Study in Sonority, Op. 7

Program notes

About the Work

Wallingford Riegger belongs with Ives, Ruggles and Henry Cowell in the small group of American modernists who organised their own concerts between the wars. He came to that company late. Trained in New York and Berlin as a cellist and conductor, he wrote in a conservative style into his forties. Study in Sonority, composed in 1927, is the piece in which he changed direction, and its publisher describes it as a significant break with his classical upbringing.

It is written for ten violins, or, as the score allows, any multiple of ten, so that a full orchestral violin section can play it. As the title says, Riegger treats the ensemble as a laboratory: with only one kind of instrument and no bass, the interest has to come from spacing, register, dynamics and ways of playing.

What to Listen For

The ten parts are layered. One writer on Riegger describes four players carrying the melody, four the harmony and two the lowest line, though the roles shift. The harmony is built from dense, dissonant chords that Riegger holds and re-voices so that they glow instead of grate, and the whole piece grows from a short motif of a few notes that returns in different guises.

Without violas, cellos and basses the sound has no floor, and that is the point: everything happens in the upper half of the orchestra’s range. Riegger marks dynamics and tempos with great precision, sometimes giving each note of the motif its own level, so listen for how much light and shade ten identical instruments can produce.