This is a very intricate serial work, firmly in the camp of the post-War modernist style initiated by admirers of Viennese composer Anton Webern.

Powell (1923-1998) traversed a trajectory familiar to composers of his generation: He started out as a composer in the neo-Classical camp and, in the 1950s, took up then serial technique then sweeping musical academia throughout the world. One thing that set him apart, and leaves an important mark on this piece, is the important career he had before settling firmly in the classical camp: That was as a working jazz pianist and arranger. He wrote charts for, among others, Benny Goodman and the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band.

Much of his music, including this quintet, seems to have a goal of reconciling the freedom of jazz performing, with one playing sparking off another player, with the tight note-by-note and motif-by-motif control implied by the serial technique.

Powell wrote this piece on commission from the Sierra Woodwind Quintet. The eight-minute work is precisely and meticulously written out, with copious instructions in words in addition to the musical notes. (Ben Yarmolinsky, writing program notes for the Quintet for its New World Records release, points out that in the space of just nine notes for flute Powell writes the instructions: "non-metrical," "very quickly and delicately," "accel. molto," and "wait."

Powell uses a mix of measured notation (by which we mean the ordinary placement of the flow of music over a succession of bar lines in a stated time signature) and other ways of coordinating the music. For instance, there are places where one player is supposed to watch his part for cues, telling him what a particular other instrument is playing, and time his entry not according to a beat but to the other player's phrase. Meanwhile, the next player is waiting for the second player's progress to cue him.

This freedom from meter results in considerable differences between any two performances of the work; sometimes these free-flowing individual lines cross each other in combinations that will not coincide each time.

The general sound of the work is similar to that of Boulez: The crystalline sound of Webern, but with a "busy" and active sound-surface. Powell often gives the instruments cells of notes.

All this is very difficult for performers, who have to listen intently to the individual notes of their colleagues, and often rapidly shift attention from one to the other. This writer wonders if this degree of performance complexity is justified by the results of any single performance, since it sounds much like any number of conventionally written-down twelve-tone works of the period.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide