! Joseph Schwantner's "...

and the mountains rising nowhereis an important

symbol, and crucial piece for wind section. The piece was premiered by the Eastman

Wind Ensemble in 1977 in College Park, MD at the national CBDNA conference.!

!
! Joseph Schwantner is an American composer and educator. His first instrument

was guitar, which was taught to him by Robert Steiner. Schwantner credits Stein as the

most important influence of his young musical life. Of his initial experiences on the

guitar, Schwantner writes:!

!
I didnt realize until many years later just how important the guitar was in my

thinking...to get to the bottom line, when I think about my music, its absolutely clear to

me the profound influence of the guitar in my music. When you look at my pieces, first

of all is the preoccupation with color. The guitar is a wonderfully resonant and colorful

instrument. Secondly, the guitar is a very highly articulate instrument. You dont bow it,

you pluck it and so the notes are very incisive. My musical ideas, the world I seem to

inhabit, is highly articulate. Lots of percussion where everything is sharply etched, and

then finally, those sharply articulated ideas often hang in the air, which is exactly what

happens when you play an E major chord on the guitar. There are these sharp

articulations, and then this kind of sustained resonance that you can easily do in

percussion a favorite trick of mine! I think it is right in my bone marrow. I dont think

there is any question about that. I think my music would look differently if I were a

clarinet player. So it doesnt mean I sit around thinking about the guitar when I am

writing a piece. Not at all! There is something fundamental about how I think about
music, that I think comes from my experiences as a young kid trying to play everything I

could on the instrument.!

! The piece written is dedicated to childrens author Carol Adler, and its title is

inspired by a line in her poem Arioso:!

arioso bells!

sepia!

moon-beams!

an afternoon sun blanked by rain!

and the mountains rising nowhere!

the sound returns!

the sound and the silence chimes!

!
! While writing this work he strove to make it very unique,l and did so heavily with

interesting percussion arrangements to give the piece a slightly programmatic feel. He

says, When I first started to write for wind ensemble there wasnt much to look at other

than Hindemith and Schoenberg. My whole band experience in the public schools had

been mostly third-rate music and transcriptions. I grew up with a certain envy of my

colleagues who were in orchestra: they got great music to play and we got bad

transcriptions and this third-rate educational music. Youll notice in and the mountains

rising nowhere that I go a long way to avoid typical band sounds. I had to overcome my

school experience.