In 1992, when Daniel Asia began transforming his guitar piece Your Cry Will Be a Whisper into his Symphony No. 4, he found the job to be far more than a straightforward matter of orchestration. "Simply by the change of medium you are forced to broaden the gestures," he said. "The orchestral medium has so many more colors to work with-and the beast moves more slowly. So you wind up elaborating the harmonic implications, and exploring the materials registrally. It's like the original piece has become the superstructure of a new building."

Partly because Asia was hanging a symphony onto the skeleton of a guitar suite, and partly because of his overall interest at the time in paring things down, the fourth symphony is Asia's least dense orchestral work. And compared to the personnel requirements of his first symphony, Symphony No. 4 calls for a stripped-down orchestra: the usual strings, three percussionists, timpani, piano, harp, woodwinds and brass in pairs, plus four horns that, at their most prominent, provide a sort of chorale motif through the first movement.

This opening section displays Asia's characteristic harmonic restlessness; as in the remainder of the symphony, the music is comfortably tonal without adhering to the old conventions of key relationships. In the first movement, music of typical Asia momentum is introduced then ushered out by delicate, atmospheric material. The second movement is a traditional scherzo, with its middle portion quite literally "trio" music-a little swinging dance that breaks the orchestra into odd threesomes, such as clarinet, horn, and harp.

The slow movement begins with tolling horns, colored discreetly by percussion. This is an elegy for Asia's former mentor Stephen Albert, killed in a 1992 automobile accident. It is gentle music, more a lullaby than a dirge, until two grief-laden outbursts that give way to a fuller, more poignant statement of the opening material.

For a finale, Asia provides a rondo that manages to be bumptious without seeming trivial after the music that precedes it.

The fourth symphony was commissioned by the Phoenix Symphony and the National Endowment for the Arts. It was premiered in Phoenix in October 1993 under the composer's direction.



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