Joseph Schwantner was in his mid-thirties, about three years away from a professorship at the Eastman School of Music (where he had nevertheless already been teaching for many years), when he composed the piece ...and the Mountains Rising Nowhere for the Eastman Wind Ensemble and its director, Donald Hunsberger, in 1977. The Eastman Ensemble and the National Endowment for the Arts both had a hand in commissioning the work from Schwantner. And the Mountains Rising Nowhere is dedicated to Carol Adler, whose 1975 poem Arioso appears at the front of the score.

The work and its quite skillful instrumental scoring are a testament to Schwantner's love of creating dense musical textures made from many layers of diverse instrumental sounds. It is scored for six flutists (four of whom double on piccolo), two clarinetists, four oboists (two of whom double on English horn, and all of whom are also asked to play extraterrestrial-sounding glass crystals), four bassoonists, four trumpeters, four hornists, four trombonists, a tubist, a pianist, six percussionists, and one contrabass player. They get together to realize a score whose pulse and tempo and rhythmic material fluctuate freely (in, however, a very traditional system of notation) and whose dynamic extremes are of the glaring kind (triple and quadruple forte and the like) that sometimes begin to lose listeners after a while— but Schwantner avoids that potential problem by wrapping things up after about ten minutes. The piano is amplified, as indeed it needs to be if it is to cut through such a mighty ensemble.

© Blair Johnston, Rovi