This is a very powerful and substantial movement for string orchestra, with a serious and memorial tone. It is written in a densely chromatic modern idiom, with variety in string textures being the principal organizing idea.

The composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928 in Helsinki, Finland), was a long-time admirer of the music of Zoltán Kodály (1882 - 1967), one of the greatest composers in Hungarian music history and one of the world's most important music educators. Kodály's example (and that of his colleague Béla Bartók) showed Rautavaara, as a young composer, how to integrate his own folk music roots into serious music.

In 1955 Rautavaara had expressed his admiration for Bartók in his work for piano and cello called Epitaph for Béla Bartók. In the early 1980s the International Zoltán Kodály Society approached Rautavaara with an offer to provide a composition for a birthday centenary celebration in 1982.

It is likely that Rautavaara had in mind when he wrote this piece a composition also written in 1955 for the tenth anniversary of Bartók's death, Witold Lutoslawski's Funeral Music, whish is one of the key string orchestra pieces of the last half of the twentieth century. Rautavaara's thoughts went in the direction of building his Kodály homage in the form of another string orchestra work highly concerned with the texture and surface of the music. Thus the work is more than the usual short "tombeau" sort of work—like Lutoslawski's composition it is a major, serious-toned composition about 14 minutes long.

It begins with very quiet though dense, low sustained notes. But then a violin begins a circular repeating (almost minimalist) pattern. This spreads throughout the orchestra. The pattern does not coincide with itself; instead a kind of orchestral shimmer or murmur results. Two note motives and chords appear beneath the oscillating patterns.

From this opening block of sound one string texture after another then appears—tremolando chords, arpeggiated wave-like patterns, pile-ups of harsh dissonant chords, sparks of "bouncing bow" notes, etc., illustrating a great range of string techniques. Rautavaara forms melodic lines from the musical letters of the title: H(omm)AGE A (ko)DA(ly) Z(olt)A(n). (Rautavaara uses the letter "Z" for the German musical note-name "Es," which is E flat; H is German for the note "B").

Fragments of these patterns (particularly the forms B-A-G-E-A and D-A-E

flat-A) appear regularly throughout the piece, but do not provide an organic or structural element of its form. However, the tritone—an important interval in Kodály's music—is important, and is strongly represented in the E flat-A element of the latter melody.

Rautavaara also wrote a poetic dedication to Kodály, which he placed at the head of the score for this work. It begins: "In the beginning there was time; the expanse, the plains of Hungary, eternity." It goes on to describe the opening violins as growing to become a chorus that hides the horizon line and starting the beat of time.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide