Louder than Words

Louder than Words, com­posed in the fall of 2001, was com­mis­sioned by sax­o­phone vir­tu­oso Joseph Lulloff. It con­tin­ues the composer’s long­time sound iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the instru­men­tal per­son­al­ity of the sax­o­phone, which began with Killing Time, an ultra-violent 1980 com­po­si­tion for ampli­fied alto sax­o­phone, ampli­fied piano, and an elec­tronic tape with a def­i­nite atti­tude. That was fol­lowed by EDGE, a sax­o­phone quar­tet which takes poly­styl­is­tic jux­ta­po­si­tion­ing and super­im­po­si­tion­ing to an exis­ten­tial extreme. EDGE was fol­lowed by a series of works com­bin­ing alto sax­o­phone with Casio syn­the­sizer and a vari­ety of other instru­ments (though mostly horn and vio­lin) and dance or other visual images. All of these works were inspired by the play­ing of Mem­phis sax­o­phon­ist Allen Rippe. In 1997, Fre­und com­posed Sky Scrap­ings for the leg­endary Eugene Rousseau, revert­ing to the clas­si­cal instru­men­ta­tion of alto sax­o­phone and piano but still elec­tri­fied by jazz-rock influ­ences and its “sub­ver­sive ser­e­nade” form.

Louder than Words, a trio for alto sax­o­phone, tenor sax­o­phone and piano (it also exists in a ver­sion for alto sax­o­phone, bas­soon and piano), addresses the joys and con­flicts of the emerg­ing 21st cen­tury in a “stream-of-consciousness” form. There is really one accu­mu­lat­ing flow of time, divided into 2 “parts” for manageability.

Part One begins with a dri­ving ritor­nello, fol­lowed by a sec­tion marked “rest­less” built around a surg­ing fast triple-time rhyth­mic motive. The ritor­nello returns in a trun­cated form, fol­lowed by a qui­etly lyric tran­si­tion to an f-minor waltz tune. The peace which fol­lows the clos­ing full cadence of this sec­tion is rudely inter­rupted by an inter­po­la­tion from Mozart’s K. 466 Piano Con­certo (pos­si­bly offered to give some his­tor­i­cal valid­ity to the con­cept of con­ti­nu­ity by intru­sion — Mozart used this mate­r­ial in the same intru­sive way). The ensu­ing dis­tor­tion of this mate­r­ial becomes a return of some pre­vi­ous agi­tated mate­r­ial, lead­ing to a sud­den, enig­matic close to Part One.

art Two begins with a sec­tion marked “fraz­zled” (sort of a cat-fight for two sax­o­phones with piano com­men­tary), even­tu­ally straight­en­ing out into a pair­ing of the sax­o­phones in conga-flavored licks. This builds to a three-measure cat­a­clysm which actu­ally appears three times, each time lead­ing to dif­fer­ent result. The first non-sequitur is a g-minor uni­son hard boo­gie break­out; the sec­ond is a rol­lick­ing trou­ba­dor­ish melody — a sur­pris­ing final des­ti­na­tion for all the accu­mu­lated momen­tum. The final appear­ance of the cat­a­clysm intro­duces a cathar­tic return of the f-minor waltz tune, which is not quite the last thing heard — the piano closes with a short, ghostly allu­sion to the begin­ning ritornello.