would say I threw in everything but the kitchen sink but even at the time I knew I was trying out a little bit of
everything and thought it would be funny to include a kitchen sink.
1995 saw three more closely related symphonies composed back-to-back: Symphony No. 4 “The Unnameable”
was the most successful. I gave all my symphonies titles, and this one has nothing whatsoever to do with the music itself except I’d jus
discovered Beckett. Each movement lasts barely a minute, as I did not play piano, had no access to engraving programs (which
were then in their infancy), and therefore possessed little sense of how long each movement might be.
Hallucination I begins the work with pounding Stravinskian rhythms, jagged melodic fragments, and complex changing
meters. This is followed by Equilibrium, a single open fifth building to a roar. Hallucination II brings us back to the energy of
the opening, with wild percussion and a sudden postmodern interruption courtesy of Mozart. After these three cubist
movements, the symphony concludes with a slinky out-of-nowhere Tango.
For this edition I have dropped a fifth movement that even at the time didn’t seem to belong, provided dynamics, fixed
errors, and slightly re-orchestrated the final movement (which did not, for some reason, originally include the full orchestra).