Orchestral Works

“While the philosophical idea of eternal return may have originated with the Pythagoreans, Stoicism would later latch onto and further elaborate upon this idea that the universe is destroyed by cataclysm (ekpyrosis or enúpwo) only to be reborn (palingenesis or naiyyeveoia) in an endlessly returning loop. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, this sense of death and rebirth takes on new meaning as the music community begins to reevaluate and rebuild after immense and widespread hardship.

The first movement, Awakening, begins abruptly, almost as if starting from a fevered dream in a frantic state or as if acclimating to an overwhelming epiphany or realization about reality. Clouds of sound from the collections of instruments, always in the act of gathering and dispersing, make up the drama of the music here. Clusters of notes and figures accumulate, growing into dense timbral thickets, sometimes suddenly leading into clearings of sparse pointillism or suspension. Marked "fast, insistent" in the score, descending scalar passages by winds and violins ride atop waves of swelling brass and low strings. Skittering and nervous, eventually militaristic-like percussion calls the rest of the orchestra to attention as brass instruments are added into the mix.

Giving up their supportive role, low strings cannot help but join in on the incessant downward marching motifs as well, continuing until they are left alone to exhaust themselves as pointedly impressionistic gestures from the harp signal and foreshadow the next movement.

Incantation begins in a more solemn and mysterious way. Rising-and-falling arpeggios are passed between clarinet and harp in a conversationally antiphonal manner, making up an active foreground that dramatically juxtaposes the more static, non-vibrato swathes of sound from high winds and strings. As in the first movement, the strings are again lured into the action, adding a more brooding and nervous tone to the proceedings. They are soon followed by the winds, as well. However, the texture of the music becomes more fragile as the winds transition into more punctuated gestures of impressionistic aplomb, marked as "diaphanous, still somewhat excited." Disjointed textures, created by a compositional technique called hocket where instruments intermesh in a holistic way to make up and complete more fully fleshed-out textures, slowly fade away to make room for a burgeoning unison of tutti strings as the music becomes heavier and approaches another boundary-marking stillness.

The third movement, entitled Mystic Circles, starts in a more wistful way, contrasting a meandering duet of clarinets with playful pointillistic percussion writing. The duet's entwined writhing rouses other instruments to their cause, inevitably building from the music's accretion; but the music climbs in register only to fall back down again shortly thereafter, thereby creating a music analogous to a circle where the beginning is the end is the beginning, so to speak. Such a music of circular "eternal returns" is inherently restless, slowly undulating back and forth between states. Indeed, this process also continues throughout the fourth movement, Shadow Procession - a reference to South African artist William Kentridge's short film of silhouetted animation of the same name. (Both notably draw upon Plato's Allegory of the Cave as inspiration.) Here at the finale, Aylward crafts a music that flows and glides with scorrevole fluency but is never lacking in its variation while doing so. Excited and motoric textures may become more tranquil yet will show no signs of slowing, pressing forward into suddenly broader vistas of musical landscape. At last, a return to the first movement's nervous and skittering tone is juxtaposed with a languid legato whose increased smoothness only seems to facilitate and lubricate the rapid-fire runs that rush the music into its final moments.”

-Clifton Ingram, writing for BMOP