and little (other than pedal effects) to the discretion of the performer. In its sheer density, of both sound and ideas, Eckhardt’s 11-minute composition relates to the so-called New Complexity movement that arose in the 1980s, partly in reaction to the reductive language of minimalism. Its legacy is a body of works characterized by multilayered textures, dissonant harmonies, fiercely complicated rhythms, and ultrafine gradations of timbres and dynamics. Eckhardt acknowledges the influence of movement-oriented composers like Brian Ferneyhough and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but his music is equally beholden to the likes of John Coltrane and Led Zeppelin. A Deeper Listen Eckhardt has likened the genesis of his music to “being in a landscape during an evening thunderstorm. There is darkness, then a flash of lightning that illuminates the surroundings. For that fraction of a second I can ‘see’ everything I need to begin the piece. What follows is a painstaking reconstruction of that moment.” One such lightning flash came in the form of a prose poem titled Echoes by the late W. S. Merwin. A meditation on the interpenetration of past, present, and future — on “the echoes pouring through us out of the past” and the “sounds that rush away from us: echoes of future words”—Merwin’s poem culminates in the image of a child sitting beside a lake at nightfall, calling out into the silence and watching the sound of his embodied voice “running away from me over the water in her white veil.” Echoes’ White Veil captures that multilayered poetic imagery in an analogous complex of sound and silence, movement and stasis. Caramoor
Eckhardt’s sound world recalls Jay Parini’s description of Merwin’s poetry as a “kind of free verse” in which “he layered image upon bright image, allowing the lines to hang in space, largely without punctuation, without rhymes.” Notated without barlines, Echoes’ White Veil might be called the musical equivalent of free verse. Sonic images pile on top of one another in tightly packed, asynchronous layers, and spare, spectral sonorities are left hanging in space. ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810–1856) Kreisleriana, Op. 16 About the Composer Schumann embodied the spirit of the Romantic era in his affinity for small-scale musical forms and lyrical utterances, his reliance on literary and other extramusical sources of inspiration, and the supreme value he placed on emotional freedom and spontaneity. Although he wrote four symphonies, several concertos, and even a single opera, his impulsive genius found its most characteristic expression in art songs and piano music, including a small body of chamber pieces for keyboard and strings. Schumann was an inveterate improviser at the keyboard, as one might suppose from the rhapsodic fluidity that characterizes his piano writing. In fact, only a chronic hand injury prevented him from realizing his youthful ambition to be a concert pianist. Instead, he dedicated himself to creating a new kind of music for the piano, compounded of heroic virtuosity and poetic intimacy.
