Structure: Ten canons in five pairs (a/b versions), with three intermezzos
About the Work
Schnee (“Snow”) emerged from Abrahamsen’s deep engagement with J.S. Bach’s canons, which he had arranged for ensemble in the early 1990s. Those arrangements, intended to be repeated “many, many times, as a kind of minimal music,” opened what Abrahamsen describes as “a profound new moving world of circular time” where music “can stand still or move either backwards or forwards.”
The piece explores fundamental questions about musical phrase structure: What constitutes an antecedent? A consequent? Can a phrase be answering or questioning? The compositional rule is deceptively simple: begin with an answering phrase followed by a questioning one, then gradually intertwine them through increasingly dense canonic writing until, at the end, they are reversed—now the question, then the answer.
Each canon exists in two versions, “identical like a painting in two versions, but with different colors.” The first version presents the material directly; the second incorporates space and additional canonic traces. The nine instruments divide into two spatial groups: piano, violin, viola, and cello on the left; pianino, flute, oboe, and clarinet on the right; percussion in the center.
AWS Performance History
12/18/19, St. Louis, MO — Performed alongside the world premiere of Finding Balance: The life and music of Hans Abrahamsen, a 50-minute theatrical work created and written by Alan Pierson exploring the composer’s life and music. The evening also featured Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music (1968) during intermission.