WINGATE: WIND QUINTET NO. 2
“Five Noumena”

Movements:
I. Prolegomenon - The Possibility of Metaphysics (Andante).
II. Categorical Imperatives (Scherzo).
III. The Crisis of Enlightenment (Chorale).
IV. Things-in-Themselves (Tarantella).
V. Pure Reason (Adagio).

Date:
2022

Instrumentation:
Flute, Oboe, Clarinet in B-flat, Horn in F, and Bassoon

Duration:
17'

Notes:
Wingate’s Second Wind Quintet quietly attempts to evoke the mysteries of philosophical inquiry by carefully weaving the instruments of the quintet into a sonic web of dodecaphonism. The piece’s title is a term used by the great philosopher Immanuel Kant in his transcendental idealism meaning roughly something like the famous Platonic ‘Forms’ — a priori entities that exist independently of the human ability to perceive them via the senses. Wingate’s quintet asks us to contemplate whether the longstanding philosophical split between the world of ideas and the world of the senses could be partially mended via the relatively abstract medium of so-called ‘absolute’ music. The question is philosophically doomed, of course, since music, as well as all auditory phenomena, unequivocally belong to that sensual world, and thus the elusive noumena evaporate immediately. But the phantom of that possibility remains, like the Platonic Forms themselves.

The Noumena Quintet is a work of rigorous pitch serialism, using the 12-tone row: [ 0 1 7 9 6 5 2 3 4 e 8 t ]. The exploratory first movement is built from the prime and retrograde forms, representing 432 pitch events. The second movement then uses the inversions and retrograde inversions, but very rapidly and with an extra note at the end, or 433 notes in total. The central chorale slowly gives us the retrograde forms again, using them to build aggregated chords, carefully preserving the integrity of the tone rows with incessant, plaintive pulses. The brief Tarantella of the fourth movement chaotically uses all the tone row forms in rapid succession, the last note of one often serving as the first note of the next, and then builds its chords from five-note subsets. The last movement, taking its title fragment from Kant’s most famous book, is in two broad sections, using first the retrograde inversions, then the inversion forms in exactly the opposite order, or 288 pitch events altogether, closing the quintet in the rarefied airs of pure reason.

While the movement titles also derive from Kantian terms or concerns, the music’s construction using the relatively mathematical enterprise of twelve-tone technique also evokes Kant’s historical situation near the end of the Enlightenment amidst the nascent murmurings of Romanticism, where the deification of reason was to give way to the sublime. Here, the Quintet’s free emotive expression is paradoxically achieved using what might be construed as a legacy of the Newtonian revolution, a very un-free, pre-determined series of pitches.