Jim Fox (1953)
The City the Wind Swept Away (1982)

Alex Iles, Jeannie Little, Bob Sanders, David Stetson, Peter Kent, Robin Lorentz, Maria Newman, Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick

The City the Wind Swept Away is a haunting single-movement piece for trombone quartet, string quartet, and piano. It’s fragile music of rarefied and quietly rumbling harmonies. Music that is both motionless and moving forward with a strange sense of inevitability. The quiet rumbling of trombones and the soft keening of strings haunt the piano’s slow stream of notes. A mosaic, a tapestry. Rich harmonies and simple triads come and go, like the ever-changing, yet ever-similar, landscapes one passes while driving through a remote area, perhaps a desert, perhaps a deep woods. Although not programmatic music, the events in The City the Wind Swept Away coast in and out of earshot in much this way, or like drifting clouds, slowly changing shapes, shifting angles, picking up different light. The work was commissioned by the late trombonist Will Sudmeirer’s Le Quatuor Tromboni de Marin and written at the Dorland Mountain Colony in 1982 (and slightly revised at the time of this recording, 2003/04). On this recording, it is performed by a group of noted Los Angeles new-music and studio players. (23-minute CD single/EP, in digipak)