Rand Steiger

Program Note for Woven Serenade (1991) Woven Serenade was commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra as part of their 1991 Mozart Festival and was first performed at Royce Hall in Los Angeles on December 5 of that year.

To have ones music associated with that of Mozart is a humbling experience, and a great honor. I have a deep respect and affection for the great works he created, particularly the opera "Don Giovanni" and the Serenade No. 10, also known as the "Gran Partita".

As I set out to write my homage, I thought of these two works in particular. I modeled the five movements of "Woven Serenade" after the formal structure of five movements from the Gran Partita. Rather than presenting the movements one after the other, as in a traditional serenade, I interweave and overlap them, sometimes creating complex moments out of fairly simple music, much the way Mozart creates complex moments in Don Giovanni by overlapping several lines from different characters. What could have been five movements played in about twenty minutes is compressed into a single movement about twelve minutes long.