Thomas L. Read

Clarinet, Violin, Cello, and Piano

Composer's Note:

Light After Light was commissioned, first performed and commercially recorded in 1990 in Burlington, Vermont by the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, Steven Klimowsky, founder and director. It was first published by Tunbridge Music (BMI), a division of Trillenium Music Company (ASCAP), in 2001. The present ACA Composers Edition is a new and thorough revision of the Tunbridge publication.

The work is cast in two interrelated but separate parts. Structural definition is primarily informed by arpeggiated and oscillatory stepwise pitch motion in Part I, and by scalar motion in Part II. Rhythm in both parts combines divisional values of four, five and seven. E natural and B flat are harmonic polarities; E giving away to B flat at the end of Part I but regaining primacy by the end of Part II. Characteristic qualities of style and expression are: lyricism and rhythmic spontaneity growing out of systematic rhythmic division; tonal and atonal passages produced by non-tonal and non-serial processes; self-contained formal sections that are thematically related; anacrustic and "end-accented" figures, not always propulsive, but sometimes passive or static in affect. Material unique to the work is formed with archetypal elements and permits effortless, even involuntary reference to other compositions. The listener may uncover fragments of Mozart, K. 533:2; Brahms Op. 73; Mahler V; and a virtuosic fragment of the Poeme by Chausson. All but the last share the same melodic prototype, F-E-F-C, that pervades the present quartet where it is sometimes modified as E-D#-E-Bb.

Lines from Paradise Lost, Bk III, seem an unrestrictive yet appropriate motto for the musical argument:

Mine ear shall not be slow, mine eyes not shut.
And I will place within them as a guide
My umpire conscience, whom if they will hear,
Light after light well used they shall attain,
And to the end persisting, safe arrive.