Déjà Vu is one of the most honored pieces by Michael Colgrass, winning the 1978 Pulitzer Prize in Music. It is one of the premiere North American concerted pieces for percussionists and orchestra.

Colgrass was born in 1932 in Chicago and received his Bachelor of Music from the University of Illinois. In 1956, he went to New York and for the next decade made his living as a freelance percussionist. He was in the orchestra of the original production of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story and participated in notable recording work, including sessions with Dizzy Gillespie and Igor Stravinsky. He moved to Toronto, Canada, in 1974.

He is one of the group of composers who, schooled in the 1950s, initially wrote in a twelve-tone style but quickly found the limitations of that technique and shifted to a personal style—in his case a free mixture of chromatically inflected tonal music with passages of atonality. He had a great success with the first major work in this new style, As quiet as..., written for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Déjà Vu, written four years after As quiet as..., belongs firmly to this stylistic period in Colgrass' career. He composed it on commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra as part of a project it was then undertaking to provide concertos for its principal players. Colgrass obliged with a work drawing on the talents of the timpanist and the three leading percussion players of the orchestra.

Colgrass originally scored the work for the four percussionists plus an orchestra that was standard except for its lack of any oboes. In 1986, he produced a wind band orchestration of it, retaining the two harps and celesta of the original orchestration and also using two string basses. The wind band orchestration is so skillful that it seems conceived directly for that medium, and the percussion writing, though using a large number of instruments, beguiles with its many colors rather than battering the audience about the ears.

Déjà Vu, on the other hand, is full of light and airy sounds—a general characteristic of Colgrass' music—despite the nearly constant display of the percussion. At 17 minutes, it is one of the most substantial of percussion/orchestra concertos. Although Colgrass is often mentioned as a composer who uses quotation as a structural device, he rarely (and in this work never) creates musical collages as many of fellow ex-serialists of his generation do.

Instead, the déjà vu in this music is (true to the term's meaning) never specific. Instead, it appears in the form of allusions to various styles of music from the Classical era through jazz. This allows Colgrass to use his serial background as a sometimes-present-sometimes-not recollection. At times he layers the various styles, particularly in a striking passage where the strings play quiet and rather lush tonal music, while both jazz and Webernian klangfarbenmelodie (i.e., pointillist treatment of melodies) unfold simultaneously.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide