Friday Night Lights

Written by Rhyuhn Green in 2026 for the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival and the ZaRiah Quintet, Diversion of Earth (G.1 22), Diversion of Earth is a temporal arc inspired by tectonic processes beneath the Earth’s surface. The piece explores fracture, motion, and unity through shifting the perception of time and how it is expressed through sound.

The opening movement, Fault Lines, exists in suspended tension. Sound emerges in fragile, isolated gestures from the cracks of the earth. In the second movement, Shifting Plates, the world begins to dissipate beneath one’s feet as time seems to ripple under the weight of gravity. The final movement, Pangea, reflects convergence. It is a unified anthem that represents what it truly means to be whole.

The pond-skater is an insect uniquely adapted to inhabit the thin veil of a pond’s surface. Utilizing a straw-like proboscis and the water’s surface tension, it roams freely, prevented from sinking by the oil glands and waterproof hairs at its extremities.

In The Pond Skater Does Not Like Water Anymore, I imagine the pond-skater as a creature confined entirely to this aquatic boundary, speculating on its psychological state when it ceases to feel affection for the very environment that defines its existence. The piece captures this sentiment in a mood that is tranquil yet stifling—a quiet heaviness. It explores the auditory landscape of a life where the foundations of one’s reality and thought no longer offer interest, yet remain inescapable. Through the piano and three string instruments, the music evokes a sense of tragedy tinged with ennui, where subtle, incessant “whispers” in the mind and the persistent pressure of internal conflict linger constantly at the edge of consciousness.

Francis Poulenc came of age during the “roaring twenties,” when Paris was one of the main centers of musical innovation in the world.  His unique brand of neoclassicism, blended with a genuine lyricism that could turn into irony at any moment, made him one of the most prominent French composers of his generation.

In reviews of Poulenc’s scintillating Sextet, one reads phrases like “bumptious and irreverent sauciness,” “witty virtuosity,” “dry, snappy and tongue-in-cheek, reveling in its own fun,” and even “positively transcendental schmaltz.”  When Poulenc, an excellent pianist, recorded the Sextet with the principal wind players of the Philadelphia Orchestra, one critic called the work “a recommended antidote for sagging spirits.”

The fun starts right at the beginning, with a series of playful wind solos over an ostinato (“obstinately” repeated) piano rhythm that sounds like a modernistic transformation of dance music from a cabaret.  After a slow and languid middle section, the bouncy opening tempo returns. The second movement, called Divertissement, does the exact opposite:  it opens and closes with an expressive melody, with the “cabaret” appearing, briefly, in the middle.  The same duality continues in the finale, with the difference that the last word, surprisingly, belongs to the Romantic poet, not to the humorist.  As in the first movement, it is the bassoon that sets the new tone with an unaccompanied melody in free rhythm, leading into a coda in which the lyrical theme from the first movement’s middle section is heard again.

© 2026 Peter Laki

William Walton is better known for his symphonic works and for his musical “entertainment” Façade (not to mention his film scores, such as Laurence Olivier’s Henry V), than for his chamber music, of which he wrote very little.  He composed the present quartet as a teenager–and revised it half a century later.

Walton became an undergraduate at Oxford at the age of sixteen, having previously been a chorister there for six years.  (He never graduated from college.)  The Piano Quartet was his first substantial work in any genre; it is said that he wrote it to compete with a similar composition by Herbert Howells, ten years his senior.  It was published with a dedication to the Rev. Thomas Strong, Dean of Christ Church and an important early mentor.

The quartet is sometimes listed as being in D minor, but in fact, Walton consistently uses the Dorian scale, with B natural where the key of D minor would call for a B flat.  This choice contributes a great deal to the special flavor of the four-movement work.

The principal melody of the first movement is introduced by the violin accompanied only by a long drone in the cello.  From this simple beginning, a rather complex movement evolves, its wide emotional range matched by a whimsical scherzo, a mysterious slow movement and a boisterous and energetic finale.

© 2026 Peter Laki