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- Augusta Read Thomas
Aureole (2012)
- G Schirmer Inc (World)
Audio clip courtesy of DePaul University
- 2+pic.2.2.2+cbn/4.3(pictpt).1+btbn.1/4perc/str
- 8 min 30 s
- 22nd April 2025, Koger Center for the Arts, Columbia, SC, United States of America
Programme Note
Augusta Read Thomas’s new orchestral work is designed specifically to precede a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Her respect for her compositional predecessor is obvious from her explanation of the title:
The title, AUREOLE, refers to an encircling ring of light; radiance surrounding the head or the whole figure in the representation of a sacred personage or saint; a halo of concentric circles of light seen around a luminous body, especially around the sun or moon.
AUREOLE alludes tangentially to certain fundamental tonal centers of Beethoven Symphony Number 9 in D minor Op. 125.
Surely the sacred personage in this situation is Beethoven himself. Thomas’ use both of tonal centers and intervals crucial to the Ninth Symphony is a musical aureole around the earlier composer’s work.
The work opens with a single pitch, the note D, Beethoven’s symphony’s tonal center. Fanfare-like repeated notes in the trumpets and violins, marked “blazing,” add an A shortly thereafter, creating the interval of a fifth – the open-sounding sonority with which Beethoven’s symphony also begins. The fanfares continue in ever-changing rhythms, moving around the orchestra and creating the composer’s desired “shimmering” effect. The winds and brass land on a chord centered around the pitch B-flat (the single other most important pitch in Beethoven’s symphony) to close the introduction.
The strings immediately jump in, turning the introduction’s repeated notes into a driving rhythmic ostinato centered on the very same B-flat; the marking is “animated and sparkling.” The melodic line explodes, hurling fast-moving sixteenth notes up and down the orchestral register and all around the ensemble. The tempo slows down a bit for a section marked “energized,” and sustained notes make a reappearance, with murmuring triplets underneath. The driving sixteenth notes return quickly, though, just as vigorously as before and are only stopped with a reminiscence of the introduction’s fifths. “Lively and playful” flute and clarinet solos give way to an “incandescent” section made up of sustained harmonies whose ever-changing orchestrations give it a dynamic, fluid character. A rhapsodic trombone solo leads to a return of the shimmering repeated notes and the re-emergence of the introduction’s fanfares. The frenzied melodic activity of the earlier fast section is recalled but interrupted by the final return of the stark, bright fifths. Harmonies built out of this interval comprise a short but luminous coda. The final chord of the work is, again, fifths: D, A, and E – the very first and the very last notes of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. An “encircling ring of light” indeed.
—Michael Lewanski
The title, AUREOLE, refers to an encircling ring of light; radiance surrounding the head or the whole figure in the representation of a sacred personage or saint; a halo of concentric circles of light seen around a luminous body, especially around the sun or moon.
AUREOLE alludes tangentially to certain fundamental tonal centers of Beethoven Symphony Number 9 in D minor Op. 125.
Surely the sacred personage in this situation is Beethoven himself. Thomas’ use both of tonal centers and intervals crucial to the Ninth Symphony is a musical aureole around the earlier composer’s work.
The work opens with a single pitch, the note D, Beethoven’s symphony’s tonal center. Fanfare-like repeated notes in the trumpets and violins, marked “blazing,” add an A shortly thereafter, creating the interval of a fifth – the open-sounding sonority with which Beethoven’s symphony also begins. The fanfares continue in ever-changing rhythms, moving around the orchestra and creating the composer’s desired “shimmering” effect. The winds and brass land on a chord centered around the pitch B-flat (the single other most important pitch in Beethoven’s symphony) to close the introduction.
The strings immediately jump in, turning the introduction’s repeated notes into a driving rhythmic ostinato centered on the very same B-flat; the marking is “animated and sparkling.” The melodic line explodes, hurling fast-moving sixteenth notes up and down the orchestral register and all around the ensemble. The tempo slows down a bit for a section marked “energized,” and sustained notes make a reappearance, with murmuring triplets underneath. The driving sixteenth notes return quickly, though, just as vigorously as before and are only stopped with a reminiscence of the introduction’s fifths. “Lively and playful” flute and clarinet solos give way to an “incandescent” section made up of sustained harmonies whose ever-changing orchestrations give it a dynamic, fluid character. A rhapsodic trombone solo leads to a return of the shimmering repeated notes and the re-emergence of the introduction’s fanfares. The frenzied melodic activity of the earlier fast section is recalled but interrupted by the final return of the stark, bright fifths. Harmonies built out of this interval comprise a short but luminous coda. The final chord of the work is, again, fifths: D, A, and E – the very first and the very last notes of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. An “encircling ring of light” indeed.
—Michael Lewanski
Media
Aureole for Orchestra
Scores
Features
- Happy 60th Birthday to Augusta Read Thomas
- Augusta Read Thomas is one of the U.S.’s most recognizable and beloved composers. In addition to writing music of “unbridled passion and fierce poetry” (American Academy of Arts and Letters), she is University Professor of Composition at the University of Chicago, where she has championed new music through founding the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition and its resident Grossman Ensemble.
Reviews
The Meyerson Symphony Center conspicuously crackled with expectation before the music started, but it was the electrifying seven-and-a-half minutes of Aureole that really set things on fire… The mood was set right from the start with a splashy brass fanfare punctuated by clanking commentary from the percussion section — bestowed with a booming drum-filled cadenza. This wake-up-and-pay-attention opening gave way to a jerky scherzo-ish section, built on discrete packets of musical motifs… In short, Aureole is a deliciously exciting piece that is as close to a perfect curtain-raiser bonbon as you can find… The audience, the most important judge of new music, weighed in with a nearly unanimous “yes” vote as demonstrated by a spontaneous ovation.
14th September 2019
The piece was quite a rousing curtain-raiser…
13th September 2019
Aureole itself, with near-melodic sections interspersed with less tonal interludes, is worthy of multiple listens.
13th September 2019
Completed in 2013, Aureole receives from the DePaul University Symphony Orchestra and conductor Cliff Colnot a performance that revels in the exuberant sonoroties of the music. Benefitting from the admirably sure intonation of the Orchestra's players, the fanfare-like figurations at the piece's opening are broadly but rousingly phrased, providing an apt introduction to the generally high spirits of the music that follows. When darker harmonies invade, momentum is maintained both by Maestro Colnot and by the Orchestra, but neither the pace of the performance nor the jocularity of the atmosphere that the music conjures seems forced.
1st May 2014
Discography
Augusta Read Thomas: Selected Works for Orchestra
- LabelNimbus Alliance
- Catalogue NumberNI 6258
- EnsembleVarious Artists