John Williams - Heartwood

Heartwood is an emotionally powerful concerted piece for cello and orchestra, in the form of a large-scale (16-minute) single movement. The harmonic style is highly chromatic, creating a yearning quality. A listener coming to it expecting something much like Williams' film scores will find such expectations expanded rather than simply satisfied. Aside from the fact that Williams' personal voice is present, it is not especially like his movie music.

But in common with Williams' film scores its inspiration is pictorial. Williams planned to write a new cello piece for the great soloist Yo-Yo Ma, then in preparation with the composer for a Sony album featuring Williams' Cello Concerto (1994).

A friend chanced to send at that time a book called Heartwood, consisting of photographs by William Guion of southern live oak trees. These magnificent trees, often draped with their garlands of Spanish moss, are a virtual emblem of the Deep South and possess a sense of grandeur, mystery, and the past. Williams apparently has an affection for trees; his 1995 Bassoon Concerto is subtitled "The Five Sacred Trees."

Guion's photos "...conveyed a dignity and enduring strength that suggested a wisdom only attained after reaching great age," Williams writes in the notes to the album, which Sony Classical released in conjunction with its observances of the composer's 70th birthday (February 8, 2002). Accordingly, Williams achieved a rich and noble sound throughout. It is rhapsodically constructed: the music constantly unfolds in a seemingly free form. Wisdom and maturity, a continued passion for life that is touched and channeled by experience -- these qualities the music of Heartwood evokes.

"Quiet majesty" is Williams' own description of the mood he tried to capture, a quality he felt would be suggested by keeping the title of Guion's album for the work. (He also points out that the name can also apply to the "...cellular structure and spiritual core of the cello itself.")

There is another element to the music, one that Williams says he only noticed once he listened to the work. It stems from a bit of musical symbolism, his use of large-sounding, orchestra-spanning vertical sonorities -- that is, chords -- that he uses throughout the piece and from which the melodic canopy of the music spreads out. This reminded him of the moody, impressionistic sounds of one of his favorite bands as a teenager.

Williams' father played in popular song orchestras, making John Williams quite aware of the distinctions among bands of his youth, including understanding the elements of the scoring of their arrangements that created their individual "sounds." One of the most distinctive was the Claude Thornhill Orchestra. Its conductor favored rich, impressionistic harmonies and a unique sound brought about by its use of French horns; his orchestrations are considered an inspiration for the great jazz arranger Gil Evans.

Williams says he "reveled in" Thornhill's music as a musically aware teenager, and hears that early enthusiasm emerging in his own music here "almost certainly for the first time." ~ Joseph Stevenson, Rovi

[-Program notes taken from: http://www.answers.com/topic/heartwood-for-cello-orchestra#ixzz1wlct3000
-All copyrights listed in the video.
-I apologize for the incorrect year for the title; Heartwood was composed in 2001 and premiered on this album in 2002.]