The Four Quiet Songs are the result of a vast revision to my earlier work, the Five Runic Songs. After removing one movement and making numerous edits to the remaining four, the work is now much more taut, and no longer requires the Olympian effort of the trumpet player to solo through nineteen minutes of chamber music. In fact, I feel that this work is now so much superior to the original, I have decided to give it a new title and present it as a new work.

Like my earlier Quartet for Low Strings, the Four Quiet Songs very explicitly evoke a style of vocal jazz popular in the earlier part of the twentieth century. While my musical training has been exclusively classical and traditional, I have always felt a fondness for the popular music of this period. I remember my parents loved it, and as a child I spent many hours shuffling through their extensive record collection listening to Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Billy Holiday – usually accompanied by Ray Ellis’ haunting orchestral arrangements.

To be sure, my Four Quiet Songs are not an attempt to transcribe that music for chamber ensemble. Rather, I wanted to recall the sounds, evoke the colors and moods, without making any explicit references to any specific songs. The solo trumpet is a sound that I often recall from Ray Ellis’ arrangements, and to this day I find myself able to sing through many of those passages without even remembering what songs they come from.

So, this was a different kind of work for me in many ways: the use of jazz-oriented harmonies, the free, even rambling forms of the individual songs, the desire to reference a specific genre from another time. I turn to these methods from time to time, usually when an aesthetic crisis of some type is about to occur: those moments that all artists suffer through when they wonder just what it is they’re supposed to be doing. On an emotional level, these nostalgic works represent a retreat to a more comfortable place, at least briefly, while I prepare for whatever the next step in my creative life might be.