SF Symphony contrabassoon Steven Braunstein rehearsing the 2002 world premiere.
Photo courtesy SF Symphony Archives
“In 2001 Steven Braunstein, the legendary contrabassoon player of the San Francisco Symphony, approached the orchestra about commissioning a work to spotlight his instrument. In the process of talking to other composers, I realized how fond I am of bass-clef instruments and instruments that flirt with extremes of register. The opportunity to compose for a virtuoso like Steve Braunstein was a great enticement. He was soloist in the world premiere, in 2002 with the San Francisco Symphony. The remarkable saxophonist Pat Posey believed Urban Legend was perfect for the baritone sax. His devotion and performance made me a true believer and I am delighted that he and Edwin Outwater have recorded it for this collection.
Jean Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela, which features solo English horn against an orchestra of strings, served as a point of departure. I decided the work should be a kind of tone poem. My soloist is backed by an ensemble of percussion, piano, electric bass guitar, and strings. This was an opportunity to use the unique voice of a dark-hued instrument not just to establish a moody picture, but also to display how agile it can be. My pieces tend to display a certain degree of fun and irony, in a way intended to delight the performer as well as the listener. I started in a rather ironic vein. But Urban Legend, which began as something of a lark, ended up quite serious.
I began to consider what could be the modern equivalent of The Swan of Tuonela, which in Finnish legend swims around the island of the dead. I thought of the island of Manhattan and the packs of creatures, other than human, that inhabit it. Legends have sprung up around such creatures, and I imagined how, in the future, these animals might develop into mythic beasts, roaming the cities with their own habits and ranges.
The animals that exist in our cities are wily and stealthy, but also confident, and even aggressive. What is their perspective on humans and our civilizations? Much must be the noise we produce; car horns, sirens, industrial sounds, talking, singing, partying. The noise-scape of our civilization does quiet down for some period during the night, which is when these animals tend to be most active. Urban Legend is the nocturne of such a night. I wanted the solo instrument to be the composite voice of the ‘wild’ creatures, both real and imagined—a voice that, when provoked, emits cries of warning and, in its solitude, laments the vanished primeval environment.
There are two ‘musical levels’ in the piece: strings and percussion evoke the noise and bustle of the cityscape at the beginning, then the frenetic dance groove quiets down and by accident we stumble across the baritone sax, which sings its lyric lament. The music goes through a fair amount of development and dialogue between the protagonists. A couple of times the sax makes itself scarce, but ultimately it meets the situation where it won’t scurry away anymore. It confronts the cityscape and its denizens, and that leads to the central section, in which the conflict is joined between these forces. The solo part becomes much more animated and aggressive, while the string orchestra takes on the anguished lament (the protagonists thereby trading places). Two-thirds of the way through the piece, we witness an enormous confrontation and then an uneasy resolution, and finally there is a coda where, between their two languages, the opposing parties settle on a dance groove which wryly and slyly brings the piece to an end. I suppose humans and creatures manage to coexist in these urban environments because we have crafty survival skills in common.
Harmonically, Urban Legend inhabits a region between the tonal and the atonal. The material is in a continuous process of transformation, moving about in terms of musical language, incorporating musical ideas that are influenced by Latin music, street noise, and the harmonic vocabulary of expressionism. The basic musical material can be found in the first sixteen bars.
The remarkable Pat Posey has always believed Urban Legend was perfect for the baritone sax. His devotion and performance have made me a true believer!”
—Michael Tilson Thomas
The solo instrument for this recording is the baritone saxophone, played by Pat Posey.
Version for saxophone premiered March 11-12, 2024. Pat Posey, baritone sax; Edwin Outwater conducting members of the San Francisco Symphony and musical community