In February of 2022, months before I ever set foot on Rice’s campus, I was sitting with my friend Annie Hart at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. We were both artists in residence there, and as such we were spending a lot of time getting to know each other’s artistic practices. Annie works primarily in popular music, performing as the singer in the band Au Revoir Simone before later going off on her own as a solo artist. At one point she mentioned to me how bizarre the entire practice of contemporary classical music was to her, remarking
“I don’t understand, don’t you ever just sit down and think ‘time to write the best piece ever!’ and then do it and that’s the end of it?”
This blew my mind for a number of reasons. The first of which was that I really did come into writing music with this joyful sense of “alright time to make something!” and that had so quickly been lost somewhere in the process of trying to “become a REAL composer.” What Annie was advocating for in this moment was a return to this sense, which seems to have never been lost on her, even amidst a wildly successful career as a singer and a burgeoning new career as a composer of film music. This also blew my mind because that really seemed like a good idea for a piece, and thematically it fit with a number of other works I knew by composers around my age, such as Be by Alex Berko.
This general idea, “write the best piece ever” was something that floated around my head for some time and even made it’s way into sketches of a new work I had initially titled “Annie” (“For Annie” sounded too classical, whereas “Annie” sounded “rock-song” enough to be dedicated to a singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/film score composer such as Annie). Some time after this conversation with Annie, I hauled myself off to Rice University to start a Master’s in Music Composition. The entire time I was pursuing this degree, I was constantly told that it was all building up to this one big moment where I would write a work for orchestra, and that needed to be a really special and momentous work. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to pull out those old “Annie” sketches.
Hilariously, I showed the beginnings of this piece to my advisor, and his immediate response was “‘Annie’ is a name, not a title.” This meant that I needed to find a new name.
Ultimately this work ended up being a meditation on this journey I had been on since that conversation with Annie all those years ago. I felt like the time I spent at Rice building up to this piece was some of the most profound artistic growth I have ever experienced in my life, and that the community of musicians I was able to find along the way was something astoundingly beautiful and heartwarming. As such, I felt the best title for this work would be a nod to “giving back” to my family at Shepherd. This work is one last grand gesture to all of those people, and as such I hope this work is able to Speak Louder Than Words.
A short analysis of this work:
The form is very straightforward: ABA’ + a short coda. Most of the materials are derived loosely from the first four notes of the timpani that open the work. The top notes of the opening brass chords atop the fiery strings are fairly straightforward repetitions of three of the four timpani notes. Those bounce around the orchestra until a pause, with the timpani restarting the momentum and giving way to a legato melody in the strings that is again just selections from the first four notes from the timpani at the opening. This new melody derived from those four notes is then the center of the work as it is heard in many different iterations throughout the end of the A section and in fragmented echoes at the beginning of the much slower B section. A short cello solo then gives way to an oboe solo with a new melody which introduces a closely related but more consonant 3 note motif, which is then turned into a 4 note motif in the subsequent horn solo. This new consonant 4 note motif is then the new core of the A’ section, making the previously harsh sounding opening into a more joyous final section. The legato melody in the strings returns and is expanded upon before one last resonant percussion “clang” gives way to the coda. The timpani ends the work with a short solo, putting to rest the four note motif as though it were an orange with no juice left to squeeze from it.
PERFORMANCE HISTORY
13 March 2025 – Shepherd School of Music Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jerry Hou
1 June 2025 – New England Philharmonic (reading session) conducted by Eric Nathan
OLIVER DUBON 