— Helps expressed his primary musical ideal as the “Long Line”. For him, this expansiveness was architectural, like the taut wires holding lengthy platforms on a suspension bridge. His own music favored this kind of structural legato. As a composer, he could breathlessly extend phrase after phrase without losing crucial continuity and without sacrificing dramatic development. As pianist, he brought this sensitivity of musical breadth even to the most ‘pointillist’ serial work like Milton Babbitt’s Partitions. Postlude, final installment in his tripartite chamber music set Serenade (see op. 8 and op. 10) commissioned by the Fromm Foundation, expresses this ecstatic long-line bathed in a crepuscular light, not without some turbulence. The Spectrum Concerts Berlin have given several intensely beautiful performances of this work, and their recording is now available on Naxos American Classics.
Postlude is dedicated to Paul Fromm.
Duration: 9 minutes.
Mid-phrase in one of the gorgeous long lines of Postlude
